In contrast, an aura of commonsensical fairness enveloped the reformers’ basic notion that anyone who shared the burdens imposed by government should have a voice in choosing that government. In the rapidly growing, energetic, and increasingly urban society of Jacksonian America, large numbers of propertyless men were known by their neighbors, relatives, and friends to be altogether capable and worthy of exercising the franchise. “If a man can think without property, he can vote without property,” observed one delegate to the Louisiana convention of 1845.84 However blinkered their vision of the future, advocates of a broader suffrage were presenting arguments that were more consonant with the predispositions and experience of a majority of the population. Samuel Jones seriously misgauged the temper of the times when he wrote in 1842 that the “principle of natural law and of our own government, that all men are created equal” ought to have no bearing on the breadth of the suffrage and that “universal suffrage . . . would be a gross violation of it.” To most Americans, that much-quoted principle could not easily be separated from the right to vote, and the principle created a strong, if not always articulated, presumption in favor of granting the franchise to adult, white men.85
Such a presumption contributed not only to the eradication of property qualifications but also to the stunningly swift abolition of taxpaying requirements in all but a handful of states. By 1855, half of the states that ever had taxpaying requirements—including those that had substituted them for property ownership—had gotten rid of them. To be sure, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, as well as a handful of other states, voted to retain tax provisions, on the grounds that only those who shared the financial burdens of the state ought to have a voice in governance. Elsewhere, however, this last major, explicit link between a person’s economic circumstances and the suffrage—a link so favored by many democratic reformers of the 1810s and 1820s—was dissolved with little fanfare. By the beginning of the Civil War, tax provisions had been eliminated even in most municipal elections.86
Shifts in ideology were only partly responsible. Taxpaying provisions also were opposed, by many Whigs as well as Democrats, because they were difficult to enforce and led to substantial fraud. Moreover, broadly stated tax requirements could prove difficult to translate into coherent, concrete policies. In New York, for example, the state legislature struggled with problems that arose between lessors and lessees in the 1820s: If a lessee paid tax on a property, was the owner then disfranchised? Or, if the lessor paid the tax, presumably from the rent paid by the lessee, did the lessee lose his right to vote? In 1825, Governor DeWitt Clinton referred to such problems as a reason to do away with the taxpaying provision altogether; he also pointed out that the prospective elimination of a general state tax could end up disfranchising masses of citizens. In 1826, sweeping aside the arguments for taxpayer suffrage that had been voiced so persuasively by Nathan Sanford, Martin Van Buren, and David Buel only six years earlier, New York amended its constitution to remove the taxpaying qualification. 87
With the ascendancy of the second-party system, taxpaying restrictions also were undermined by the dynamics of partisan politics: parties and factions vied to wear the increasingly popular mantle of democracy while simultaneously accusing one another of circumventing the law for their own advantage. Most commonly, campaigns to terminate taxpaying provisions were launched by Democrats, but the Whigs usually jumped on the bandwagon quickly, both to shore up their democratic credentials and because they believed that Democrats were corruptly evading the law anyway. In southern states such as Louisiana and Virginia, eliminating taxpaying requirements was viewed, once again, as mortar solidifying the edifice of white supremacy.88
By the middle of the nineteenth century, thus, the nation had taken significant steps in the direction of universal white male suffrage. Spurred by the development of the economy, shifts in the social structure, the dynamics of party politics, the diffusion of democratic ideals, the experiences of war, and the need to maintain militias, the states, the federal government, and municipalities all had dismantled the most fundamental obstacles to the participation of men in elections. The impact of these reforms on the size of the electorate varied from state to state and is difficult to gauge with precision, but it surely was substantial. A careful study of New York before 1820 indicates that two-thirds of adult males were unable to meet the freehold requirement to vote for the senate, and one-third were unable to meet the much lower property requirement for voting for the legislature; the reforms therefore tripled the electorate for senatorial elections and increased it by 50 percent for the assembly. Similarly, in North Carolina, abolition of the freehold requirement doubled the electorate for senatorial elections, while the Virginia reforms of 1851, applying to all elections, increased the size of the polity by as much as 60 percent.89
The consequences were not everywhere so dramatic (in New Jersey and Massachusetts, for example, the growth of the electorate was more modest), but in every state where property and taxpaying qualifications were abolished, thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of men were enfranchised. The expansion of the suffrage in fact played a key role in the enormous upsurge of political participation in the 1830s and 1840s, when turnout in some locales reached 80 percent of all adult male citizens. De Tocqueville’s declaration that “the people reign over the American political world as God rules over the universe” was more than a little hyperbolic, but his celebratory enthusiasm was far more closely matched by the reality of the United States in 1850 than it would have been in 1800.90
THREE
Backsliding and Sideslipping
According to our general understanding of the right of universal suffrage, I have no objection . . . but if it be the intention of the mover of the resolution to extend the right of suffrage to females and negroes, I am against it. “All free white male citizens over the age of twenty-one years,”—I understand this language to be the measure of universal suffrage.
—MR. KELSO, INDIANA CONSTITUTIONAL DEBATES, 1850
HISTORY RARELY MOVES IN SIMPLE, straight lines, and the history of suffrage is no exception. Significant as the broadening of the franchise was in the first half of the nineteenth century, it does not tell the whole antebellum story. While the dominant thrust of legal change was toward increasing the number of voters, laws also were passed that tightened voting requirements. Some of these were administrative in origin, giving specificity to vaguely worded constitutional mandates. Others were designed to fill specific quadrants of the large space opened up by the abolition of property and taxpaying requirements. Still others were a response to the profound economic, social, and political changes transforming the nation: as the United States began to wrestle with the impact of industrialism, sectional conflict, immigration, and westward expansion, the first clouds of an antidemocratic reaction were forming on the horizon.
Women, African Americans, and Native Americans
One of the earliest acts of suffrage restriction—or retraction—was the disfranchisement of women in New Jersey in 1807. Both the state’s constitution of 1776 and an election law passed in 1790 granted the right to vote to all “inhabitants” who otherwise were qualified: this was interpreted locally to mean that property-owning women could vote. New Jersey’s policy was exceptional—although throughout the new nation there were individuals who followed the logic of “stake in society” arguments across the customary border of gender and concluded that women (such as widows) should be enfranchised if they possessed property and were not legally dependent on men. Why the state of New Jersey embraced this minority view is unclear, but the enfranchisement of women was definitely not inadvertent and appears to have been grounded at least in part in factional politics. As different political groups struggled to gain ascendancy during and just after the revolution, they tried to enlarge their potential constituencies, one of which was female.
Yet what partisan politics could give, it also could take away. By the early nineteenth century, the balance of political
power had shifted, charges of voting fraud were rampant, and the Federalists, as well as two competing groups of Republicans, concluded that it was no longer to their advantage to have all “inhabitants”—including women, aliens, and African Americans—in the electorate. After the impulse to clean up politics had been bolstered by a flagrantly corrupt election to select the site for a new court-house in Essex County, New Jersey’s legislature took it upon itself to declare that “no person shall vote in any state or county election for officers in the government of the United States or of this state, unless such person be a free, white male citizen.” Those who supported this retrenchment made little or no mention of women lacking the capacity to vote; legislators were simply fighting corruption, correcting a “defect” in the constitution, and clearing up “doubts” about the composition of the electorate. Once that constitutional defect had been corrected, women everywhere in the nation were barred from the polls.1
African Americans were the target of a far more widespread movement, in the North as well as in the few pockets of the South where free blacks had sometimes voted. As Tables A.4 and A.5 make clear, the number of states that formally excluded free African Americans was relatively small at the nation’s founding, but it rose steadily from 1790 to 1850. States that had permitted blacks to vote during the first years of independence, including New Jersey, Maryland, and Connecticut, limited the franchise to whites before 1820. New York excluded the vast majority of blacks (by instituting a racially specific set of property and residence requirements) in the same constitution in which it removed property qualifications for whites. In 1835, North Carolina added the word white to its constitutional requirements, and Pennsylvania, which had such a liberal constitution during the revolutionary era, did the same in 1838, two years after its supreme court had ruled that blacks could not vote because they were not “freemen.” Of equal importance, every state that entered the union after 1819 prohibited blacks from voting. In the late 1840s and early 1850s, moreover, many states (including New York, Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin) reaffirmed their racial exclusions, either in constitutional conventions or through popular referenda. By 1855, only five states (Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and Rhode Island) did not discriminate against African Americans, and these states contained only 4 percent of the nation’s free black population. Notably, the federal government also prohibited blacks from voting in the territories it controlled; in 1857, the Supreme Court ruled that blacks, free or slave, could not be citizens of the United States.2
The sources of this exclusionary impulse shifted somewhat over time. Early in the period, there was an almost matter-of-fact quality to decisions to bar African Americans, who were widely believed to be inferior and lacking in potential republican virtues. Since slaves obviously were ineligible to vote and most free blacks could not meet property and taxpaying requirements, formally expressed racial barriers would affect relatively few people, especially in the North. Yet with each passing decade the free black population grew, the abolition of property requirements made it possible for poor, uneducated blacks to vote, and inhabitants of northern states grew increasingly apprehensive about the prospect of attracting black migrants from the South.
More important, perhaps, was an efflorescence of racism: while abolitionist sentiment was growing, so too were sharply antagonistic, fearful, and hostile attitudes toward blacks. This hardening of attitudes was discernible in the language with which the issue was discussed. At the New York convention in 1821, for example, a delegate opposed to black suffrage rather temperately had described blacks as “a peculiar people, incapable, in my judgment, of exercising that privilege with any sort of discretion, prudence, or independence.” Twenty-five years later, one of his successors at the “people’s convention” of 1846 belligerently declared that “nature revolted at the proposal” for black enfranchisement.3
In some states, the issue became enmeshed in party politics. In New York, for example, Republican factions were hostile to black voting between 1810 and 1820, in part because they feared (correctly) that blacks would constitute a Federalist voting bloc, especially in New York City; politically active blacks, throughout the North, tended to support the Federalists because of their opposition to slavery. Similarly, in later decades, Democratic opposition to African-American suffrage was reinforced by the (equally correct) conviction that most blacks would vote for Whigs—who were more antagonistic to slavery and who, despite their conservatism on class issues, could imagine a place for African-American voters in an organic social order. The membership of both major parties, however, tended to be divided on the issue, and outside of the border states (as well as the South, of course), the electoral stakes were small. In the North in 1850, blacks constituted more than 2 percent of the population in only one state, New Jersey, and many areas that witnessed heated debates on the subject (e.g., Ohio and Indiana) had populations that were less than 1 percent black. The black vote, however, was decisive in a controversial county election in Pennsylvania in the 1830s, a fact that contributed to the adoption of a racial exclusion in the 1838 constitution.4
Indeed, northern antagonism to black voting was grounded far less in party politics than in hostile, or at best condescending, white attitudes toward blacks. Numerous delegates to the conventions, often equipped with anti-black suffrage petitions from their constituents, reiterated the notion that suffrage was not a natural right but “a kind of franchise bestowed or withheld as the public good demanded,” and they were adamant that blacks were altogether lacking in qualities that could serve the public good. “No pure negro has wishes and wants like other people,” declared one Indiana delegate in 1850. “The distinction between these races has been made by the God of Nature,” insisted another. “The black race has been marked and condemned to servility, by the decree of Omnipotence; and should feeble man claim to erase from them the leprosy which God has placed upon them?” “Every negro was a thief, and every negro woman far worse,” noted a Wisconsin spokesman. Even in freedom, blacks could not be “elevated” enough to make them the equals of whites, and any policy that promoted the “amalgamation” of the races would only lead to the “degradation of the white man.” In Philadelphia, which had an unusually large African-American population (9 percent in 1830), such attitudes spilled into the streets, fueling periodic race riots in the late 1820s and in the 1830s. Indeed, the fear of black migration helped to fuel the demand for black disfranchisement: not only in Pennsylvania but in New York, Wisconsin, and elsewhere, convention delegates claimed that enfranchising blacks would only encourage freedmen and runaway slaves to flock to their states. A delegate from Wisconsin insisted that an extension of the suffrage “would cause our state to be overrun with runaway slaves from the South.” Blacks at the time constituted two-tenths of 1 percent of the state’s population.5
Northern blacks, of course, resisted efforts to strip away their political rights. In Philadelphia, a gathering of African Americans issued an angry public statement called the Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens, Threatened with Disfranchisement, to the People of Pennsylvania. “We ask a voice in the disposition of those public resources which we ourselves have helped to earn; we claim a right to be heard, according to our numbers, in regard to all those great public measures which involve our lives and fortunes,” the statement declared. Similarly, New York’s African-American population protested against the state’s discriminatory property qualification, and in Providence, blacks—thanks to an extraordinarily complex political situation—succeeded in getting their political rights restored.6
Some whites also were forceful advocates of black suffrage, from the early nineteenth century through the 1850s. In 1821, in New York, a delegate countered the claim that blacks were a “peculiar people” by maintaining that they were instead “a peculiarly unfortunate people” that white society should endeavor to help. At all of the major state conventions, there were delegates who argued that if blacks were men, then they deserved to possess the ri
ghts of men. In 1846, a New York delegate “called upon the convention to decide whether the colored people were men or not. If they were men, he claimed for them the enjoyment of the common rights of men; otherwise, make them slaves to you and your children and trample them in the dust forever.”7 That same year, a Wisconsin delegate developed this moral argument more amply and eloquently, grounding the case in both religious and political principles:the sentiment that “all men are born free and equal” is a just and right principle . . . the negro has rights as sacred and as dear as any other race; and . . . these rights can only be secured by placing in his hands the instrument of defense—the ballot—which is provided by our institutions as the safeguard of political rights. We live as has been often repeated in this hall, in an age of progressive democracy, an age whose characteristic is a spirit that breaks over the barriers and superstitions of the past and looks through the disguises of rank and nation to a common nature coming from an impartial God. In its political effects it discards the prerogative of a few to govern and looks to the rights of all . . . this spirit is opening a grand law of humanity more comprehensive than all others, that looks farther than the skin to say who shall have rights and who shall be maintained in the free enjoyment of what the God of nature has given them. . . . Because a man is born with a dark skin, he is forever to be disfranchised! This is a terrible, damnable doctrine, and as false as it is terrible. It is a doctrine that will not stand the scrutiny of the spirit of the age; neither will its apologists stand with clean hands at a tribunal where there is no respect of persons.8
The Right to Vote Page 10
