10 Porter, History of Suffrage, 133-134.
11 Mass., Gen. Laws (1811), chap. 9.
12 Thompson, “Suffrage in Mississippi,” 33; Chilton Williamson, “American Suffrage and Sir William Blackstone,” Political Science Quarterly 68 (1953): 125.
13 Edmund J. James, The Charters of the City of Chicago. Part 1, The Early Charters, 1833-1837 (Chicago, 1898), 39; Williamson, “American Suffrage,” 162.
14 Julian A. C. Chandler, “The History of Suffrage in Virginia,” in Herbert B. Adams, ed., Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science Series, no. 19 (Baltimore, MD, 1901), 20; Williamson, “American Suffrage,” 190, 220-223; J. R. Pole, Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic (New York, 1966), 293-294; The Constitution of the State of New York, Nov. 3, 1846 (Albany, NY, 1849), 1069-1079; Charter of the City of Milwaukee, Published by Order of the Common Council (Milwaukee, WI, 1849), 6.
15 James Fenimore Cooper, The American Democrat (1838; reprint, New York, 1956), 139-143.
16 Gerald E. Frug, Local Government Law (St. Paul, MN, 1988), 56-61.
17 Jon C. Teaford, The Municipal Revolution in America: Origins of Modern Urban Government, 1650-1825 (Chicago, 1975), 79-90; John F. Dillon, Commentaries on the Law of Municipal Corporations, vol. 1 (Boston, 1911), 26-27, 37-39, 635-636; Hendrik Hartog, Public Property and Private Power: The Corporation of the City of New York in American Law, 1730-1870 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1983), 4, 237; Gerald E. Frug, “The City as a Legal Concept,” Harvard Law Review 93 (1980): 1101-1108.
18 Teaford, Municipal Revolution, 82-89; Frank W. Blackmar, “History of Suffrage in Legislation in the United States,” The Chautauquan 22 (October 1895): 28-34; Mass., Gen. Laws (1822), chap. 110, sec. 1-8, 23-24; Chandler, “Suffrage in Virginia,” 20, 52; John V. Mering, The Whig Party in Missouri (Columbia, MO, 1967), 72-75; Hartog, Public Property, 135-139; Pole, Political Representation, 293-294.
19 Mary Jo Adams, The History of Suffrage in Michigan, Publications of the Michigan Political Science Association, vol. 3, no. 1 (Ann Arbor, MI, March 1898), 42-43, 50-53.
20 Green, Constitutional Development, 249; Adams, Suffrage in Michigan, 37-38; Kettleborough, Constitution Making in Indiana, vol. 1, ccxxvi, 106, 304-305; Roy H. Akagi, “The Pennsylvania Constitution of 1838,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 48 (1924): 328.
21 Winkle, Politics of Community, 49-65, 83-87, 172-175.
22 Gerald M. Rosberg, “Aliens and Equal Protection: Why Not the Right to Vote?” Michigan Law Review 75 (April-May 1977): 1096-1097; James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608-1870 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1978), 28; H. Sidney Everett, “Immigration and Naturalization,” Atlantic Monthly 75 (March 1895): 349-350; Reports of the U.S. Immigration Commission. Vol. 39, Immigration Legislation , Senate Document no. 758 (Washington, DC, 1911), 6.
23 Jamin B. Raskin, “Legal Aliens, Local Citizens: The Historical, Constitutional and Theoretical Meanings of Alien Suffrage,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 141 (April 1993): 1402.
24 Gerald L. Neuman, “‘We Are the People’: Alien Suffrage in German and American Perspective,” Michigan Journal of International Law 13 (Winter 1992): 291-296; Raskin, “Legal Aliens,” 1400-1403.
25 The Naturalization Laws of the United States, comp. by “member of the bar,” containing also the Alien Laws of the State of New York (Rochester, NY, 1855) 9-11; Immigration Commission, vol. 39, 6; Everett, “Immigration and Naturalization,” 349-350; John P. Gavit, Americans by Choice (1922; reprint, Montclair, NJ, 1971), 66-77; Taliesin Evans, American Citizenship and the Right of Suffrage in the United States (Oakland, CA, 1892), 14-15.
26 Among the key court cases, see Johnston v. England (1817) in Ervin H. Pollack, ed., Ohio Unreported Judicial Decisions Prior to 1823 (Indianapolis, IN, 1952), 149-159; or the more widely cited Spragins v. Houghton, 3 Ill. (2 Scam.) 377 (1840); and Rosberg, “Aliens and Equal Protection,” 1095-1096.
27 Raskin, “Legal Aliens,” 1403-1404; Richard P. McCormick, The History of Voting in New Jersey: A Study of the Development of Election Machinery, 1664-1911 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1953), 110; Rosberg, “Aliens and Equal Protection,” 1097-1099.
28 Raskin, “Legal Aliens,” 1403-1405.
29 For the debate in Wisconsin regarding alien suffrage, see Milo M. Quaife, ed., The Convention of 1846, Publications of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Collections, vol. 27, Constitutional Series, vol. 2 (Madison, WI, 1919), 207-278; Journal of the Convention to form a constitution for the State of Wisconsin, with a sketch of the debates, begun and held at Madison, on the fifteenth day of December, eighteen hundred and forty-seven (Madison, WI, 1848), 146-191.
30 Calculated from data in Naturalization Laws, 87.
31 For an examination of the politics leading to Michigan’s law, see Ronald P. Formisano, The Birth of Mass Political Parties, Michigan, 1827-1861 (Princeton, NJ, 1971), 81-101; see also Harold M. Dorr, ed., The Michigan Constitutional Conventions of 1835-36, Debates and Proceedings (Ann Arbor, MI, 1940), 177-257, 511; regarding Indiana, see Kettleborough, Constitution Making in Indiana, vol. 1, xcvi-xcix, civ-cix; and Report of the Debates and Proceedings of the Convention for the Revision of the Constitution of the State of Indiana (Indianapolis, IN, 1850), 1292-1305; for dates of specific laws, see articles by Raskin, Rosberg, and Neuman.
32 For a partial chronicle of the states that adopted alien suffrage, see Neuman, “Alien Suffrage,” 297-300; see also Raskin, “Legal Aliens,” 1391-1470; and Rosberg, “Aliens and Equal Protection,” 1095-1099. As Rosberg points out, there is some uncertainty about the number of states that ever had alien suffrage provisions in part because such provisions may have appeared in statutes rather than constitutional clauses; Tables A.4 and A.12 list all of the states in which I found such provisions. The most recent and detailed account of noncitizen voting in the United States is Ron Hayduk, Democracy for All: Restoring Immigrant Voting Rights in the United States (New York, 2006). Hayduk’s listing of states that have ever permitted alien voting (and when they did so) differs slightly from mine, in ways that do not seem interpretively consequential. (See especially pp. 15-25.) Hayduk rightly underscores the fact that Congress repeatedly sanctioned noncitizen voting in federal territories in the nineteenth century. See also Albert J. McCulloch, Suffrage and Its Problems (Baltimore, MD, 1929), 140-141. For debates regarding alien suffrage, see Debates Indiana 1850, vol. 2 (Indianapolis, IN, 1850), 1292-1305; Report of the Debates and Proceedings of the Convention for the Revision of the Constitution of the State of Kentucky, 1849 (Frankfort, KY, 1849), 445-617.
33 Quaife, Convention of 1846, 235-238.
34 Spragins v. Houghton, 3 Ill. (2 Scam.) 377, 408 (1840); see also Neuman, “Alien Suffrage,” 300-310.
35 Frederick J. Turner, “Contributions of the West to American Democracy,” Atlantic Monthly 91 ( January 1903): 83-96; idem, The Frontier in American History (New York, 1920), 192. Donald Frary and Charles Seymour also advance an argument supporting the notion of the frontier as a democratizing influence, but this is disputed by Avery Craven and Walter Johnson. Donald Frary and Charles Seymour, How the World Votes: The Story of Democratic Development in Elections, vol. 1 (Springfield, IL, 1918), 228-233; Avery Craven and Walter Johnson, The United States: Experiment in Democracy (Boston, 1947), 288. See also Edward Pessen, Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics (Homewood, IL, 1969), 128-129, 157-158.
36 Green, Constitutional Development, 159-162; J. R. Pole, “Representation and Authority in Virginia from the Revolution to Reform,” Journal of Southern History 24 (February 1958): 35; Pole, Political Representation , 314-17ff.
37 Roger W. Shugg, Origins of Class Struggle in Louisiana: A Social History of White Farmers and Laborers During Slavery and After, 1840-1875 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1939), 120-128; Perry H. Howard, Political Tendencies in Louisiana (Baton Rouge, LA, 1957), 24-25; Green, Constitutional Development, viii, 190-195, 300; Chandler, “Suffrage in Virginia,” 21-
38.
38 Chilton Williamson, American Suffrage: From Property to Democracy, 1760-1860 (Princeton, NJ, 1960), 228-229.
39 Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Democracy, Liberty, and Property—The State Constitutional Conventions of the 1820s (Indianapolis, IN, 1966), 135; Frary and Seymour, World Votes, vol. 1, 233.
40 Williamson, American Suffrage, 210-212.
41 Charles G. Steffen, The Mechanics of Baltimore: Workers and Politics in the Age of Revolution, 1763-1812 (Urbana, IL, 1984), 121; Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People (New York, 1988), 185-186; Pole, Political Representation, 318; Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York, 1984), 175; John Spencer Bassett, “Suffrage in the State of North Carolina, 1776-1861,” American Historical Association: Annual Report of the American Historical Association for 1895 (Washington, DC, 1896), 281; Michigan Conventions 1835-36, 74; Green, Constitutional Development, 266; Pole, Political Representation, 307; Kathleen N. Conzen, Immigrant Milwaukee, 1836-1860: Accommodation and Community in a Frontier City (Cambridge, MA, 1976), 195.
42 Pole, Political Representation, 307-309; idem, “Representation in Virginia,” 33-34.
43 Peterson, Democracy, 377-387; see also Pole, Political Representation, 320-321.
44 Chandler, “Suffrage in Virginia,” 32-44.
45 Sutton, Revolution to Secession, 60-66.
46 Ibid., 72-103; William G. Shade, Democratizing the Old Dominion: Virginia and the Second Party System, 1824-1861 (Charlottesville, VA, 1996), 59-77.
47 Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (Urbana, IL, 1989), 110-113, 221-223.
48 Debates and Proceedings in the State Convention Held at Newport, September 12th, 1842, For the Adoption of a Constitution of the State of Rhode Island (Providence, RI, 1859), 36, 45-47, 53-60; Quaife, Convention of 1846, 223-235; Constitution New York 1846, 1015-1016; Green, Constitutional Development, 190-195, 269; Cole, Constitutional Debates 1847, 516, 532, 535, 543-544, 561, 574-575, 577-578, 603, 605-606; Constitution of the State of New York 1821 (Albany, NY, 1849), 77-78; Samuel Jones, A Treatise on the Right of Suffrage (Boston, 1842), 150; New York Debates 1821, 118, 121, 141, 144, 179; American Mercury , 9 June 1818.
49 Williamson, American Suffrage, 188; Massachusetts Convention of Delegates, Journal of Debates and Proceedings in the Convention of Delegates, 1821 (Boston, 1853), 253; Lindley S. Butler, ed., The Papers of David S. Reid, vol. 1. (1993-1997), 253; Shade, Democratizing the Old Dominion, 58.
50 Peterson, Democracy, 280, 408-409; Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, CT, 1997), 173; Sutton, Revolution to Secession, 88-89, 96; Alison G. Freehling, Drift Toward Dissolution: The Virginia Slavery Debate of 1831-32 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1982), 72. See also Proceedings of the Maryland State Convention, to Frame a New Constitution. Commenced at Annapolis, November 1, 1850 (Annapolis, MD, 1850), 136.
51 Cole, Constitutional Debates 1847, 517-518, 525, 553, 570-608; Journal of the convention assembled at Springfield, June 7, 1847, in pursuance of an act of the general assembly of the State of Illinois, entitled “An act to provide for the call of a convention,” approved, February 20, 1847, for the purpose of altering, amending, or revising the constitution of the State of Illinois (Springfield, IL, 1847), 47-48, 76-77, 180, 196-205; Journal of the Convention for the Formation of a Constitution for the State of Iowa, Begun and Held at Iowa City, First Monday of May Eighteen Hundred and Forty-Six (Iowa City, IA, 1846), 52-53.
52 John Ashworth, “Agrarians” and “Aristocrats”: Party Political Ideology in the United States, 1837-1846 (London, 1983), 1, 8-36, 53-57, 61, 114-115, 153, 161, 225; regarding race, see ibid., 221-223; Marc W. Kruman, “The Second American Party System and the Transformation of Revolutionary Republicanism,” Journal of the Early Republic 12 (1992): 525-530; Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton, NJ, 1961), 10-11; Ronald P. Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s-1840s (New York, 1983), 268-278; Joel H. Silbey, The American Political Nation, 1838-1893 (Stanford, CA, 1991), 8-10, 30-31; James A. Morone, The Democratic Wish: Popular Participation and the Limits of American Government (New York, 1990), 86-87; John L. Brooke, The Heart of the Commonwealth (New York, 1989), 247-248; Rush Welter, The Mind of America, 1820-1860 (New York, 1975), 179-235.
53 John H. Aldrich, Why Parties? The Origin and Transformation of Political Parties in America (Chicago, 1995), 97-115; Porter, History of Suffrage, 124-125; Neuman, “‘We Are the People,’” 292-310; Shade, Democratizing the Old Dominion, 108-109; Laura J. Scalia, America’s Jeffersonian Experiment: Remaking State Constitutions, 1820-1850 (DeKalb, IL, 1999), 7-8; Fredman, Australian Ballot, ix, 21-23; Evans, History of the Australian Ballot, 1-16.
54 For accounts of the partisan dynamics contributing to suffrage reform in different states, see Frary and Seymour, World Votes, vol. 1, 233; Benson, Concept of Jacksonian Democracy, 7-11; Formisano, Birth of Mass Political Parties, 81-101; Howard, Political Tendencies, 51-53; William H. Adams, The Whig Party of Louisiana (Lafayette, LA, 1973), 41-49; Shugg, Origins of Class Struggle, 126-131.
55 Frary and Seymour, World Votes, vol. 1, 233; Benson, Concept of Jacksonian Democracy, 10-11; Craig Hanyan, De Witt Clinton and the Rise of the People’s Men (Montreal, Canada, 1996), 233-234.
56 Mering, Whig Party, 71-75.
57 Bassett, “Suffrage,” 282; see also ibid., 281-284; Green, Constitutional Development, 266-270; Kruman, “Second American Party System,” 531; Thomas E. Jeffrey, “Beyond ‘Free Suffrage’: North Carolina Parties and the Convention Movement of the 1850s,” North Carolina Historical Review 62 (1985): 393-394, 415; idem, “‘Free Suffrage’ Revisited: Party Politics and Constitutional Reform in Antebellum North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review 59 (1982): 24-30, 35-38; Papers of David Reid, vol. 1, (Raleigh, NC, 1933), xxxv-xxxix, 231, 249; ibid., vol. 2, 84.
58 Jack R. Pole, “Suffrage Reform and the American Revolution in New Jersey,” Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society 74 (July 1956): 581; Kettleborough, Constitution Making in Indiana, vol. 1, xcvii; Journal of the Convention to Form a Constitution for the State of Wisconsin 1848, 168, 175-178; Henry R. Mueller, The Whig Party in Pennsylvania: Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law (New York, 1922), 36-37; Williamson, American Suffrage, 184-185; Stephen E. Maizlish, The Triumph of Sectionalism: The Transformation of Ohio Politics, 1844-1856 (Kent, OH, 1983), 176-178; Floyd B. Streeter, Political Parties in Michigan, 1837-1860 (Lansing, MI, 1918), 27-29, 165; Cole, Constitutional Debates of 1847, 551, 567; for debates about alien voting, see ibid., 524-608.
59 Jarvis M. Morris, A Neglected Period of Connecticut’s History, 1818-1850 (New Haven, CT, 1933), 291-317; Philip C. Davis, The Persistence of Partisan Alignment: Issues, Leaders, and Voters in New Jersey, 1840-1860 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1978), 106-112.
60 Ashworth, “Agrarians” and “Aristocrats,” 153-154; Kruman, “Second American Party System,” 531-532; idem, “Legislatures and Political Rights,” in Joel H. Silbey, ed., Encyclopedia of the American Legislative System, vol. 3 (New York, 1994), 1240.
61 Sheidley, Sectional Nationalism, 39-59.
62 Jeffrey, “‘Free Suffrage’ Revisited,” 25-45; idem, “Beyond ‘Free Suffrage,’” 415; idem, State Parties and National Politics: North Carolina, 1815-1861 (Athens, GA, 1989), 206-215.
63 Sutton, Revolution to Secession, 122-141; Shade, Democratizing the Old Dominion, 264-283; Peter J. Galie, Ordered Liberty: A Constitutional History of New York (New York, 1996), 75-91.
64 Chandler, “Suffrage in Virginia,” 26; George Ticknor Curtis, Letters of Phocion (n.p., n.d., Daily Advertiser and Courier, Boston, 1853), 117; Ashworth, “Agrarians” and “Aristocrats,” 10. For a detailed chronicle of the politics of the era, including accounts of the politics of suffrage expansion in some states, see Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York, 2005), especially
99-201.
65 Massachusetts Debates 1821, 256; Debates New York 1821, 97; Peterson, Democracy, 199-200.
66 Massachusetts Debates 1821, 252; William Griffith, Eumenes, being a collection of papers, written for the purpose of exhibiting some of the more prominent errors and omissions of the constitution of New Jersey (Trenton, NJ, 1799), 46; Peterson, Democracy, 381-382, 402-403; see also one of the first American treatises on the subject, Isaac Hillard, The Rights of Suffrage (Danbury, CT, 1804).
67 James Cheetham, A Dissertation Concerning Political Equality, and the Corporation of New York (New York, 1800), vi, 25.
68 Massachusetts Debates 1821, 250; for similar arguments, see also ibid., 247, as well as Curtis, Phocion, 118-119.
69 Journal of the Convention of the State of New York, Begun and Held at the Capitol in the City of Albany, On the First Day of June, 1846 (Albany, NY, 1846), 1016; Niles’ Register, 21 October 1820, 115; Debates Ohio 1850-1851, vol. 2, 635.
70 Debates New York 1821, 97.
71 For examples of arguments regarding the military and militia service, see Niles’ Register, 21 October 1820, 115; Debates New York 1821, 118, 121, 141, 179; Journal New York 1846, 1015-1016; Williamson, American Suffrage, 188, 227; Convention 1847 Illinois, 513, 532; Quaife, Convention of 1846, 249-250.
72 Williamson, American Suffrage, 202; Debates New York 1821, 130; Benson, Concept of Jacksonian Democracy, 7-10.
73 Peterson, Democracy, 202-205; Williamson, American Suffrage, 192, 202.
74 Massachusetts Debates 1821, 253.
75 Peterson, Democracy, 197-198, 404.
76 Williamson, American Suffrage, 231-232; Peterson, Democracy, 407-410.
77 Massachusetts Debates 1821, 247; Jones, Treatise, 84.
78 Massachusetts Debates 1821, 251; for an example of the Blackstonian argument, see the report on the Connecticut Legislature in the American Mercury, 9 June 1818.
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