This case was the dominating feature of the National Convention at Washington in the winter of 1874; the key-note of all the speeches and the arguments before the judiciary committees was woman’s right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment.  The women did not relinquish this claim until all ground for it was destroyed by a decision of the United States Supreme Court in 1875, in the case of Virginia L. Minor, of St. Louis.  Francis Minor, a lawyer of that city, was the first to assert that women were enfranchised by both the letter and the spirit of the Fourteenth Amendment, and, acting under his advice, his wife attempted to register for the presidential election of 1872.  Her name was refused and she brought suit against the inspector for the purpose of making a test case.  After an adverse decision by the lower courts, the case was carried to the Supreme Court of the United States and argued before that tribunal by Mr. Minor, at the October term, 1874.  It is not too much to say that no constitutional lawyer in the country could have improved upon this argument in its array of authorities, its keen logic and its impressive plea for justice.[78]

The decision was adverse, the opinion of the court being delivered March 29, 1875, by Chief-Justice Waite, himself a strong advocate of the enfranchisement of women.  The court admitted that “women are persons and citizens,” but found that the “National Constitution does not define the privileges and immunities of citizens.  The United States has no voters of its own creation.  The National Constitution does not confer the right of suffrage upon any one, but the franchise must be regulated by the States.  The Fourteenth Amendment does not add to the privileges and immunities of a citizen; it simply furnishes an additional guarantee to protect those he already has.  Before the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the States had the power to disfranchise on account of race or color.  These amendments, ratified by the States, simply forbade that discrimination, but did not forbid that against sex.”

This is in direct contradiction to the decision of Chief-Justice Taney in the Dred Scott case:  “The words ‘people of the United States’ and ‘citizens’ are synonymous terms and mean the same thing; they describe the political body who, according to our republican institutions, form the sovereignty and hold the power, and conduct the government through their representatives.  They are what we familiarly call the sovereign people, and every citizen is one of this people, and a constituent member of this sovereignty.”