ticular State. To exclude naturalized citizens from eligibility to the office of Governor would create distinctions and disregard the fundamental law of the Union. A native citizen of Mississippi going to Louisiana would be eligible to the office of Governor, but a naturalized citizen from any State would be excluded. This would clearly be creating in one State a discrimination between citizens of the several States. It could not then be said that citizens of each State had been vested in Louisiana with the privileges and immunities of citizens in all the States. Louisiana would have violated and destroyed the integrity of the federal Constitution.

In reply to this national idea of citizenship, it was said that the national Constitution did not permit so broad a view. It did not declare that a citizen of another State should have a right to hold office in any particular State. If so, a citizen of Missouri might be made a candidate, and, if elected by the people of Louisiana, claim of right to be its Governor. Citizens of other States could not claim the right to enjoy the same privileges and immunities in a new State which they had enjoyed in their own. If this were true, the citizen of Massachusetts coming to Louisiana would have a right to vote in Louisiana according to the laws of Massachusetts. In New York, negroes were entitled to vote, and if the doctrine was true, negroes would have a right to vote in Louisiana. Thus the old difficulty of realizing the equal rights of the citizens of the several States, which had sprung up at

Hard to Equalize the Rights of Citizenship

the time of the Missouri controversy, and which always appeared when a slave-holding State attempted to define the franchise, duly appeared in the Louisiana convention.*

* Compare this train of ideas with the discussion of the same question at the time of the admission of Missouri: Chapter vi.

CHAPTER XV

ELEMENTS OF DISCORD IN THE COMMONWEALTH

THE only reason for retaining the word native in defining the qualifications of the Governor was to secure a native-born citizen as Governor in time of war. Birth and citizenship are not synonymous terms. As all agreed that none but a citizen of Louisiana could vote, or be elected Governor, what was the relevancy in quoting the Constitution of the United States? So broad an interpretation of the national Constitution tended to deprive a State of its sovereign power to regulate the qualifications of its own officers and to define the qualifications both of the elector and of the elected. The States had never so far parted with their sovereignty as to deprive themselves of the right to regulate their own domestic affairs. It was impossible for citizens of foreign birth to disfranchise their sentiments; therefore it was unsafe to qualify them for holding office. In time of war, could a foreign-born chief magistrate so far forget the country of his birth as to avoid endangering the interests of the commonwealth? The framers of the federal Constitution intended that the citizens of one State should not be regarded

Check on the Vagaries of State Constitutions

as strangers in another State, but in all things be equal to its citizens. The Constitution, laws, and treaties of the United States were the supreme law of the land—a provision which forbade the introduction of foreign matter into a State constitution. A discrimination against naturalized citizens was abhorrent to the principles of representative government, and the judges of the United States courts would not recognize it. Though a State constitutional convention might deviate from the true path, the judges of the courts, both State and federal, would ultimately bring back constitutional provisions and legislation into harmony with the supreme law of the land. It was true that six States-Alabama, Arkansas, Missouri, Maine, New York, and Virginia-required their chief executive to be nativeborn; but twenty and with the Constitution of the general government in plain view-had rejected such a provision. According to the American theory of government, all citizens were on a footing of equality. Should Louisiana hesitate to choose between the wisdom of twenty States and the intemperance of six? Nor was it true, as some had declared, that at the time of making the national Constitution its framers intended such a discrimination. As soon as the States acknowledged that the federal Constitution was the supreme law of the land, the power of naturalization became the exclusive privilege of Congress.

On this point the best authority was The Feder

alist. "The dissimilarity in the rules of naturalization has long been remarked as a fault in our system, and has left a foundation for intricate and delicate questions. In the fourth article of the old confederation it is declared that the free inhabitants of each of these States-paupers, vagabonds, and fugitives from justice excepted-shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens of the several States, and the people of each State shall in every other enjoy all the privileges of trade and commerce." The term "free inhabitants" here obviously implied that the citizens of the State were entitled in every other State to all the privileges of its free citizens. Every State was under obligation to recognize these interstate rights of citizens.

By the old Articles of Confederation, any State might discriminate against the citizens of any other. This produced confusion and hostility among them. Political economy compelled the adoption of a uniform rule of naturalization, and this could be made by Congress alone. To secure this peace and the equity, the Philadelphia convention had given the power exclusively to Congress.

The present convention had assembled to remove the defects in the constitution of 1812, not to discriminate among the citizens of the State. If the naturalized citizen was made ineligible to the office of Governor, what would prevent an ex

*The Federalist, xlii. The speaker also quoted at length from Story, Commentaries on the Constitution, Vol. iii., Secs. 1097-1800.