INHERENT RIGHTS OF CITIZENS
After some further talk General Butler said he agreed fully that the first ten amendments to the constitution were limitations of federal power and not restrictions of the rights of the States. The “privileges and immunities” however, claimed by these prisoners were privileges inherent in each one of the citizens of the several States of the United States, because in vast majority we were British subjects and had certain privileges and immunities inherited under the common law and mMagna cCharta, and among them, and the most thoroughly known and defined were the trial by jury for all high crimes, exemption from search and seizure without warrant of law, protection from self-accusation when a witness, and not to be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. We claim that all the rights, privileges, and immunities that belonged to a British subject under mMagna cCharta belong to each citizen of the United States; and that as new citizens of the United States were made, not citizens of States, by naturalization, these rights, priviligesprivileges, and immunities came to them as citizens of the United States. The effect of the fourteenth amendment was to guarantee these rights, privileges, and immunities to the citizens of all the States.