s not true therefore that _the people_ have ever
exercised the right to prescribe the qualifications of voters or
officers. From the beginning, Congress always has settled the question
in its organic act. That of your own Territory read, "Every free, white,
male inhabitant shall vote at the first election, and be eligible to any
office within the Territory." Thus you see Congress, not you, the
people, decided who should and who should not vote in Kansas. And when
the delegates of the prescribed "free, white, male" order met in
convention, they proved themselves nothing above human, very like the
so-elected conventions of other States, and retained all legislative
power within the limits of the original congressional permit. The same
is true of the rebel States, in which the President now finds the people
destitute of all civil government; when he specifies who may vote, when
he excludes any class from the ballot-box, he makes it impossible for
"the people" to form a republican government.

When the loyal black men are not allowed their right to vote in the
first election of the rebel States, their governments are thrown into
the hands of a very small minority, and that too of very doubtful
loyalty. The President by adhering to the old slave definition of "the
people," rules that all our brave black Union soldiers and our best
friends and allies, without whose aid we should still be struggling with
rebels in arms, shall be subjects, not citizens, of the government they
have rescued from the Confederate usurpers. It is not in human nature
that a people fanatically believing themselves a superior race, and
thereby rightful legislators over another and inferior race, shall
execute justice and equality toward those whom they decree shall be
"hewers of wood and drawers of water." No, the black man's guarantee to
the protection of his inalienable rights to "life, liberty and
property," is bound up in his right to the ballot.

When I speak of the inalienable rights of the negro, I do not forget
that these belong equally to woman. Though the government shall be
reconstructed on the basis of universal manhood suffrage, it yet will
not be a true republic. Still one-half of the people will be in
subjection to the other half, and the time will surely come when the
whole question will have to be reopened and an accounting made with this
other subject class. There will have to be virtually another
reconstruction, based on the duty of