The HistoryOf Personhood

what is personhood? does the moral arc bend toward justice? explain the de facto/de jure difference

Telegram to President Lincoln from his Secretary on the passage

of the 13th Amendment

14th Amendment

Let me refer the House to a carefully prepared list of the property in-terests of those affected by the amendments the gentleman would an-nual, which I shall print: and in this connection let me suggest anoth-er thought. By repealing the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments, at once all the negroes in the United States would be disfranchised. Of all the farms at the present time in the United States, according to the census of 1900, 13 per cent are owned or operated by negro farmers, and according to Mr. Talcott Williams, editor of the Philadelphia Press, the amount of property now owned by the negroes in this country amounts to almost $500,000,000.

Now, by the resolutions introduced by the gentleman from Georgia and others, it is proposed to disfranchise all the owners of this prop-erty. I would like to ask what were the causes which led up to the Declaration of Independence; what it was that our forefathers fought for during 1776? Let me suggest that the initial cause for which we fought was that there should be “no taxation without representation,” and there can be no representation without representation, “and there can be no representation without the right to exercise the fran-chise. Direct representation of those governed in the governing body is the keystone of our democratic institutions. If our Government is not a representative government it is nothing.

I can not agree with those who advance the argument that the South should be left to solve the negro problem, for the reason that when States enact legislation affecting the political status of large numbers of its citizens of voting age the result of such legislation is national in its effect,a nd, therefore, must at once become the object of concern to all sections of the country.

One word in regard to the fourteenth amendment. In the fourteenth amendment the very use of the word “shall,” in prescribing the re-sults to happen when certain conditions arose, leaves no discretion to Congress. It is absolutely mandatory upon Congress to take the course prescribed.Edward De V. Morrell (PA), in the House April 4, 1904.

Albert Little’s Speech to SCOTUS in Sara J. Spencer vs. The Board of Registration AND Sarah E. Webster vs.

The Judges of Election.

Section 1. 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.

You see in a moment this does not confer anything. It uses no words of grant or grace, apt or otherwise, nor does it profess to. It expressly rec-ognizes, as an already existing fact, that the citizens of the United States have the right to vote. The right which shall thus be respected is a right peculiar to the citizen--it is not a personal right, but a political right, and a right to vote, the same one mentioned in the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment--a right not created or conferred by the Fifteenth Amendment. It could not be, for it existed, and, as I have just said, was spoken of in the Fourteenth Amendment; so that it must be as old as that at the least. This amendment is a solemn mandate to all concerned not to deny this right, because it existed, and because it was of the highest value.

Justice Wylie: It is not to be denied for either of the three reasons mentioned.

Mr. R: Yes, your honor, I have not reached that; I am now only showing that it is a right--a citizen right--and older than the Fifteenth Amendment; but, if your honor intends to infer, that because the right cannot be denied in any one of those cases, that, therefore, it may be in all others, then you have another instance of a constitutional right to deny a constitutional right; and, without vanity, I have already pulverized that assumption.

It is thus absolutely certain that colored male citizens do not claim their admitted right to vote from this Fifteenth Amendment. They had it before, and this came in to protect and secure them in its enjoyment.

Whence did they derive it? From the Fourteenth Amendment? If so, then did women acquire it by the same amendment? Was it an inherent right in them as a part of “the people?” So women are a much larger and more important part of “the people.”

The right to vote shall not be denied on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, was not used to make the right sacred in male negroes alone, while the rights of all others were left to political caprice, or to be controlled hereafter by these same colored males mayhap; but this amendment was aimed fully at the mischief remedied by the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment, and there its force is expended. It fossilizes the second section of that amendment. While the broad language of its first section secures, beyond the abridging hand of the States, the great rights it secures--rights which Congress cannot abridge on any pretext, for it can exercise no power not granted, and the Constitution confers on it no power to abridge the “privileges or immunities of the citizen” in any instance.

And here I rest this solemn argument. I have brought this cause of woman, and of man as well--of the race--into the presence of the court, sur-rounded by the severe atmosphere of the law, beyond the reach of chronic ribaldry, and into the region of argument, where it must be estimated by its legal merits. I have applied to it the rules of law. I have pushed away the dead exfoliations that cumber the path; and have gone to the founda-tions, to the ever fresh and preserving spirit of the rules of the common law, and have sought to apply them with candor.

In 1872, 47 years prior to the passage of the amendment, Susan

B. Anthony was fined 100 dollars for casting an

illegal ballot - this speech was made the following year.

The preamble of the Federal Constitution says:

“We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of lib-erty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people--women as well as men. And it is a downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government--the ballot.

For any State to make sex a qualification that must ever result in the disfranchisement of one entire half of the people is to pass a bill of attainder, or an ex post facto law, and is therefore a violation of the supreme law of the land. By it the blessings of liberty are for ever withheld from women and their female posterity. To them this government has no just powers derived from the consent of the governed. To them this government is not a democracy. It is not a republic. It is an odious aristocracy; a hateful oligarchy of sex; the most hateful aristocracy ever established on the face of the globe; an oligarchy of wealth, where the right govern the poor. An oligarchy of learning, where the educated govern the ignorant, or even an oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be en-dured; but this oligarchy of sex, which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of every household--which ordains all men sovereigns, all women subjects, carries dissension, discord and rebellion into every home of the nation.

Webster, Worcester and Bouvier all define a citizen to be a person in the United States, entitled to vote and hold office.

The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons? And I hardly believe any of our opponents will have the hardihood to say they are not. Being persons, then, women are citizens; and no State has a right to make any law, or to enforce any old law, that shall abridge their privileges or immunities. Hence, every discrimination against women in the constitutions and laws of the several States is today null and void, precisely as in every one against Negroes.