Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 2.djvu/778

744 spective of sex. The denial of the ballot to all women by the Supreme Court, in the person of Virginia L. Minor, under the pretense that the United States possesses no voters in the States of its own creation is thus shown to be a false assumption. But this is not all.

5th and 6th. And oldest of all these classes of United States voters are those men who vote for members of the House of Representatives, and for Presidential Electors in the several States.

. 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.

Article 2, Section 1, Clause 2. Each State shall appoint in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in Congress.... Clause 3. The Congress may determine the time of choosing the electors and the day on which they shall give their votes; which day shall be the same throughout the United States.

The United States by these articles guarantees: 1st. To every person who has a right under State action to vote for the most numerous branch of his State Legislature, the United States right to vote at a peaceable election for members of Congress. 2d. The United States directs the appointment of Presidential Electors, and declares that Congress may not only determine the time of choosing such electors, but shall also fix the day upon which such votes shall be given. The United States secures the right, merely leaving the States to prescribe the qualifications of voters. This is all, with one exception that woman asks; she demands that her right shall be recognized and secured by the United States, which shall then prohibit the States from prescribing qualifications not within the reach of all citizens.

A 7th class of United States voters are those men who having been deprived of citizenship through civil offenses against the power and majesty of the United States are afterward pardoned, or "restored to citizenship."

Still an 8th class over whom the United States exercises its authority are deserters from the army—military criminals. An act of Congress of March 3, 1865, imposed forfeiture of citizenship and its rights, as an additional penalty for the crime of desertion. In accordance with this act, the President issued a proclamation the eleventh of that same month, declaring that all deserters who failed to report themselves to a Provost Marshal within sixty days thereafter should be deemed to have forfeited their rights of citizenship, and should be declared forever incapable of holding any office of interest or profit under the United States. This act was passed previous to the submission of the XIV. Amendment.

Thus at the time of Chief-Justice Waite's decision asserting National want of power over the ballot, and declaring the United States possessed no voters of its own creation in the States (where else would it have them?), the country already possessed eight classes of voters, or persons whose right to the ballot was in some form under the control or sanction of the United States. The black man, the amnestied man, the naturalized man, the foreigner honorably discharged from the Union army, voters for the lower House of Congress, voters for Presidential electors, pardoned civil and military criminals. Further research may bring still other classes to light.

Thus when woman claims that her right to the use of the ballot shall be se-