1st. The Fourteenth Amendment is a valid, subsisting compact between the sovereign people of the United States and the citizens of African descent of its adoption.
2d. That, from and after its adoption, freedmen born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, were citizens of the United States and of the States wherein they resided.
3d. That no State can make any law which shall abridge their privileges and immunities as citizens of the United States; nor deprive them of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny them the equal protection of the laws.
4th. That, by the adoption of this compact, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution became the supreme law of the land, and that under article six, section two of the Constitution, the judges in every State were thereby bound, notwithstanding anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary.
5th. That, at the time of the adoption of this compact by the sovereign people of the United States with these citizens of African descent, the privileges and immunities of which "citizens in the several States" were in the full enjoyment were those which are fundamental, and constitute the essence of the republican citizenship in or under free republican government, such as are and have been common to citizens in the several States under their Constitutions and laws.
6th. That the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States of African descent are the privileges and immunities of citizens of the several States, which are in their nature fundamental, and which belong of right to the citizens of all free governments, and which have at all times been enjoyed by the citizens of the several States composing this Union, from the time of their becoming free, independent, and sovereign States; those fundamental principles being subject, nevertheless, to such restraints as the government may justly prescribe for the general good of the whole,—to use the expressions of the preamble of the corresponding provision in the old Articles of Confederation,—"the better to secure and perpetuate mutual friendship and
