the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment were authorized by any State Constitution, law, or custom. In the midst of the throes of our civil war, the Supreme Court confirmed this construction, and, speaking in emphatic tones, it declared that the Constitution is "a law for rulers and people equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men at all times and under all circumstances."[1] Since the first Wednesday of March, 1789,[2] when the Constitution took effect, this interpretation has been practised under and acquiesced in, and has remained unquestioned. The all-absorbing, vital, and important question, therefore, which survived the downfall of the Civil-Rights Bill, and must survive as long as the Fourteenth Amendment and the Constitution itself survive, is whether or not the individuals of the State can be constitutionally inhibited by congressional legislation, under the Fourteenth Amendment, or whether or not they can be constitutionally authorized by jurisprudence to break through the "cobweb chains of this paper Constitution," whenever popular opinion favors the disfranchisement of a disfavored class of their constitutional rights. Upon the solution of this grave question of constitutional justice depends the legal status of the civil-rights of citizens of the United States of African descent. If private citizens of the States be permitted to violate this solemn constitutional compact, no matter under what forms of jurisprudence, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment, who also framed the Civil-Rights Bill, have labored in vain to follow the example of those able English statesmen and profound lawyers who, after the revolution of 1688, deemed it important (notwithstanding the Great Charter with its restrictions and guarantees was acknowledged as the law of England) that a declaratory bill of rights, enumerating their civic rights, should also be promulgated.
Irrespective of the power to enforce by appropriate legislation the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment, or of its exercise by Congress, the following substantive affirmations unquestionably represent the constitutional status of the civil rights of American citizens of African descent.
