Amendment
upon the United States and all the States thereof.

If once we 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 tricks and cunning devices which will be
attempted to exclude one and another class of citizens from the right of
suffrage. It will not always be the men combining to disfranchise all
women; native born men combining to abridge the rights of all
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 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, the Stewarts, the Conklings and the Fentons. It is a poor
rule that won't work more ways than one. Establish this precedent, admit
the State's right to deny suffrage, and there is no limit to the
confusion, discord and disruption that may await us. There is and can be
but one safe principle of government--equal rights to all.
Discrimination against any class on account of color, race, nativity,
sex, property, culture, can but embitter and disaffect that class, and
thereby endanger the safety of the whole people. Clearly, then, the
national government not only must define the rights of citizens, but
must stretch out its powerful hand and protect them in every State in
this Union.

If, however, you will insist that the Fifteenth Amendment's emphatic
interdiction against robbing United States citizens of their suffrage
"on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude," is a
recognition of the right of either the United States or any State to
deprive them of the ballot for any or all other reasons, I will prove to
you that the class of citizens for whom I now plead are, by all the
principles of our government and many of the laws of the States,
included under the term "previous condition of servitude."

Consider first married women and their legal status. What is servitude?
"The condition of a slave." What is a slave? "A person who is robbed of
the proceeds of his labor; a person who is subject to the will of
another." By the laws of Georgia, South Carolina and all the States of
the South, the negro had no right to the custody and control of his
person. He belonged to h