the courts, preclude legislative and municipal corruption, and secure responsibility by concentrating executive power." Through the approaching Constitutional Convention, he says the people "can secure justice through reformed courts, fix responsibility for abuses of executive power;—in short, they can increase the value of property and the reward of honest labor."
Mr. Tilton, in The Independent, in allusion to the recent Republican defeat in Connecticut, concludes; "the policy of negro suffrage is clearly seen to be the only policy for the National welfare." ... "What then, is the next step," he asks, "in the progress of reconstruction?" In italics he answered, "We must make Impartial Suffrage the rule and practice of the Northern as well as the Southern States." He proposes a new amendment to the Federal Constitution which will secure to every American citizen, black and white, North and South, the American citizen's franchise. What is meant in this article of the Independent by impartial suffrage is understood by these words in another part of it. "The Republican party in Connecticut was abundantly strong enough to secure Impartial Suffrage. But it chose, instead, to insult its black-faced brethren, and refused their alliance." Mr. Raymond, in the New York Times, speaks without a stammer on the suffrage question. It declares, "In New York suffrage is now absolutely universal for all citizens except the colored people; and upon them it is only restricted by a slight property qualification."
A correspondent of the Boston Congregationalist, in a letter from New York, tells us, "A Constitutional Convention is to be held shortly in this State, and we expect to see universal suffrage adopted.... The Strong-Minded Women aim to secure female voting, but they will fail, as they should." The Congregationalist has also an editorial article headed, "The steps to Reconstruction," in which it speaks excellently of "a millennium of Republican governments," and of Impartial Suffrage in them, as near at hand. But it too speaks only of freedmen to be clothed with the rights of citizenship in the millennial, latter-day glory so soon to be. Over the black male citizen this editor shouts, "chattel, contraband, soldier, citizen, voter, counselor, magistrate, representative, senator,—these all shall be the successive steps of his wonderful progress!!"
I have produced these as the best representatives of the different styles or types of the radical or progressive movement in the work of reconstructing the government. That the Standard and Independent believe fully in the right of women to Equal Suffrage and citizenship is known to every attentive reader of those journals. But at an hour like this, it is painful to witness anything like agreement even, with the language of the others I have cited.... To rob the freed slave of citizenship to-day is as much a crime as was slavery before the war on Sumter; and to withhold the divinely conferred gift from woman is every way as oppressive, cruel, and unjust as if she were a black man....
