"The
citizen's right to vote shall not be denied by the United States, nor
any state thereof; 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 the 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 amendment upon the United States and all the states thereof.
If we once 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 freaks and cunning devices, that will be
resorted to, to exclude one and another class of citizens from the right
of suffrage.
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