other State.
For, previous to the adoption of the Constitution of the United States,
every State had the undoubted right to confer on whomsoever it pleased
the character of citizen, and to endow him with all its rights. But this
character of course was confined to the boundaries of the State, and
gave him no rights or privileges in other States beyond those secured to
him by the laws of nations and the comity of States. Nor have the
several States surrendered the power of conferring these rights and
privileges by adopting the Constitution of the United States. Each State
may still confer them upon an alien, or any one it thinks proper, or
upon any class or description of persons; yet he would not be a citizen
in the sense in which that word is used in the Constitution of the
United States, nor entitled to sue as such in one of its courts, nor to
the privileges and immunities of a citizen in the other States. The
rights which he would acquire would be restricted to the State which
gave them. The Constitution has conferred on Congress the right to
establish an uniform rule of naturalization, and this right is evidently
exclusive, and has always been held by this court to be so.
Consequently, no State, since the adoption of the Constitution, can by
naturalizing an alien invest him with the rights and privileges secured
to a citizen of a State under the Federal Government, although, so far
as the State alone was concerned, he would undoubtedly be entitled to
the rights of a citizen, and clothed with all the rights and immunities
which the Constitution and laws of the State attached to that
character.

It is very clear, therefore, that no State can, by any act or law of its
own, passed since the adoption of the Constitution, introduce a new
member into the political community created by the Constitution of the
United States. It cannot make him a member of this community by making
him a member of its own. And for the same reason it cannot introduce any
person or description of persons, who were not intended to be embraced
in this new political family, which the Constitution brought into
existence, but were intended to be excluded from it.

The question then arises, whether the provisions of the Constitution, in
relation to the personal rights and privileges to which the citizen of a
State should be entitled, embraced the negro African race, at that time
in this country, or who might afterward be imported, who had then or
sh