Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 12.djvu/426

406 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. Are we then — should the Spanish treaty be ratified — to meet any constitutional difficulty in holding and governing whatever it may bring us? The XIV. and XV. Amendments must certainly prove a source of embarrassment. The latter declares that the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States on account of race or color. By Section 1992 of the Revised Statutes of the United States, "all persons bom in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are declared to be citizens of the United States." This statute was passed, on April 9, 1866, by the same Congress which framed and on June 16, 1866, proposed to the States for ratification the XIV. Amendment, with which, therefore, it may fairly be assumed to have been intended to be in harmony. The first words of that Amendment are that "all per- sons bom or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States, and of the State wherein they reside." If this stood alone and unexplained by contemporary legislation, it might be argued that it applied only to persons residing in one of the States. But read in the light of Revised Statutes, Section 1992, it would seem a more natural construction to treat it as adding to that the farther step to which the consent of the States was necessary, that those thus bom or naturalized, if they then or afterwards resided in a State, should be citizens of that State, as well as of the United States. It will be observed that the State among whose citizens they are thrust is not necessarily that of their birth. It is any State in which citizens of the United States may at any time reside. Whether therefore Revised Statutes, Section 1992, should he repealed or not, the XIV. Amendment would seem to make every child, of whatever race, born in any of our new territorial posses- sions after they become part of the United States, of parents who are among its inhabitants and subject to our jurisdiction, a citizen of the United States from the moment of birth. The Indian tribes on our own continent are held not to be subject to our jurisdiction in the sense in which those words are here employed. They were until 1871 (Revised Statutes, Section 2079) considered as separate nations with which we dealt as treaty powers.^ Their present condi- tion has been described by the Supreme Court of the United States ' The Cherokee Nation -v. Georgia, 5 Peters, i.