In the first three decades of American nationhood, state and federal courts began to interpret the privileges and immunities clause, at least as it applied to white men. Courts generally held that the clause prohibited states from treating people from out of state differently from their own residents in what they considered matters of fundamental rights. These were what contemporaries sometimes referred to as “civil rights”—the right to move freely from state to state, enter into contracts, own property, and sue and be sued.
