frage, and hence, needed no constitutional amendment for any other purpose. What right, I ask you, has the Irishman the day after he receives his naturalization papers that he did not possess the day before, save the right to vote and hold office? And the Chinamen, now crowding our Pacific coast, are in precisely the same position. What privilege or immunity has California or Oregon the constitutional right to deny them, save that of the ballot? Clearly, then, if the XIV. Amendment was not to secure to black men their right to vote, it did nothing for them, since they possessed everything else before. But if it was meant to be a prohibition of the States to deny or abridge their right to vote—which I fully believe—then it did the same for all persons, white women included, born or naturalized in the United States, for the amendment does not say all male persons of African descent, but all persons are citizens.
The second section is simply a threat to punish the States, by reducing their representation on the floor of Congress, should they disfranchise any class of male citizens, and does not allow of the inference that the States may disfranchise from any, or all other causes; nor in anywise weaken or invalidate the universal guarantee of the first section. What rule of law or logic would allow the conclusion, that the prohibition of a crime to one person, on severe pains and penalties, was a sanction of that crime to any and all other persons save that one? But, however much the doctors of the law may disagree, as to whether people and citizens, in the original constitution, were one and the same, or whether the privileges and immunities in the XIV. Amendment include the right of suffrage, the question of the right of the citizen to vote is settled forever by the XV. Amendment:
The citizen's right to vote shall not be denied by the United States, nor any State thereof; on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
How can the State deny or abridge the right of the citizen, if the citizen does not possess it? There is no escape from the conclusion, that to vote is the citizen's right, and the specifications of race, color, or previous condition of servitude can, in no way, impair the force of the emphatic assertion, that the citizen's right to vote shall not be denied or abridged. The political strategy of the second section of the XIV. Amendment, failing to coerce the rebel States into enfranchising their negroes, and the necessities of the Republican party demanding their votes throughout the South, to insure the re-election of Grant in 1872, that party was compelled to place this positive prohibition of the XV. Amendment upon the United States and all the States thereof.
If we once establish the false principle, that United States citizenship does not carry with it the right to vote in every State in this Union, there is no end to the petty freaks and cunning devices that will be resorted to, to exclude one and another class of citizens from the right of suffrage. It will not always be men combining to disfranchise women; native-born men combining to abridge the rights of naturalized citizens, as in Rhode Island; it will not always be the rich and educated who may combine to cut off the poor and ignorant; but we may live to see the poor, hard-working, uncultivated day laborers, foreign and native born, learning the power of the ballot and their vast majority of numbers, combine and amend State constitutions so as to disfranchise the Vanderbilts and A. T. Stewarts, the Conklings and