Chapter 1.0. Voting Rights in Early America, Introduction

This chapter examines voting rights in early America through the time of the Constitution. To do so, it begins with two excerpts from the best book on this subject, by Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote (Basic Books, 2009), pp. 1-7, 20-21. This first section introduces the topic and briefly sums up the colonial background. The next section (ch. 1.1) takes the story down to the Constitution.

The following sections of this chapter include a famous defense of voting restrictions by John Adams (ch. 1.2) and then three statistical tables from Keyssar’s book (his tables A.1, A.3, and A.5). These tables (ch. 1.3) sum up his findings for the historical periods of most relevance to this class (though the last two tables go much later in date than is needed for the midterm).

At its birth, the United States was not a democratic nation–far from it. The very word democracy had pejorative overtones, summoning up images of dis­order, government by the unfit, even mob rule. In practice, moreover, relatively few of the new nation’s inhabitants were able to participate in elections: among the excluded were most African Americans, Native Americans, women, men who had not attained their majority, and adult white males who did not own land. Only a small fraction of the population cast ballots in the elections that elevated George Washington and John Adams to the august office of the presidency.

To be sure, the nation’s political culture and political institutions did become more democratic between the American Revolution and the middle of the nineteenth century. This was the “age of democratic revolutions,” the epoch that witnessed the flourishing of “Jacksonian democracy:” by the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829-37), most states that still had property qualifications for voting eliminated them. The ideal of democracy became widespread during these years, the word itself more positive, even celebratory. Owing in part to these shifting ideals and beliefs–and also because of economic and military needs, changes in the social structure, and the emergence of competitive political parties — ­the franchise was broadened throughout the United States. By 1850, voting was a far more commonplace activity than it had been in 1800.

Yet the gains were limited. Longstanding historical labels ought not obscure the restricted scope of what was achieved. Even in 1850 the U.S. stood a long way from “universal suffrage.” Significantly, that phrase had begun to appear in public discourse, but the institution lagged far be­hind. Change was neither linear nor uncontested: the sources of democratization were complex, and the right to vote was itself a prominent political issue throughout the period.

The Received Legacy: The Colonial Period to the Eve of the Revolution

For more than a decade before the founding fathers arrived in Philadelphia, individ­ual states had been writing their own suffrage laws. These laws almost everywhere were shaped by colonial precedents and traditional English patterns of thought. The linchpin of both colonial and British suffrage regulations was the restriction of voting to adult men who owned property. On the eve of the American Revolution, in seven colonies men had to own land of specified acreage or monetary value in order to par­ticipate in elections; elsewhere, the ownership of personal property of a designated value (or in South Carolina, the payment of taxes) could substitute for real estate.

Both in England and in the colonies, property requirements had long been justified on two grounds. The first was that men who possessed property (especially “real prop­erty,” i.e., land and buildings) had a unique “stake in society”-meaning that they were committed members of (or shareholders in) the community and that they had a per­sonal interest in the policies of the state, especially taxation.

The second was that prop­erty owners alone possessed sufficient independence to warrant their having a voice in governance. As Henry Ireton had argued in England in the seventeenth century, “if there be anything at all that is the foundation of liberty, it is this, that those who shall choose the law-makers shall be men freed from dependence upon others.” And the best way to be “freed” from such dependence, or so it was believed, was through the owner­ship of property, especially real estate.

Conversely, the ballot was not to be entrusted to those who were economically dependent because they could too easily be controlled or manipulated by others. Such control may have seemed particularly plausible in the six colonies in which voting was viva voce [voting was done by stating one’s vote before the election officials, often with many people watching in a very public context]– although advocates of secret paper ballots pointed out that disfranchisement was not the only solution to that problem. Indeed, implicit in the argument for independence was another notion, often unspoken but especially resonant in the colonies, where economic opportunities were believed to abound: that anyone who failed to acquire property was of questionable competence and unworthy of full membership in the polity.

