No they didn’t.
“No they didn’t.”
DRED SCOTT v. SANDFORD, (1856)
In discussing this question, we must not confound the rights of citizenship which a State may confer within its own limits, and the rights of citizenship as a member of the Union. It does not by any means follow, because he has all the rights and privileges of a citizen of a State, that he must be a citizen of the United States. He may have all of the rights and privileges of the citizen of a State, and yet not be entitled to the rights and privileges of a citizen in any 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 [60 U.S. 393, 406] 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.
[Due to the repeal of the U.S. Naturalization Act of 1795 with the adoption of the Naturalization Act of 1802, there were no provisions for conferring naturalized citizenship upon a child born abroad with two U.S. citizen parents, and the U.S. Supreme Court decided in DRED SCOTT v. SANDFORD, (1856) that the states also had no authority to confer U.S. citizenship such children born abroad. To remedy this situation, the Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and included provisions to confer naturalized U.S. citizenship for children born abroad with two U.S. citizen parents. The U.S. Supreme Court then decided the Civil Rights Act of 1866 was unconstitutional, so it became necessary to enact the 14th Amendment to the Constitution and re-enact the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Even then, the right to claim naturalized U.S. citizenship by relationship to a U.S. citizen mother was not enacted until the Cable Act of 1922, and the form of citizenship was naturalized citizenship and not natural born citizenship. If it were possible for a U.S. citizen mother to confer natural born citizenship upon her child, the Congress would not have found it necessary to enact the Cable Act to authorized naturalized U.S. citizenship for a child with a U.S. citizen mother.