Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

by Kate Masur

In the 1820s, the privileges and immunities clause (Article IV, Section 2) became critically important to the American debate about the rights of free African Americans, and it would remain so until passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866. The clause read, “The citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states.” It alluded to state citizens (“the citizens of each state”), but it did more than simply recognize the existence of state citizenship; it suggested that citizens of a state should enjoy some basic prerogatives when they were in other states.