Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
The House of Representatives shall be composed of members
chosen every second year by the people of the several
States, and the electors in each State shall have the
qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous
branch of the State legislature.
The persons so designated are voters under State laws; but by
this section of the national constitution they are made United
States voters. It is directed under what conditions of State
qualification they may cast votes in their respective States for
members of the lower house of congress. The constitution here
created a class of United States voters by adoption of an already
voting class. Did but this single instance exist, it would be
sufficient to nullify Chief-Justice Waite's decision, as Article
VI, Sec. 2, declares
The constitution and the laws of the United States which
shall be made in pursuance thereof * * * shall be the
supreme law of the land.
This supreme law at its very inception created a class of United
States voters. If in the Minor case alone, the premises of the
Supreme Court and Chief-Justice Waite were wrong, the decision
possesses no legal value; but in addition to this class, the
United States, by special laws and amendments has from time to
time created other classes of United States voters.
Under the naturalization laws citizenship is recognized as the
basis of suffrage. No State can admit a foreigner to the right of
the ballot, even under United States laws, unless he is already a
citizen, or has formally declared his intention of becoming a
citizen of the United States. The creation of the right here is
national; its regulation, local.
Men who commit crimes against the civil laws of the United States
forfeit their rights of citizenship. State law cannot
re-habilitate them, but within the last five years 2,500 such men
have been pardoned by congressional enactment, and thus again
been made voters in States by United States law. Is it not
strange that with a knowledge of these facts before him
Chief-Justice Waite could base his decision against the right of
a woman to the ballot, on the ground that the United States had
no voters in the States of its own creation?
Criminals against the military law of the United States, who
receive pardon, are still another class of voters thus created. A
very large body of men, several hundred thousand, forfeited their
rights of citizenship, their ballot, by participation in the
rebellion; they were political criminals. When general amnesty
was proclaimed they again secured the ballot. They had been
deprived of the suffrage by United States law and it was restored
to them by the same law.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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