Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/202

170 of Missouri, to whom had been assigned the next thirty minutes, said: Mr. Chairman, and Gentlemen of the Judiciary Committee: I am invited to speak of the dangers which beset us at this hour in the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in Mrs. Minor's case, which not only stultifies its previous interpretation of the recent constitutional amendments and makes them a dead letter, but will rank, in the coming ages, in the history of the judiciary, with the Dred Scott decision. The law, as explained in the Dred Scott case, was an infamous one, which trampled upon the most solemn rights of the loyal citizens of the government, and declared the constitution to mean anything or nothing, as the case might be. Yet the decision in that case had a saving clause, for it was not the unanimous voice of a Democratic judiciary. Dissenting opinions were nobly uttered from the bench. In the more recent case, under the rule of a Republican judiciary created by a party professing to be one of justice, the rights of one-half of the people were deliberately abrogated without a dissenting voice. This violation of the fundamental principles of our government called forth no protest. In all of the decisions against woman in the Republican court, there has not been found one Lord Mansfield, who, rising to the supreme height of an unbiased judgment, would give the immortal decree that shall crown with regal dignity the mother of the 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