The Right to Vote

by Alexander Keyssar

  In part because they feared the universalist implications of natural rights claims, most proponents of a broader franchise offered more limited and specific arguments for changing the voting laws. One such argument was that property qualifications ought to be replaced by taxpaying requirements, because all taxpayers (not just property owners) were contributing to the government and affected by its policies. Such a change would enlarge the electorate; it also would shift the primary basis of an individual’s claim to membership in the polity from his independence (as established by the ownership of property) to his stake in, and vulnerability to, state policies (as someone required to pay taxes). Taxpaying requirements, as historian Marc Kruman has argued, were not simply watered-down versions of property qualifications; they derived from a different premise: that all those who paid taxes had the right to defend themselves against potentially unfair government policies. The logic of “no taxation without representation” had a domestic as well as anticolonial application.41

  Linked to this argument was another, drawn directly from republican theory and prevailing conceptions of the social contract: “that law to bind all must be assented to by all.”42 For society to function smoothly, for the social contract to operate, people had to be given the opportunity—directly or through chosen representatives—to consent to or oppose laws. Denying people the franchise made that impossible and was consequently an invitation to disorder, anarchy, and tax evasion. “No man can be bound by a law that he has not given his consent to, either by his person, or legal representative,” declared a western Massachusetts citizens committee in 1779.43 “We view it both unfair and unjust to tax men without their consent,” concluded a town meeting in New Salem in 1780.44

  The significance of popular consent also helped to undermine the idea of virtual representation. The purpose of representation, in republican theory, was to provide the governed with a feasible mechanism through which they could express or withhold their consent to laws or policies promulgated by a government. To say that men could be fairly represented by those whom they had played no part in choosing rang just as false as the royal claim that the colonists were adequately, if virtually, represented by British members of Parliament. As historian Gordon Wood has pointed out, the increasingly pluralist and particularistic conception of representation that emerged during the revolution subverted arguments for a limited franchise.45

  The final cluster of arguments for expanding the franchise was rather different: these favored extending the right to vote to everyone who was serving, or had served, in the army or the militia. The grounds for such an expansion were partly moral: it was not fair to ask propertyless men to risk their lives in defense of independence and then refuse them the right to vote. “Shall these poor polls who have gone for us into the greatest perils and undergone infinite fatigues in the present war . . . shall they now be treated by us like villains?” queried the citizens of Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1780.46 It was an “injustice” to disfranchise men who “have fought and bled in their country’s cause,” concluded residents of nearby Lenox.47

  Embedded in this view was also a clear, if not always articulated, conception of the links between the rights and obligations of citizenship: a man who served in the militia or the army was entitled to all the rights of a citizen, including the right to vote. As one Pennsylvania editorialist wrote, the franchise should belong to “every man who pays his shot and bears his lot.” Similarly, a Philadelphia pamphleteer (probably Thomas Young) insisted that “every man in the country who manifests a disposition to venture his all for the defense of its liberty, should have a voice in its council.” The power of such arguments went well beyond implicit theories of citizenship: as would be true throughout American history, the notion that soldiers should be enfranchised was an emotionally resonant one to all men who had fought or even those who knew what military service was like. “Perils,” “infinite fatigues,” and “bled” were concrete words, evoking the intensity and horror of wartime experiences that amply earned a man the right to choose his leaders and participate in politics.48

  These principled reasons for enfranchising men who bore arms were to be heard repeatedly in the course of American history. So too was a more pragmatic and political argument: recruiting and retaining an army would be difficult if soldiers or potential soldiers were prohibited from voting. Franklin voiced this view at the Constitutional Convention, in opposition to a call for a national freehold qualification. “It is of great consequence,” the oldest delegate declared, “that we should not depress the virtue and public spirit of our common people; of which they displayed a great deal during the war, and which contributed principally to the favorable issue of it.” He contrasted the willingness with which captured British seamen “entered the American service” with the patriotism of imprisoned American sailors, who had refused to “redeem themselves” from British prisons by fighting for the enemy. Franklin attributed the Americans’ superior valor to their morale, to their knowledge that they were the “equal” of their “fellow citizens,” and warned that the patriotism of the “common people” could be undermined by property qualifications on the franchise. Franklin’s point was a resonant one in a new and vulnerable nation that had been compelled to offer significant economic and legal incentives to the poor in order to raise a revolutionary army. Wars were not fought by property owners alone (they often did not fight at all), and it was in the national interest to enfranchise everyone who might be called upon in an hour of need.49

  Given these widely disparate and sharply conflicting views of suffrage, it is hardly surprising that the breadth of the franchise—and particularly the desirability of property requirements—became a major focus of controversy during the revolutionary era. Arguments for and against a more democratic suffrage were voiced in newspapers, broadsides, provincial assemblies, town meetings, gatherings of militiamen, and constitutional conventions, as well as taverns, inns, city streets, and private homes. The very act of declaring independence from Britain compelled the residents of each colony to form a new government, and the process of forming new governments inescapably brought the issue of suffrage to the fore.50 Who should be involved in creating a new government for an ex-colony? For a new government to be legitimate, who had to consent to its design and structure? And how broad should suffrage be in a republic? The answers to these questions varied from one state to the next. (For a summary of the suffrage laws adopted, see Table A.1.)

