ed 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. It will not
always be men combining to disfranchise women; native-born men
combining to abridge the rights of naturalized citizens, as in
Rhode Island; it will not always be the rich and educated who may
combine to cut off the poor and ignorant; but we may live to see
the poor, hard-working, uncultivated day laborers, foreign and
native born, learning the power of the ballot and their vast
majority of numbers, combine and amend State constitutions so as
to disfranchise the Vanderbilts and A. T. Stewarts, the Conklings
and Fentons. It is a poor rule that won't work more ways than
one. Establish this precedent, admit the right of the States to
deny suffrage, and there is no power to foresee the confusion,
discord, and disruption that may await us. There is, and can be,
but one safe principle of government--equal rights to all. And
any and every discrimination against any class, whether on
account of color, race, nativity, sex, property, culture, can but
embitter and disaffect that class, and thereby endanger the
safety of the whole people. Clearly, then, the National
government must not only define the rights of citizens, but it
must stretch out its powerful hand and protect them in every
State in this Union.

But if you will insist that the XV. Amendment's emphatic
interdiction against robbing United States citizens of their
right to vote, "on account of race, color, or previous condition
of servitude," is a recognition of the right, either of the
United States or any State, to rob citizens of that right for any
or all other reasons, I will prove to you that the class of
citizens for which I now plead, and to which I belong, may be,
and are, by all the principles of our Government, and many of the
laws of the States, included under the term "previous condition
of servitude."

First.--The married women and their legal status. What is
servitude? "The condition of a slave." What is a slave? "A person
who is robbed of the proceeds of his labor; a person who is
subject to the will of another."