Page:A legal review of the case of Dred Scott, as decided by the Supreme Court of the United States.djvu/22

 We have thus shown that in many of the States, at and since the time of the adoption of the federal Constitution, free negroes have not only been recognized as citizens, but allowed to exercise one of the highest privileges of citizenship, that of voting. But this privilege is by no means necessary to citizenship, as is now generally conceded, and is well stated by the Chief Justice, on page 422: "Undoubtedly a person may be a citizen, that is, a member of the community who form the sovereignty, although he exercises no share in the political power, and is incapacitated from holding particular offices. Women and minors who form part of the political family cannot vote; and where a property qualification is required to vote, or hold a particular office, those who have not the necessary qualification cannot vote, or hold the office; yet they are citizens." As most, if not all, of those decisions which deny the title of citizen to free negroes, are founded upon the assumption that the right to vote is necessary to citizenship; and as those decisions prove, at most, only that negroes cannot be citizens in the States whose courts deny them that character; we do not consider it necessary more particularly to examine them.

No candid man can read the acts of congress without being convinced that the laws of the United States acknowledge no qualification of color or race, as essential to the citizenship of native-born inhabitants. The very unanimity of opinion on this point accounts for the fact that citizenship is nowhere defined. Instances are not wanting, however, in which the fact that negroes may be citizens is expressed with a distinctness that cannot be misunderstood. Thus the act of congress of February 28, 1803, imposed a penalty on any one who should import, into any State which had prohibited or should prohibit the slave trade, "any negro, mulatto, or other person of color, not being a native, a citizen, or a registered seaman of the United States," &c.; and as the act of 1796 did not authorize, any but citizens of the United States to be registered as seamen, the act of 1803 twice recognizes negroes as citizens. This act bears the signature of Thomas Jefferson, the writer of the Declaration of Independence, and is of itself a sufficient answer to the assertion of the Chief Justice, that "the legislation and histories of the times, and the language used in the Declaration of Independence, show that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves, nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people,