These concerns also prompted other restrictions on voting. Many colonies instituted residency requirements to exclude transients who presumably lacked the requisite stake in the colony’s affairs; for similar reasons, some made citizenship, of England or the province, a prerequisite for voting. To guarantee that those who were dependent could not vote, several colonies formally barred all servants from the polls, while others ex­pressly excluded paupers. Women too were prohibited from voting because they were thought to be dependent on adult men and because their “delicacy” rendered them unfit for the worldly experiences necessary for engagement in politics.

In addition, there were limitations on the franchise that had more to do with social membership in the community than with a person’s independence or stake in society. Freedmen of African or Amerindian descent were denied the ballot in much of the South. In seventeenth­-century Massachusetts, only members of the Congregational Church could vote; in the eighteenth century, Catholics were disfranchised in five states and Jews in four.

As these details suggest, aside from property qualifications, there were no firm principles governing colonial voting rights, and suffrage laws accordingly were quite varied. Not only Catholics and Jews, but also Native Americans, free blacks, and non­-naturalized aliens could vote in some places and not in others. Women were barred expressly in several colonies, including Virginia, but statutes elsewhere made no ref­erence to gender, and in at least a few Massachusetts towns and New York counties propertied widows did legally vote. Absentee landowners were enfranchised in Vir­ginia in 1736, which often meant that they could vote in more than one place. In practice, moreover, the enforcement or application of suffrage laws was uneven and dependent on local circumstances.

Of equal importance, the qualifications to vote in local elections–especially in the cities and larger towns–often differed from those needed to vote for colonial or provincial officers. These differences had two sources. The first was political or institutional. Royal charters for incorporated cities frequently spelled out precise suffrage rules, and those rules commonly granted political citizenship to men who had commercial affairs–rather than a residence–within the city limits. The breadth of the franchise in New York City; Perth Amboy, New Jersey; and Norfolk, Virginia, for example, was determined not by colonial general assemblies but by royal declaration and by the appointed officers who controlled the municipal cor­porations.

The second reason for this municipal-colonial difference was economic: city and town dwellers possessed different types of property than did farmers, and consequently they sought to define property requirements in terms other than acreage or land. Although differently configured, city and town suffrage qualifica­tions were not uniformly stricter or more lenient than were the qualifications for voting in the countryside.

Did the right to vote expand or contract during the colonial era? Were the colonies becoming more or less democratic in their suffrage rules? The evidence is mixed. Some broadening of the franchise certainly occurred: religious restrictions for non-church members and Protestant dissenters tended to be relaxed in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; municipal corporations began to grant the franchise to freeholders (men who owned real property) as well as men of commerce; and both Massachusetts and Virginia enacted laws that reduced the property re­quirements for voting.

Yet the colonial era also witnessed some statutory contrac­tion of the suffrage. The initial laws restricting the franchise to property owners generally were passed only decades after the colonies were settled, and in several colonies, including Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Virginia (which had a notably nonlinear franchise history), property requirements became more stringent over time. Moreover, the legal exclusion of Catholics, as well as African Americans, mu­lattoes, and Native Americans, took place primarily in the eighteenth century. Whether these laws altered rather than codified existing practices is unclear, but the statutes seem to have been more restrictive by the middle of the eighteenth century than they had been in the seventeenth.

What also is unclear is just how many people could and did vote. This issue is a source of controversy among historians, some of whom conclude that colonial America was a land of middle-class democracy in which 80 or 90 percent of all adult white males were enfranchised, while others depict a far more oligarchic and exclu­sive political order.

In fact, enfranchisement varied greatly by location. There cer­tainly were communities, particularly newly settled communities where land was inexpensive, in which 70 or 80 percent of all white men were enfranchised. Yet there were also locales-including coastal towns (Ipswich, Massachusetts), farming counties (Westchester, New York; and Chester, Pennsylvania), cities (Philadelphia and Boston), and even some frontier settlements (Kent, Connecticut)-where the percentages were far lower, closer to 40 or 50 percent.

Levels of enfranchisement seem to have been higher in New England and in the South (especially Virginia and the Carolinas) than they were in the mid-Atlantic colonies (especially New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland); not surprisingly, they also tended to be higher in newer settlements than in more developed areas. On the whole, the franchise was far more widespread than it was in England, yet as the revolution approached, the rate of property ownership was falling, and the proportion of adult white males who were eligible to vote was probably less than 60 percent.