  The most influential and, perhaps, dramatic expansion of the franchise occurred in Pennsylvania during the first months of the revolution. The key actors in the drama were members of the highly politicized Philadelphia militias who seized the early initiative in Pennsylvania’s rejection of British rule. As early as March 1776, the Committee of Privates, speaking for rank-and-file militiamen drawn from the city’s “lower” and “middling sorts,” announced its readiness to discard colonial suffrage requirements: it asked the provincial assembly to enfranchise the “brave and spirited Germans and others” who had “cheerfully” joined the militia associations, yet were “not entitled to the privileges of freemen electors.” Later in the spring, the committee also demanded that militiamen be permitted to elect their own officers and that all taxpaying militia associators (active volunteer members of the militias) be allowed to vote for delegates who would draw up a new state constitution.51

  Backed by prominent reformers such as Franklin, Young, and Paine, and allied with western farmers who had long been underrepresented in the colony’s government, the militiamen succeeded in electing a constitutional convention dominated not by the traditional elites but by artisans, lesser merchants, and farmers. That convention, in the fall of 1776, produced the most democratic constitution in the thirteen original states: it abolished property requirements and enfranchised all taxpaying adult males as well as the nontaxpaying sons of freeholders. Since Pennsylvania had a poll tax—meaning a “head” tax or a tax on all household heads—this effectively enfra
nchised the great majority of adult males. Despite fierce opposition from the Quaker upper classes that had controlled the colonial government, the Constitution relocated the boundaries of the population regarded as having “a sufficient common interest with and attachment to the community.” Those new, more ample boundaries remained in place despite the state’s conservative swing in the 1780s.52

  In Maryland, militia associators also spearheaded the attack on the colonial franchise with even greater militance, but less ultimate success. The precipitant of militia action was a provincial decision in 1776 to limit voting for delegates to a constitutional convention to men who met the colonial property qualifications. In half a dozen counties, militiamen rebelled, insisting that all taxpaying associators be permitted to vote. In Arundel County, armed men who could not meet the franchise requirement actually marched on the polls, demanded the right to vote, and threatened to “pull the house down from under” the election judges. When they were refused and the polls closed, they declared that they would lay down their arms. In other counties, militiamen and local citizens appointed their own election judges, who in turn allowed all associators to vote. The state’s governing authorities, however, displayed little tolerance for these rebellions, ordering new elections with strict enforcement of the property qualifications. The constitutional convention itself, perhaps chastened by the tumult, significantly lowered, but did not abolish, the property requirement; and the state’s Declaration of Rights reiterated the principle that the right of suffrage ought to be possessed by “every man having property in . . . the community.”53

  The political dynamics of revolution generated a broader franchise in a half dozen other states as well. In New Jersey, a decentralized movement for reform, backed by artisans, city dwellers, and small landowners, succeeded in abolishing the freehold requirement for voting; a new provision, however, was instituted, granting suffrage only to persons worth fifty pounds in proclamation money.54 In Georgia, despite significant opposition, the freehold qualification was abandoned in 1777 and replaced by a more flexible requirement that any twenty-one-year-old white male could vote who possessed “ten pounds value,” was “liable to pay tax in” the state, or belonged “to any mechanic trade.”55 New Hampshire, after six years of difficulty agreeing on the text of a constitution, decided in 1782 to substitute a taxpaying qualification for the provincial freehold requirement.56

  In New York and North Carolina, the right to vote was enlarged, with conflict resolved through bicameral compromise. In the Empire State, despite the activism of New York City’s already enfranchised artisans, the conservative Whigs who dominated state politics preserved property requirements for voting for all offices. Yet the requirement was reduced (to a twenty-pound freehold or a forty-shilling tenancy) for elections to the state assembly, while remaining far more substantial for senatorial elections. New York also took the step (mirrored less formally elsewhere) of constitutionally abolishing oral voting.57 In North Carolina, similarly, demands for manhood suffrage were rebuffed, but some liberalization of the law did take place: a taxpaying qualification was introduced for the lower house of the legislature, while the state retained a fifty-acre freehold requirement in elections for the state senate.58

