Ch. 1.1. Voting Rights from the Revolution to the Constitution
(Continued from Keyssar.)
The Revolution and the Vote
The “shot heard round the world” signaled the beginning of a new era in the history of the franchise. By challenging Britain’s right to rule the colonies, the American Revolution sparked a far-reaching public debate about the nature and sources of legitimate governmental authority. The issue of suffrage was always near the center of that debate: if the legitimacy of a government depended on the consent of the governed (one of the key rhetorical claims of the revolution), then limitations on suffrage were intrinsically problematic, since voting was the primary instrument through which a populace could express or withhold consent.
Did the colonial franchise restrictions, then, have to be abolished? The question loomed large, and in many of the former colonies, the revolutionary period–stretching from the mid-1770s to the ratification of the Constitution–witnessed heated public exchanges and sharp political conflict over the franchise; in some locales, men voted–or were prevented from voting–through the use or threat of force. Challenges to the traditional class restraints on suffrage were critical ingredients in the democratic, rather than anti-imperial, thrust of the revolution.
The conflict over the franchise that erupted during the revolution involved–as such conflicts always would–both interests and ideas. The planters, merchants, and prosperous farmers who wielded power and influence in late-eighteenth-century affairs had an unmistakable interest in keeping the franchise narrow: a restricted suffrage would make it easier for them to retain their economic and social advantages. Conversely, tenant farmers, journeymen, and laborers (not to mention African Americans and women) had something to gain from the diffusion of political rights. Landowners would maximize their political power if the franchise were tied to freehold ownership, while city dwellers, shopkeepers, and artisans had a direct interest in replacing freehold requirements with taxpaying or personal property qualifications.
Yet the debates were not simply a self-interested shouting match between the haves and the have-nots or between men who owned different types of property. For one thing, the haves were hardly unanimous in their views; nor presumably were the have-nots, who left fewer written records. Furthermore, ideas-whether or not independent of interests-mattered to the haves and have-nots alike. Participants in debates about the franchise surely were influenced by their own material interests, but they also were trying to grasp or invent ideas that meshed with social realities.
The Constitution
As the men who would later be called “the framers” of the United States Constitution trickled into Philadelphia during the late spring of 1787 (most of them arrived late), they had weighty issues on their minds: whether the Articles of Confederation should be revised or replaced with an altogether new plan of government; how the federal government could be made stronger without undermining the power of the states; resolving the already brewing conflict over the apportionment of representatives between large and small states; and contending with the freighted and divisive matter of slavery. Although the Revolutionary War had been won and independence achieved, a great deal still appeared to be hanging in the balance: as James Madison portentously noted, “it was more than probable” that the plan they came up with would “in its operation … decide forever the fate of Republican Government.”
With George Washington presiding and the energetic, carefully prepared Madison shaping many of the terms of debate, the fifty-five delegates to the convention wrestled, in closed sessions, with these and many other issues throughout the hot and humid summer. That they would succeed in devising a constitution acceptable to the twelve states that had sent them (not to mention Rhode Island, which had declined the invitation to attend) was far from certain; several impasses were reached in the first two months of deliberation, and by the end of July, many of the delegates were frustrated, impatient, and tired. Eighty-one-year-old Benjamin Franklin, described by one of his fellow delegates as “the greatest philosopher of the present age,” trudged wearily back and forth to the sessions, occasionally having to be carried in a sedan chair.
By mid-September, a constitution had been drafted and signed, and delegates began returning home to promote its ratification. The Articles of Confederation were to be scrapped; the increased-but restrained-powers of the federal government had been specified; the issues of state representation and slavery had been compromised; and a great many details outlining the operation of a new republican government had been etched in parchment. What British leader William E. Gladstone a century later would call “the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain of man” was complete. The Western world’s most durable and perhaps most celebrated written blueprint for representative government was soon to become the fundamental law of North America’s new nation.
Remarkably, this new constitution, born in celebration of “republican government,” did not grant anyone the right to vote. The convention’s debates about suffrage, held during the doldrums of late July and early August, were brief, and the final document made little mention of the breadth of the franchise. Only section 2 of article 1 addressed the issue directly: it declared that in elections to the House of Representatives “the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature” (C1.2.1). More obliquely, section 1 of article 2 indicated that the legislature of each state had the right to determine the “manner” in which presidential electors would be selected (C2.1.2), while article 4 entrusted the federal government with a vague mandate to “guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government” (C4.4). Otherwise, the Constitution was mute-from which much would follow.
As Madison explained in the Federalist (no. 52): “One uniform rule would probably have been as dissatisfactory to some of the States as it would have been difficult to the convention.” By making the franchise in national elections dependent on state suffrage laws, the authors of the Constitution compromised their substantive disagreements to solve a potentially explosive political problem.
The solution they devised, however, had a legacy–a long and sometimes problematic legacy. The Constitution adopted in 1787 left the federal government without any clear power or mechanism, other than through constitutional amendment, to institute a national conception of voting rights, to express a national vision of democracy. Although the Constitution was promulgated in the name of “We, the people of the United States,” the individual states retained the power to define just who “the people” were. Stated somewhat differently, citizenship in the new nation-controlled by the federal government – was divorced from the right to vote, a fact that was to have significant repercussions for almost two centuries.
Also problematic – in the long run – was the Constitution’s failure to guarantee to any Americans the right to vote for the highest office in the land, the presidency of the United States. Presidents were to be chosen through a complex mechanism that later came to be known as the “Electoral College.” “Electors” in each state were to meet and cast ballots for two persons, and those ballots were to be transmitted to Congress, where they would be opened and counted: the person receiving the largest number of votes would be elected president and the runner-up would become vice president (C2.1.3).
But the Constitution left entirely to state legislatures the question of how the electors themselves would be chosen. Article 2, section 1 specified that “each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress” (C2.1.2). The states were not required to hold popular elections to choose presidential electors, and state legislatures could, whenever they wished, change the “manner” of appointing electors. Not surprisingly, during the early years of the republic, some state legislatures chose presidential electors by themselves, leaving the people of their states no role whatsoever in determining who would wield the executive power of the new federal government.
The American Revolution, in sum, produced modest, but only modest, gains, in the formal democratization of politics. In more than a third of the states, colonial restrictions on suffrage (or close approximations thereof) remained in force; elsewhere the suffrage was broadened, in some places significantly, in others not. Overall, the proportion of adult men who could vote in 1787 was surely higher than it had been in 1767, yet the shift was hardly dramatic, in part because changes in the laws were partially offset by socioeconomic shifts that increased the number of propertyless men. By 1790, according to most estimates, roughly 60 to 70 percent of adult white men (and very few others) could vote.
Yet the contribution of the revolution went beyond the legal changes etched in the state constitutions. The experience of the revolution – the political and military trauma of breaking with a sovereign power, fighting a war, and creating a new state – served to crack the ideological framework that had upheld and justified a limited suffrage. The concept of virtual representation was undermined; the notion that a legitimate government required the “consent” of the governed became a staple of political thought; and a new, contagious language of rights and equality was widely heard.
For many participants, values and principles at the heart of the revolution were difficult to reconcile with the practice of denying voting rights to men simply because they were poor or African American. At the same time, the experience of fighting a long and drawn-out war, with a popular rather than professional army, illuminated the importance of the “common people” to the fate of the new nation. By the end of the revolution, the policy of keeping those common people from the polls had become significantly harder to defend than it had been in 1770.