Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 6.djvu/633

TENNESSEE 617 States had rejected it and it had been ratified by all the others ex- cept Vermont and Connecticut, whose Governors refused to call special sessions. It looked as if the women of the United States would be prevented from voting at the presidential election in November for the lack of one ratification. There was every reason to believe that the Legislature of Tennessee would give this one if it were not prevented by a clause in the State constitution. Meanwhile the ratification of the Federal Prohibition Amend- ment by the Ohio Legislature had been sent to the voters by a recent law, they had rejected it and an appeal had been taken to the U. S. Supreme Court on the constitutionality of the referendum law. On June i, in Hawk vs. Smith, this court held that a referendum to the voters on the ratification of Federal Amendments was in conflict with Article V of the Federal Consti- tution, therefore null and void, as this Constitution was the supreme law of the land. The decision said: "It is not the function of courts or legislative bodies, National or State, to alter the method which the U. S. Constitution has fixed." Article II, Section 32 of the Tennessee constitution reads : "No convention or General Assembly of this State shall act upon any amendment of the Constitution of the United States proposed by Congress to the several States unless such convention or General Assembly shall have been elected after such amendment is sub- mitted." The presumption was naturally that this clause was nullified by the U. S. Supreme Court's decision. On June TO, Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Suffrage Association, telegraphed Governor Albert H. Roberts, urging him to call an extra session. He, thereupon, sought the opinion of Attorney General Frank M. Thompson as to the power of the present Legislature to ratify, who answered that it would -. er. He said that he had submitted the question to the U. S. Department of Justice through Solicitor General John rierson, to whom President Wilson had also appealed, whose answer in brief was as follows: "The ruling of the Supreme in the Ohio case and the consideration which I gave to this inn in preparing those cases for hearing leave no doubt in my mind tn:t the power to ratify an amendment to the Federal VOX. TI