lected her duty in part—I confess it freely—it is not your fault alone, gentlemen, that we are not with you to-day. If we had been as conscious of our duty and privilege years ago as we are to-day, if we had known our birthright, we should have stood by your side, welcome coadjutors, long since. So we will take the blame of the past alike—we have all been walking very slowly this path of Christian civilization. But in the greatest conflict of modern times, you announced great principles and fought for them on the field, and we stood by them in the home, and we stand by them still there. And when we come to deliberate with you in solemn council as to how these principles shall be carried into legislation, your task will be easier, our opportunities will be larger, and still our hearts will be where they have ever been—in our homes.
Forty-first Congress, 3d Session, House of Representatives, Report, No. 22, Jan. 30, 1871, recommitted to the Committee on Judiciary and ordered to be printed. Mr. Bingham, from the Committee on the Judiciary, made the following report.
The Committee on the Judiciary, to whom was referred the Memorial of Victoria C. Woodhull, having considered the same, make the following report:
The Memorialist asks the enactment of a law by Congress which shall secure to citizens of the United States in the several States the right to vote "without regard to sex." Since the adoption of the XIV. Amendment of the Constitution, there is no longer any reason to doubt that all persons, born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside, for that is the express declaration of the amendment.
The clause of the XIV. Amendment, "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States," does not, in the opinion of the Committee, refer to privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States other than those privileges and immunities embraced in the original text of the Constitution, article IV., section 2. The XIV. Amendment, it is believed, did not add to the privileges or immunities before mentioned, but was deemed necessary for their enforcement, as an express limitation upon the powers of the States. It has been judicially determined that the first eight articles of amendment of the Constitution were not limitations on the power of the States, and it was apprehended that the same might be held of the provision of section 2, article iv.
To remedy this defect of the Constitution, the express limitations upon the States contained in the first section of the XIV. Amendment, together with the grant of power in Congress to enforce them by legislation, were incorporated in the Constitution. The words "citizens of the United States," and "citizens of the States," as employed in the XIV. Amendment, did not change or modify the relations of citizens of the State and Nation as they existed under the original Constitution.
Attorney-General Bates gave the opinion that the Constitution uses the the word "citizen," only to express the political quality of the individual in his relation to the Nation; to declare that he is a member of the body politic, and bound to it by the reciprocal obligation of allegiance on the one side