  In only one state, Vermont, was a man’s ability to vote completely detached from his financial circumstances. The residents of what would become the Green Mountain State adopted a constitution in 1777 that was closely modeled on that of Pennsylvania. The farmers of Vermont went a step further, however, eliminating not only property requirements but taxpaying qualifications as well. That they took such an unprecedented step was a reflection both of the region’s relatively egalitarian social structure and the rather unruly political—and military—process that led to the writing of a constitution. For Vermonters, the revolution was a rebellion, led by Ethan Allen and his band of Green Mountain Boys, against both Britain and the state of New York, to which the region technically belonged. Since Vermont was unique in not having a government when independence was declared, delegates to its constitutional convention were selected not by an existing state assembly but by popular elections held in the region’s townships. This democratically selected convention produced the first state constitution to abolish slavery and to institute anything close to universal manhood suffrage. In campaigning for statehood, Allen (who had become the head of the state’s militia) and his colleagues pointed repeatedly to the difference between Vermont’s broad suffrage and the freehold requirements still prevailing in New York. When Vermont finally entered the union in 1791, any adult male who took the Freeman’s Oath could vote.59

  Vermont was a revealing but exceptional case. Even the partial liberalization of voting requirements was by no means universal: in five states, there was little or no change at all. Rhode Island and Delaware retained their colonial laws, without great public turmoil; Connecticut did the same, despite pressure for reform from militiamen, among others. In South Carolina, demands for change produced only a nominal revision of the property requirements, and in Virginia—where the subject produced great debates and considerable eloquence from notables such as George Mason and Thomas Jefferson—the constitution adopted in 1776 ended up reiterating voting laws that had been put in place forty years earlier.60

  Massachusetts, moreover, actually stiffened its requirements for voting.61 Throughout the revolutionary period, the Bay State was wracked by regional and ideological conflict: the relatively conservative established leadership of its eastern counties squared off repeatedly against more radical and democratic factions centered in the west. In 1778, a convention drafted a compromise constitution that would have permitted all taxpaying, white freemen to vote for the lower house of the state legislature, while retaining a property requirement for senate and gubernatorial elections. Yet this constitution was overwhelmingly rejected by the state’s citizens, in part—but only in part—because it was insufficiently democratic. Numerous towns objected to its racially discriminatory suffrage provision: it “deprives a part of the human race of their natural rights, merely on account of their color,” explained the citizens of Westminster. Others refused to accept the persistence of any property qualifications on voting, which made “honest poverty a crime.”62

  A year later, a new constitution was drafted, largely by John Adams: it dropped the racial exclusions but reinstituted property requirements that were more stringent than those of the colonial era. Members of the constitutional convention (chosen by an electorate that included all freemen) justified this conservative tilt in a published address that was remarkably overt in its class bias and contempt for the propertyless:Your Delegates considered that Persons who are Twenty-one Years of age, and have no Property, are either those who live upon a part of a Paternal estate, expecting the Fee thereof, who are but just entering into business, or those whose Idleness of Life and profligacy of manners will forever bar them from acquiring and possessing Property. And we will submit it to the former class, whether they would not think it safer for them to have their right of Voting for a Representative suspended for [a] small space of Time, than forever hereafter to have their Privileges liable to the control of Men who will pay less regard to the Rights of Property because they have nothing to lose.63

  Forty-two towns, most of them in the west, objected strenuously to the proposed suffrage qualifications. “Taxation and representation are reciprocal and inseparably connected,” declared the town meeting of Stoughton. Belchertown’s citizens insisted that denying the franchise to adults was to deprive them of “that liberty and freedom which we are at this day contending for.” The eastern town of Mansfield responded to the convention’s stated rationale by noting that “many sensible, honest, and naturally industrious men, by numberless misfortunes,” never acquire property “of the value of sixty pounds.” Despite these objections, and thanks to a remarkably stacked and undemocratic method of counting the “votes” of the commonwealth’s communities, the new constitution was declared ratified in 1780
. Its suffrage provision reflected the convention’s view that those who lacked property were unworthy of full citizenship—or in the words of one prominent eastern merchant, “the people at large, in any numbers together, are nearly as unfit to choose legislators . . . as they are in general to fill the offices themselves.”64

  The revolutionary period, in sum, witnessed a broad range of reactions to economic restrictions on the franchise. Although often overshadowed by other issues (such as taxation or the structure of future legislatures), the breadth of the franchise mattered greatly to citizens of the thirteen original ex-colonies and the new state of Vermont. In every state, there was pressure for suffrage reform, as well as conservative opposition to a less class-biased, more economically inclusive franchise. The outcomes of these conflicts followed no clear regional pattern; they seem instead to have been shaped largely by the strength of local elites and by the particular political processes that unfolded in each state. The overall result was a mixed bag of substantial changes, cosmetic alterations, and preservation of the status quo. 65