d hence needed no constitutional amendment for any other
purpose. What right in this country 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? The Chinamen now
crowding our Pacific coast are in precisely the same position. What
privilege or immunity has California or Oregon the right to deny them,
save that of the ballot? Clearly, then, if the Fourteenth 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 intended to
prohibit the States from denying or abridging their right to vote, then
it did the same for all persons, white women included, born or
naturalized in the United States; for the amendment does not say that
all male persons of African descent, but that 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 of their male citizens, and can not be construed into a sanction to
disfranchise female citizens, nor does it in any wise weaken or
invalidate the universal guarantee of the first section.

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 Fourteenth Amendment
include the right of suffrage, the question of the citizen's right to
vote is forever settled by the Fifteenth Amendment. "The right of
citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged
by the United States, or by any State, 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 that emphatic assertion that the citizen's
right to vote shall not be denied or abridged.

The political strategy of the second section of the Fourteenth 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 ensure the re-election of Grant in 1872, that party was
compelled to place this positive prohibition of the Fifteenth