tions relating to slavery and to the personal and political rights
of the negro race, may be clearly traced in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth,
and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution.

--The Thirteenth Amendment, proposed by Congress while the war was yet
flagrant, simply declared that neither slavery nor involuntary
servitude shall exist within the United States or in any place subject
to National jurisdiction.

--The Fourteenth Amendment advanced the negro to the status of a
citizen, but did nothing affirmatively to confer the right of suffrage
upon him. Negatively it aided him thereto, by laying the penalty of a
decreased representation upon any State that should deny or in any
way abridge his right to vote at any election for the choice of
electors for President and Vice-President of the United States,
representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a
State, or the members of the Legislature thereof.

--The Fifteenth Amendment, now proposed, did not attempt to declare
affirmatively that the negro should be endowed with the elective
franchise, but it did what was tantamount, in forbidding to the United
States or to any State the power to deny or abridge the right to vote
on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. States
that should adopt an educational test or a property qualification might
still exclude a vast majority of negroes from the polls, but they would
at the same time exclude all white men who could not comply with the
tests that excluded the negro. In short, suffrage by the Fifteenth
Amendment was made impartial, but not necessarily universal, to male
citizens above the age of twenty-one years.

The adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment seriously modified the effect
and potency of the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment. Under
that section a State could exclude the negro from the right of
suffrage, if willing to accept the penalty of the proportional loss
of representation in Congress, which the exclusion of the colored
population from the basis of apportionment would entail. But
the Fifteenth Amendment took away absolutely from the State the
power to exclude the negro from suffrage, and therefore the second
section to the Fourteenth Amendment can refer only to those other
disqualifications never likely to be applied, by which a state might
lessen her voting population by basing the right of suffrage on the
ownership of real estate, or on the possessio