The Right to Vote

by Alexander Keyssar

  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.10 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.11 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.12

  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.13

  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.14 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.15 Moreover, the legal exclusion of Catholics, as well as African Americans, mulattoes, and Native Americans, took place primarily in the eighteenth century.16 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.17

  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.18 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.19 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.20 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.21

  The Revolution and the Vote

  The ultimate end of all freedom is the enjoyment of a right of free suffrage.

  —“A WATCHMAN,” Maryland Gazette, 1776

  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.22

  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.23

  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 reality and harmonized with deeply held values. This was always true in American history, and never more so than during the revolution—an era of political experimentation and war in which ideas about politics possessed exceptional valence. Received notions were being looked at with fresh eyes, held up against the backdrop of changed circumstances; new ideas had to be tested against models of history and human nature. The founding fathers—and mothers, sons, and daughters—were trying to envision a new polity as well as a new state, and they felt some urgency about getting it right.

  Throughout the ex-colonies, political leaders put forward several different arguments—some traditional, at least one new—to justify the retention of restrictions, particularly property restrictions, on the franchise. Implicit in these arguments was the claim that voting was not a right but a privilege, one that the state could legitimately grant or curtail in its own interest. Indeed, in early English usage, the word franchise referred to a privilege, immunity, or freedom that a state could grant, while the term suffrage alluded to intercessory prayers. Even Pennsylvanian James Wilson, a signer of both the Declaration of Independence and the Consti
tution, and one of the more democratic of the founding fathers, described suffrage as a “darling privilege of free men” that could and should be “extended as far as considerations of safety and order will permit.”24

  One such consideration was the “stake in society” notion inherited from the colonial period. Only men with property, preferably real property, were deemed to be sufficiently attached to the community and sufficiently affected by its laws to have earned the privilege of voting.25 Sometimes this argument was given a negative cast, with proponents insisting that the propertyless, if enfranchised, would constitute a menace to the maintenance of a well-ordered community.26 Defenders of property qualifications also maintained (as the British had to the colonists) that representation could be virtual rather than actual, and that consequently there was no need to enfranchise the poor. The interests of the propertyless, like those of women and children, could be represented effectively by wise, fair-minded, wealthy white men.27

  Those who opposed any expansion of suffrage also relied heavily on the belief that in order to vote a person had to be independent. This venerable idea, a staple of republican thought in the eighteenth century, was given influential expression in the late 1760s by Sir William Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England:The true reason of requiring any qualification, with regard to property, in voters, is to exclude such persons as are in so mean a situation that they are esteemed to have no will of their own. If these persons had votes, they would be tempted to dispose of them under some undue influence or other. This would give a great, an artful, or a wealthy man, a larger share in elections than is consistent with general liberty. If it were probable that every man would give his vote freely and without influence of any kind, then, upon the true theory and genuine principles of liberty, every member of the community, however poor, should have a vote in electing those delegates, to whose charge is committed the disposal of his property, his liberty, and his life. But, since that can hardly be expected in persons of indigent fortunes, or such as are under the immediate dominion of others, all popular states have been obliged to establish certain qualifications; whereby some, who are suspected to have no will of their own, are excluded from voting, in order to set other individuals, whose wills may be supposed independent, more thoroughly upon a level with each other.28

  Blackstone’s reference to persons who were “in so mean a situation” that they had “no will of their own” (a phrasing that Blackstone appears to have lifted, without attribution, from Montesquieu) was repeated endlessly during the revolutionary era.29 In debates everywhere, from Massachusetts to New Jersey to Maryland to South Carolina, lawyers, merchants, and farmers defended property qualifications by quoting or paraphrasing Blackstone and by invoking the specter of a demagogue coming to power through the manipulation of dependent men and women.30 Even Thomas Jefferson, perhaps the most democratic leader of the revolution, accepted Blackstone’s equation of property with independence and the right to vote—although Jefferson sought to solve that distasteful equation by advocating the distribution of free land to the propertyless. 31 Thomas Paine also believed, in the 1770s, that voters should be personally independent, but by 1795 the experience of two revolutions had changed his mind and led him to advocate universal suffrage.32

  Remarkably, the argument that the poor should not vote because they had “no will of their own” coexisted with an altogether contradictory argument, often expressed by the same people: the poor, or the propertyless, should not vote because they would threaten the interests of property—that is, they would have too much will of their own. If men without property could vote, reflected the judicious conservative, John Adams, “an immediate revolution would ensue.”33 Indeed, the almost obsessive incantation of Blackstone’s phrase may well have been a refraction, a semiconscious mask, of class apprehensions, a sign that the well-to-do feared not that the poor would have no will of their own but precisely the opposite. Sober and scholarly as the argument for independence may have sounded, there was little in American political experience to suggest that the poor would be misled by an “artful” or “wealthy” politician to the ruin of the republic; it was far more likely, as a rebellion of hard-pressed western Massachusetts farmers demonstrated in 1786, that men who were financially strapped would band together to defend their own interests. Operatively, then, the primary thrust of Blackstone’s words was to defend the material interests of the propertied. By invoking his arguments, Blackstone’s North American followers were performing an impressive feat of ideological alchemy: providing an ostensibly egalitarian defense of an overtly anti-egalitarian policy.

