race: "I care not for the dictates of judges, however eminent, if they be contrary to principle. If the parties will have judgment, let justice be done, though the heavens fall." The Dred Scott decision declared as the law of citizenship, "to be a citizen is to have actual possession and enjoyment, or the perfect right to the acquisition and enjoyment of an entire equality of privileges, civil and political." But the slave-power was then dominant and the court decided that a black man was not a citizen because he had not the right to vote. But when the constitution was so amended as to make "all persons born or naturalized in the United States citizens thereof," a negro, by virtue of his United States citizenship, was declared, under the amendments, a voter in every State in the Union. And the Supreme Court reaffirmed this right in the celebrated slaughter-house cases (16 Wallace, 71). It said, "The negro, having by the fourteenth amendment, been declared to be a citizen of the United States, is thus made a voter in every State in the Union." But when the loyal women of Missouri, apprehending that "all persons beneath the flag were made citizens and voters by the fourteenth amendment," through Mrs. Minor, applied to the Supreme Court for protection in the exercise of that same right, this high tribunal, reversing all its former decisions, proclaims State sovereignty superior to national authority. This it does in this strange language: "Being born in the United States, a woman is a person and therefore a citizen"--we are much obliged to them for that definition of our identity as persons--"but the constitution of the United States does not confer the right of suffrage upon any one." And then, in the face of its previous decisions, the court declared: "The United States has no voters in the States of its own creation", that the elective officers of the United States are all elected, directly or indirectly by State voters. It remands woman to the States for her protection, thus giving to the State the supreme authority and overthrowing the entire results of the war, which was fought to maintain national supremacy over any and all subjects in which the rights and privileges of the citizens of the United States are involved.