States for preventing men
from voting but leaving them entirely free to prohibit women. When
even this penalty proved insufficient to protect negro men in their
attempts to vote, Congress in 1869 submitted a 15th Amendment which
was declared ratified the following year: "The right of citizens of
the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the
United States or by any State on account of race, color or previous
condition of servitude."

Those who had been striving for two decades to obtain suffrage for
women protested by every means in their power against this second
discrimination. They implored and demanded that the word "sex" should
be included in this amendment, which would have forever settled the
question, just as the omission of the word "male" in the 14th
Amendment would have settled it. The most of the men who had stood by
them in their early struggles for the vote, when both were working
together for the freedom of the slaves, now sacrificed them rather
than imperil the political rights of the negro men. Some of the women
themselves were persuaded to abandon their opposition to these
amendments by the promise of the Republican leaders that as soon as
they were safely intrenched in the constitution another should be
placed there providing for woman suffrage. This promise they did not
try to keep and it remained unfulfilled over fifty years. Miss Anthony
and Mrs. Stanton were never for one moment deceived or silenced but in
their paper, _The Revolution_, they opposed these amendments as long
as they were pending.

* * * * *

Although the protests were in vain the women had learned that they
might be relieved of the intolerable burden of having to obtain the
suffrage State by State through permission of a majority of the
individual voters. They had seen an entire class enfranchised through
the quicker and easier way of amending the Federal Constitution and
they determined to invoke this power in their own behalf. From the
office of _The Revolution_ in New York in the autumn of 1868 went out
thousands of petitions to be signed and sent to Congress for the
submission of an amendment to enfranchise women. Immediately after its
assembling in December, 1868, Senator S. C. Pomeroy of Kansas
introduced a resolution providing that "the basis of suffrage shall be
that of citizenship and all native or naturalized citizens shall enjoy
the same rights and privileges of the el