  The issue of inequality also lay at the heart of the most innovative, and distinctively American, justification for property restrictions: a pessimistic view of the nation’s future class structure. Even at the new nation’s birth, even as the glorious future of the republic was being proclaimed up and down the seaboard, some of the revolution’s leaders were cautioning that economic expansion and the growth of “manufactures” would bring greater inequality and new political dangers. This theme, which would be echoed in political debates for a century, was voiced by Madison at the federal Constitutional Convention:in future times a great majority of the people will not only be without landed but any other sort of property. These will either combine under the influence of their common situation; in which case, the rights of property and the public liberty will not be secure in their hands: or which is more probable, they will become the tools of opulence and ambition, in which case there will be equal danger on another side.

  By referring to “future times,” Madison was tacitly acknowledging the limited applicability of Blackstone’s thinking to the late-eighteenth-century American world in which freeholders were numerous. Yet presciently anticipating that the rise of “manufactures” would transform the nation’s social structure, Madison advocated a property requirement that would serve the nation in a nineteenth-century future in which the propertyless—possessing either too much or too little will of their own—would be numerically predominant and politically powerful. Property qualifications, in effect, would function as a bulwark against the landless proletariat of an industrial future.34

  Arrayed against these conservative views was a set of equally cogent, if somewhat experimental, arguments in favor of extending the franchise, particularly to men who did not own property. The most broadly framed of these arguments was simple: voting was a “natural right” that the state could not suspend except in the most extreme circumstances. The idea that voting was a right, even a natural right, had become increasingly widespread in the eighteenth century (its ancestry dated to antiquity) and was embraced by many small farmers and artisans, as well as by the most radical leaders of the revolution, such as Franklin, Thomas Young of Pennsylvania, and Ethan Allen of Vermont.35 The rural town of Richmond, Massachusetts, for example, declared its opposition to a proposed state constitution in 1780 because “excluding persons from a share in representation for want of pecuniary qualifications is an infringement on the natural rights of the subject.” Similarly, the town of Greenwich objected that the “people” were “deprived of their natural rights” because it was the “right of the people to elect their own delegates.”36 The notion that voting was a right also was mobilized on behalf of African Americans: “The depriving of any men or set of men for the sole cause of colour from giving there [sic] votes for a representative,” proclaimed the town of Spencer, Massachusetts, was “an infringement upon the rights of mankind.”37

  The idea that voting was a natural right or even a right at all was rhetorically powerful: it meshed well with the Lockean political theory popular in eighteenth-century America, it had a clear antimonarchical thrust, and it had the virtue of simplicity. The language of rights was resonant and fresh in late-eighteenth-century America, and the notion that voting was a right that inhered in individuals rather than property was welcome as well as liberating. Franklin’s pointed query about the right to vote belonging to
the jackass rather than the man became so widely known that references to “Franklin’s jackass” appeared in constitutional convention debates fifty years later.

  Yet there was a problem with this vision of suffrage as a right, a problem both political and rhetorical. During the revolutionary period and in later decades, as its proponents quickly discovered, there was no way to argue that voting was a right or a natural right without opening a Pandora’s box. If voting was a natural right, then everyone should possess it. Did this mean that not just every man (including poor men) should vote, but women as well? What about African Americans—and recently arrived aliens? Or children? If there was a “right” to suffrage, wasn’t it wrong or immoral to deprive any group or individual of that right? How could one justify denying anyone his or her natural—or socially acknowledged—rights?

  This was precisely the point John Adams made in his letter (quoted earlier) to James Sullivan in 1776, a point he was to reiterate for years.38 Once it was acknowledged that people had a right to vote, it would be difficult to deny the suffrage to anyone: there would “be no end of it,” as Adams observed. Adams and other conservatives, moreover, were well aware that most of those who invoked natural rights on behalf of the propertyless did not want there to be “no end of it”: they did not believe, for example, that women or African Americans or minors should vote.39 Their conception of natural rights was not universal, and their embrace of rights claims therefore could easily be exposed as instrumental and inconsistent. This dynamic—the embrace of rights arguments by advocates of an expanded suffrage met by a conservative counterargument emphasizing the unacceptable contents of the Pandora’s box—was to be repeated for almost two centuries.40