Luther Martin, attorney-general of Maryland, in his report to the Legislature of that State of the convention that framed the United States Constitution, said: 

“Those who advocated the equality of suffrage took the matter up on the original principles of government:  that the reason why each individual man in forming a State government should have an equal vote, is because each individual, before he enters into government, is equally free and equally independent.”

James Madison said: 

“Under every view of the subject, it seems indispensable that the mass of the citizens should not be without a voice in making the laws which they are to obey, and in choosing the magistrates who are to administer them.”  Also, “Let it be remembered, finally, that it has ever been the pride and the boast of America that the rights for which she contended were the rights of human nature.”

And these assertions of the framers of the United States Constitution of the equal and natural rights of all the people to a voice in the government, have been affirmed and reaffirmed by the leading statesmen of the nation, throughout the entire history of our government.

Thaddeus Stevens, of Pennsylvania, said in 1866: 

     “I have made up my mind that the elective franchise is one of the
     inalienable rights meant to be secured by the declaration of
     independence.”

B. Gratz Brown, of Missouri, in the three days’ discussion in the United States Senate in 1866, on Senator Cowan’s motion to strike “male” from the District of Columbia suffrage bill, said: 

“Mr. President, I say here on the floor of the American Senate, I stand for universal suffrage; and as a matter of fundamental principle, do not recognize the right of society to limit it on any ground of race or sex.  I will go farther and say, that I recognize the right of franchise as being intrinsically a natural right.  I do not believe that society is authorized to impose any limitations upon it that do not spring out of the necessities of the social state itself.  Sir, I have been shocked, in the course of this debate, to hear Senators declare this right only a conventional and political arrangement, a privilege yielded to you and me and others; not a right in any sense, only a concession!  Mr. President, I do not hold my liberties by any such tenure.  On the contrary, I believe that whenever you establish that doctrine, whenever you crystalize that idea in the public mind of this country, you ring the death-knell of American liberties.”

Charles Sumner, in his brave protests against the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments, insisted that, so soon as by the thirteenth amendment the slaves became free men, the original powers of the United States Constitution guaranteed to them equal rights—­the right to vote and to be voted for.  In closing one of his great speeches he said: