The Right to Vote
Page 12
In New York, the 1830s witnessed the beginning of a prolonged partisan struggle over voter registration. Early proposals for a registry were unmistakably designed to hinder the voting of Irish Catholic immigrants and thereby reduce Democratic electoral strength. In 1840, Whigs succeeded in passing a registry law that applied only to New York City, which contained the largest concentration of Irish voters. That law was repealed two years later, but throughout the 1840s and 1850s an emerging coalition of Republicans and Know-Nothings continued to press for a formal system of registration. (Regarding the Know-Nothings, see Chapter 4.) In Connecticut, similarly, the Whigs passed a registry law in 1839. Since it did not require the registrars to be drawn from both parties, Democrats denounced the act as a “disfranchising law” and replaced it, in 1842, with a law that shifted the burden of registration from the voter to town officials. Proposals for registries also were floated in other states. Yet nearly everywhere outside of the Northeast, registration systems were rebuffed as partisan measures that would weaken the Democratic Party while infringing the rights of immigrants and the poor.26
Apprehensions about immigrant voting in the 1840s, particularly in the Northeast, also gave birth to new and untried ideas for limiting the franchise. In New York, New Jersey, Indiana, Maryland, and Missouri, constitutional conventions considered proposals to institute literacy tests, or even English language literacy tests, for prospective voters. “The least we can require,” noted a New Jersey delegate in 1844, “is this very simple manifestation of intelligence.” Such a law, he claimed, would encourage parents to educate their children. “Let fathers understand—let mothers understand, that before their sons wear the livery of American freemen they must be able to read.” Samuel Jones stated the issue more severely: “persons wholly destitute of education do not possess sufficient intelligence to enable them to exercise the right of suffrage beneficially to the public.” Although the image of an educated electorate clearly had its attractions, these proposals were rapidly rebutted: there were many fine, upstanding citizens who happened to be illiterate or barely literate (even Andrew Jackson, it was claimed, had difficulty spelling his own name) but were perfectly capable of responsibly exercising the franchise. Without a system of universal education, moreover, a literacy requirement would be, as one delegate put it, “a blow at the poor.”27
Advocates of restriction also put forward another proposal explicitly aimed at immigrants: they sought to prevent naturalized citizens from voting until they had held citizenship for one, five, ten, or even twenty-one years. The expressed goal of this proposal was to prevent the partisan, mass naturalization of immigrants that allegedly occurred on the eve of elections; the proposal also would give immigrants time to become fully acquainted with American norms and values (and diminish the Democratic vote). In the 1840s and early 1850s, laws of this type were proposed in New York, New Jersey, Missouri, Maryland, Indiana, and Kentucky. Yet not until the Know-Nothing successes of the later 1850s (see Chapter 4) were any literacy or “waiting period” restrictions actually imposed—although New York, in 1846, did institute a system through which registrars could interrogate naturalized citizens and demand written proof of their eligibility. Notably, the concern about immigrant voters in the Northeast was mounting at precisely the same time that many Midwestern states were extending the franchise to nondeclarant aliens.28
By the early 1850s, in sum, several groups or categories of men (and one group of women) had lost the political rights they possessed a half century earlier. Although the franchise on the whole had been broadened, new barriers were erected, targeting specific—and smaller—populations (see Table A.9). These barriers were expressions of the nation’s reluctance to embrace universal suffrage, of the limits to the democratic impulses that characterized the era. After the 1820s, such barriers—as well as proposals for additional restraints on the franchise—were also a response to socioeconomic change; as the economy became more industrial, large numbers of immigrants arrived at the nation’s shores, and the impending crisis over slavery threatened to release significant numbers of African Americans not only from bondage but from the South. Despite the democratic ethos of the era, the transformation of American society was setting in motion a crosscurrent of apprehensions about a broadly democratic polity, apprehensions that would prove to be harbingers of things to come.29
Democracy, the Working Class, and American Exceptionalism
Americans have long taken pride in what they see as the exceptional qualities of political development in the United States, qualities that distinguish American history from that of other, particularly European, nations. Prominent among these exceptional features are the longstanding tradition of political democracy and the relatively small role played by class in American social life and politics. For much of the twentieth century, scholars and writers have linked these two ingredients, locating their convergence in the uniquely early and quite uncontested enfranchisement of the American working class in the years before the Civil War. According to the standard, widely accepted narrative, American workers—unlike their counterparts nearly everywhere in Europe—gained universal suffrage (or at least universal white male suffrage) early in the process of industrialization and thus never were obliged to organize collectively to fight for the franchise. As a result, workers were able to address their grievances through the electoral process, they were not compelled to form labor parties, and they developed partisan attachments to mainstream political organizations. All of which—or so it has been argued—had profound implications for the subsequent evolution of American politics and American labor, including the absence of a strong socialist movement in the United States.30
The traditional account does have some validity. Many American workers indeed were enfranchised decades before their counterparts in Europe (although just how many remains unclear). Moreover, as labor historian David Montgomery has pointed out, the acquisition of the franchise by thousands of artisans, craftsmen, and mechanics in antebellum America led to important legal changes that served the interests of working people.31
Nonetheless, the traditional account, grounded in a triumphalist, or Whig, history of suffrage, misses a critical dimension of the story. Put simply, to the extent that the working class was indeed enfranchised during the antebellum era (and one should not ignore that women, free blacks, and recent immigrants constituted a large portion of the working class), such enfranchisement was largely an unintended consequence of the changes in suffrage laws. The constitutional conventions that removed property and even taxpaying requirements did not aim or intend to enfranchise the hundreds of thousands of factory operatives, day laborers, and unskilled workers who became such a prominent and disturbing feature of the economic landscape by the mid-1850s—certainly not immigrant, and especially Irish Catholic, operatives, laborers, and unskilled workers.
Although conservatives such as James Kent and Josiah Quincy had warned that lowering the barriers to voting would end up giving substantial political power to such undesirables, the proponents of suffrage reform discounted that possibility. New Yorker David Buel, it will be remembered, declared that if he shared Kent’s vision of the future, he would not have advocated the elimination of property qualifications. Buel, however, was convinced that New York would remain an overwhelmingly agricultural state and that there was nothing to be feared from the relatively small urban population of New York City. Similarly, Martin Van Buren, another staunch supporter of a broader franchise, made clear that he opposed “universal suffrage” and that the constitutional revisions of 1820 were intended only to enfranchise the respectable middling strata of society.32
Indeed, the broadening of the franchise in antebellum America transpired before the industrial revolution had proceeded very far and before its social consequences were clearly or widely visible. The data presented in Tables A.2 and A.8 lend some factual and statistical muscle to the point. As these tables indicate, there were relatively few manufacturing workers in the nor
thern states when property qualifications were abolished or new constitutions without property restrictions were adopted. (Since the South remained overwhelmingly agricultural, these states are omitted from Table A.8.) In New York in 1820, for example, persons engaged in agriculture outnumbered those in manufacturing and commerce combined by a ratio of almost 4 to 1; in Illinois, the ratio was 10 to 1; even in Massachusetts, the ratio was 3 to 2. Everywhere in America, the number of people engaged in agriculture greatly outnumbered those working in manufacturing alone when property and taxpaying requirements were abolished. The enormous surge in manufacturing began after 1820 and in some places, after 1840. That surge led to a dramatic shift in the ratios of farmers to workers: by 1850, persons who earned their living in agriculture were actually outnumbered in five states. But this new, and permanent, tilt in the relative importance of industry occurred twenty years or more after the suffrage laws had been changed.
What this points to, of course, is that the American polity did not make a deliberate and conscious decision to enfranchise the working class that the industrial revolution was in the process of creating. Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and other states did choose to entrust the ballot to farmers who leased rather than owned land, to small shopkeepers who owned little or no property, and to artisans, mechanics, and craftsmen who constituted the visible—and not very large—working class of the early nineteenth century. These men were all deemed to possess the republican virtues of manliness, self-sufficiency, and independence of judgment that were thought to be required of voters. Stable and respectable employment, as well as property ownership, made a man worthy of full political citizenship. Yet few of the delegates to constitutional conventions—and probably few of the people who elected them—believed that suffrage ought to be so universal as to embrace a large, urban proletariat of a type that existed in England and that, it was hoped, would never become part of the American world. Such a proletariat did eventually appear on this side of the Atlantic, but only after the suffrage laws, nearly everywhere, had been reformed. The broadening of suffrage in the United States took place in the absence of a large or very developed industrial working class.33
This comparative perspective can be extended to the South. In Europe (and elsewhere), resistance to universal suffrage was grounded not only in opposition to the enfranchisement of industrial workers but in an equally powerful opposition to the extension of political rights to the peasantry—to the millions of men, many of them illiterate, who lived in poverty, toiling on estates or on farms large and small. The American peasantry, however, was peculiar: it was enslaved. As Benjamin Watkins Leigh observed at Virginia’s constitutional convention of 1829, “slaves, in the eastern part of this state, fill the place of the peasantry of Europe.” “In every civilized country under the sun,” Leigh argued, “some there must be who labor for their daily bread” and who were consequently unfit to “enter into political affairs.” In Virginia and throughout the South, those who labored for their daily bread were African-American slaves—and because they were slaves, they never became part of the calculus, or politics, of suffrage reform. When the political leaders of Virginia or North Carolina or Alabama decided to abolish property or taxpaying qualifications, they did not remotely imagine that their actions would enfranchise the millions of black men who toiled on the cotton plantations and tobacco farms of the region.34
In both the South and the North, thus, economic barriers to enfranchisement were dropped in social and institutional settings that permitted political leaders to believe that the consequences of their actions would be limited, far more limited than they would have been in Europe. The relatively early broadening of the franchise in the United States was not simply, or even primarily, the consequence of a distinctive American commitment to democracy, of the insignificance of class, or of a belief in extending political rights to subaltern classes. Rather, the early extension of voting rights occurred—or was at least made possible—because the rights and power of those subaltern classes, despised and feared in the United States much as they were in Europe, were not at issue when suffrage reforms were adopted. The American equivalent of the peasantry was not going to be enfranchised in any case, and the social landscape included few industrial workers. What was exceptional about the United States was an unusual configuration of historical circumstances that allowed suffrage laws to be liberalized before men who labored from dawn to dusk in the factories and the fields became numerically significant political actors.
A Case in Point: The War in Rhode Island
The exception that proves this rule—at least for the North—was Rhode Island, where a property requirement remained in place until long after a sizable industrial working class had emerged. Rhode Island did not draw up a new constitution during the revolutionary era and continued to be governed by a colonial charter that granted the franchise to “freemen”; as defined by the General Assembly, this term included only those who owned real estate valued at $134 or rented property for at least $7. In the eighteenth century, nearly three-quarters of all adult males were able to meet such requirements. The rapid growth of Providence and of manufacturing centers (particularly textile mills) in the state’s Blackstone Valley, however, changed that proportion dramatically: by the 1830s, substantially less than half of the adult white males in the state could vote, and many of those who lacked the franchise were immigrant workers. Compounding the maldistribution of political power was a system of legislative apportionment weighted heavily in favor of the rural counties in the southern half of the state.35
Several different political factions, as well as the disfranchised themselves, attempted to promote suffrage reform during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, but they were rebuffed by a coalition of conservatives and landowners who controlled the legislature and enjoyed, among other benefits, minimal and infrequent taxes on landed property. Opposition to the colonial charter picked up steam, however, in the early 1830s; it was sparked initially by a group of radical workingmen of whom carpenter and activist Seth Luther became the most celebrated spokesman. Luther, who had served a stint in debtors’ prison in the early 1820s, was a gifted orator and one of New England’s foremost critics of the inequalities created by industrialization. In his Address on the Right of Free Suffrage, he claimed that there were “twelve thousand vassals” in Rhode Island Luther denounced the class prejudice that kept workingmen from voting, insisted that the laws of Rhode Island violated the federal Constitution’s guarantee of a republican form of government, and suggested that the Declaration of Independence be rewritten to indicate that “all men are created equal, except in Rhode Island.”36
who submit to be taxed without their own consent, who are compelled to perform military duty, to defend the country from foreign invasion and domestic commotion; to protect property frequently not their own; in fact, who are obliged by the will of a minority, to bear all the burthens of a nominally free government, and yet have no voice in the choice of the rulers, and the administration of that government.
Despite Luther’s fiery rhetoric, and in part because workingmen became pessimistic about the possibility of enfranchisement, the movement for suffrage reform (and reapportionment) was taken over by a group of middle-class reformers, many of whom were Whigs. They were led by Thomas Dorr, a successful Providence attorney from a well-to-do Rhode Island family. Dorr, who had attended Exeter and entered Harvard at the ripe age of fourteen, was known as a man of integrity and principle who unequivocally embraced causes he believed were righteous. The reformers launched a Constitutionalist Party that sought to write a new state constitution and correct numerous defects in the state’s government. After two years of agitation, they succeeded in convincing the General Assembly to hold a constitutional convention—which proceeded to reject, by overwhelming margins, demands for taxpayer suffrage, reapportionment, and the abandonment of the colonial charter. Clearly at stake was nothing less than control of the state’s government: the combination of a
broad franchise and reapportionment would produce a dramatic shift in power, which landowners were fiercely committed to resisting.37
The conflict came to a boiling point in 1841, when mechanics and workingmen, believing that they could never redress any of their economic grievances until they possessed political rights, formed a new, militant suffrage organization. Their demands for change were backed not only by the reformers of the mid-1830s but also by the Democratic Party, which viewed an expansion of the franchise as the key to its own electoral fortunes. Dorr by this time had abandoned the Whigs and become the head of Rhode Island’s Democratic Party. This broad coalition of reform advocates openly derided the state’s existing constitution as an anachronism. “If the sovereignty don’t reside in the people, where in the hell does it reside?” queried one member of the new Rhode Island Suffrage Association.38
Convinced that further appeals to the state’s government were futile, the Suffrage Association convened a People’s Convention in October 1841. There they drafted a new constitution that granted the franchise to all adult white men who met a residency requirement of one year; it also reapportioned the legislature to increase the representation of Providence and the industrial towns of the north. The most contentious issue to surface at the convention was black suffrage: after a lengthy debate, shaped in part by the fear of including a potentially unpopular element in what was already a radical document, the People’s Convention voted to restrict suffrage to whites, a decision that led both blacks and abolitionists to oppose the new suffrage movement.39