Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 2.djvu/667

Rh B. Gratz Brown, of Missouri, in the three days' discussion in the United States Senate in 1866, on Senator Cowan's motion to strike "male" from the District of Columbia suffrage bill, said:

Charles Sumner, in his brave protests against the XIV. and XV. Amendments, insisted that, so soon as by the XIII. Amendment the slaves became free men, the original powers of the United States Constitution guaranteed to them equal rights—the right to vote and to be voted for:

The preamble of the Constitution of the State of New York declares:

Here is not the slightest intimation, either of receiving freedom from the United States Constitution, or of the State conferring the blessings of liberty upon the people; and the same is true of every one of the thirty-six State Constitutions. Each and all alike declare rights God-given, and that to secure the people in the enjoyment of their inalienable rights, is their one and only object in ordaining and establishing government. And all of the State constitutions are equally emphatic in their recognition of the ballot as the means of securing the people in the enjoyment of these rights. Article 1 of the New York State Constitution says:

And so carefully guarded is the citizen's right to vote, that the Constitution makes special mention of all who may not vote:

In naming the various employments that shall not affect the residence of voters, the 3d section of Article 2d says

and hence his vote. Thus is the right of voting most sacredly hedged about. The only seeming permission in our constitution for the disfranchisement of women is in section 1st of Article 2d:

But I insist that in view of the explicit assertions of the equal right of the whole people, both in the preamble and previous article of the constitution, this omission of the adjective "female" in the second, should not be