sons of African descent, but
all persons are citizens.

The second section is simply a threat to punish the states, by reducing
their representation on the floor of Congress, should they disfranchise
any of their male citizens, on account of color, and does not allow of
the inference that the states may disfranchise from any, or all other
causes; nor in any wise weaken or invalidate the universal guarantee of
the first section. What rule of law or logic would allow the conclusion,
that the prohibition of a crime to one person, on severe pains and
penalties, was a sanction of that crime to any and all other persons
save that one?

But, however much the doctors of the law may disagree, as to whether
people and citizens, in the original constitution, were one and the
same, or whether the privileges and immunities in the fourteenth
amendment include the right of suffrage, the question of the citizen's
right to vote is settled forever by the fifteenth amendment. "The
citizen's right to vote shall not be denied by the United States, nor
any state thereof; on account of race, color, or previous condition of
servitude." How can the state deny or abridge the right of the citizen,
if the citizen does not possess it? There is no escape from the
conclusion, that to vote is the citizen's right, and the specifications
of race, color, or previous condition of servitude can, in no way,
impair the force of the emphatic assertion, that the citizen's right to
vote shall not be denied or abridged.

The political strategy of the second section of the fourteenth
amendment, failing to coerce the rebel states into enfranchising their
negroes, and the necessities of the republican party demanding their
votes throughout the South, to ensure the re-election of Grant in 1872,
that party was compelled to place this positive prohibition of the
fifteenth amendment upon the United States and all the states thereof.

If we once establish the false principle, that United 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 all women; native
born men combining to abridge the rights of all naturalized citizens, as
in Rhode Island. It will not always be the rich and educated who may
combine to cut off the poo