Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/66

Again Madison said in The Federalist (No. 54), in speaking of the enumeration for Representatives:

The Federal Constitution, therefore, decides with great propriety in the case of our slaves when it views them in the mixed character of persons and property. This is in fact their true character. It is the character bestowed on them by the laws under which they live; and it will not be denied that these are the proper criteria; because it is only under the pretext that the laws have transformed the negroes into subjects of property, that a place is disputed them in the computation of numbers; and it is admitted that, if the laws were to restore the rights which have been taken away, the negroes could no longer be refused an equal share of representation.

Therefore, as women are counted in the enumeration on which the Congressional apportionment is based, they are legally entitled to an equal share in direct representation.

In 1884 the case of Jasper Yarbrough and others who had been sentenced to hard labor in the penitentiary in Georgia for preventing a colored man from voting for a member of Congress, was brought to the U. S. Supreme Court by a petition for a writ of habeas corpus. The decision rendered March 2, virtually nullified that given by this court in the case of Mrs. Minor in 1875, as quoted above, which held that "the National Constitution has no voters," for this one declared::

But it is not correct to say that the right to vote for a member of Congress does not depend on the Constitution of the United States. The office, if it be properly called an office, is created by the Constitution and by that alone. It also declares how it shall be filled, namely, by election. Its language is: "The House of Representatives shall be composed of members chosen every second year by the people of the several States; and the electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State Legislature."

The States in prescribing the qualifications of voters for the most numerous branch of their own Legislature, do not do this with reference to the election for members of Congress. Nor can they prescribe the qualifications for those eo nomine [by that name}.

They define who are to vote for the popular branch of their own Legislature, and the Constitution of the United States says the same persons shall vote for members of Congress in that State.

It adopts the qualification thus furnished as the qualification of its own electors for members of Congress. It is not true, therefore, that the electors for members of Congress owe their right to vote to the State law in any sense which makes the exercise of the right to depend exclusively on the law of the State.