trument by its
authors and their contemporaries, and recent legislation by Congress.
When at the first movement toward independence, the Congress of the
United States instructed the several States to institute governments of
their own, they left each State to decide for itself the conditions for
the enjoyment of the elective franchise. During the period of the
Confederacy there continued to exist a very great diversity in the
qualifications of electors in the several States, and even within a
State a distinction of qualifications prevailed with regard to the
officers who were to be chosen. The Constitution of the United States
recognizes these diversities when it enjoins that in the choice of
members of the House of Representatives of the United States "the
electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for
electors of the most numerous branch of the State legislature." After
the formation of the Constitution it remained, as before, the uniform
usage for each State to enlarge the body of its electors according to
its own judgment, and under this system one State after another has
proceeded to increase the number of its electors, until now universal
suffrage, or something very near it, is the general rule. So fixed was
this reservation of power in the habits of the people and so
unquestioned has been the interpretation of the Constitution that during
the civil war the late President never harbored the purpose--certainly
never avowed the purpose--of disregarding it; and in the acts of
Congress during that period nothing can be found which, during the
continuance of hostilities, much less after their close, would have
sanctioned any departure by the Executive from a policy which has so
uniformly obtained. Moreover, a concession of the elective franchise to
the freedmen by act of the President of the United States must have been
extended to all colored men, wherever found, and so must have
established a change of suffrage in the Northern, Middle, and Western
States, not less than in the Southern and Southwestern. Such an act
would have created a new class of voters, and would have been an
assumption of power by the President which nothing in the Constitution
or laws of the United States would have warranted.

On the other hand, every danger of conflict is avoided when the
settlement of the question is referred to the several States. They can,
each for itself, decide on the measure, and whether it is to be ad