Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/63

 criminal offense, tried and fined in the U. S. Circuit Court at Canandaigua, by Associate Justice Ward Hunt of the U. S. Supreme Court. There is no more flagrant judicial outrage on record. The full account of this case, in which she was refused the right of trial by jury as guaranteed by the Constitution, will be found in Vol. II, History of Woman Suffrage, p. 627 and following; also much more in detail in the Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, p. 423, with her great Constitutional Argument delivered in fifty of the post-office districts of the two counties before the trial, p. 977 and following.

The vote of Mrs. Virginia L. Minor was refused in St. Louis and she brought suit against the inspectors of election. The case was decided against her in the Circuit Court of the county and the Supreme Court of Missouri. She then carried it to the Supreme Court of the United States—Minor vs. Happersett et al. No. 182, October term, 1874. The case was argued by her husband, Francis Minor, and after the lapse of a quarter of a century it is still believed that his argument could not have been excelled. The decision was delivered by Chief Justice Waite, March 29, 1875, and was in brief: "The National Constitution does not define the privileges and immunities of citizens. The United States has no voters of its own creation. The Constitution does not confer the right of suffrage upon any one, but the franchise must be regulated by the States. The Fourteenth Amendment does not add to the privileges and immunities of a citizen; it simply furnishes an additional guarantee to protect those he already has. Before the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments the States had the power to disfranchise on account of race or color. These Amendments, ratified by the States, simply forbade that discrimination but did not forbid that against sex."

The full text of argument and decision will be found in the History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. II, p. 715 and following. In making this decision the Court was compelled to reverse absolutely its own finding of three years previous in what was known as the Slaughter House Cases (16 Wallace) which said: "The negro having by the Fourteenth Amendment been declared to be