79 Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992), 269-270; Debates New York 1821, 193; Peterson, Democracy, 391-393.
80 Massachusetts Convention 1821, 251-52; American Mercury, 9 June 1818.
81 Debates New York 1821, 115-116; part of what is quoted is from a slightly different version of Kent’s speech, reprinted in Peterson, Democracy, 193-197. Kent, like many of his Blackstonian ancestors, actually voiced both arguments (that workers would be controlled by their employers and that they would rise up independently against the interests of property), however contradictory the two arguments may have been. Yet his emphasis, unlike Quincy’s, was on the fear of the urban poor seizing the property of the rich in their own interest.
82 Debates New York 1821, 115-116, 128, 137, 143.
83 Cole, Constitutional Debates of 1847, 534-535, 594-595; Green, Constitutional Development, 190-195; Peterson, Democracy, 196-197.
84 Shugg, Origins of Class Struggle, 126.
85 Jones, Treatise, 180.
86 Williamson, American Suffrage, 263-272; Rosalind L. Branning, Pennsylvania Constitutional Development (Pittsburgh, PA, 1960), 25. Even that most democratic state, Vermont, imposed property qualifications for voting in local elections throughout the first half of the nineteenth century.
87 Williamson, American Suffrage, 204-207, 255-272.
88 Ibid., 255-256, 263-272; Marguerite G. Bartlett, The Chief Phases of Pennsylvania Politics in the Jacksonian Period (Allentown, PA, 1919), 128; Pessen, Jacksonian America, 128-129; Marchette G. Chute, The First Liberty: A History of the Right to Vote in America, 1619-1850 (New York, 1969), 313.
89 Richard P. McCormick, “Suffrage Classes and Party Alignments: A Study in Voter Behavior,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 46 (December 1959): 397-410; Williamson, American Suffrage, 241.
90 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (London, 1835), 53; Brooke, Heart of the Commonwealth, 325-326; William E. Gienapp, “‘Politics Seem to Enter into Everything’: Political Culture in the North, 1840-1860,” in Stephen E. Maizlish and John J. Kushma, eds., Essays on American Antebellum Politics, 1840-1860 (College Station, TX, 1982), 15-22, 62-65; Walter Dean Burnham, “Those High Nineteenth-Century American Voting Turnouts: Fact or Fiction?” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 16 (Spring 1986): 613-644; Williamson, American Suffrage, 195; Harry Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (New York, 1990), 232; McCormick, “Suffrage Classes,” 405-410; idem, “New Perspectives on Jacksonian Politics,” American Historical Review 65 (January 1960): 291-298; Ronald P. Formisano, “Boston, 1800-1840: From Deferential-Participant to Party Politics,” in Ronald P. Formisano and Constance K. Burns, eds., Boston 1700-1980: The Evolution of Urban Politics (Westport, CT, 1984), 34-35; Walter Dean Burnham, “The Turnout Problem,” in A. James Reichley, ed., Elections American Style (Washington, DC, 1987), 113-115.
CHAPTER THREE
1 Kelso quoted in Report of the Debates and Proceedings of the Convention for the Revision of the Constitution of the State of Indiana (Indianapolis, IN, 1850), 172; Judith A. Klinghoffer and Lois Elkin, “‘The Petticoat Electors’: Women’s Suffrage in New Jersey,” Journal of the Early Republic 12 (Summer 1992): 161-193; Marion T. Wright, “Negro Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776-1875,” Journal of Negro History 33 (April 1948): 176; Irwin N. Gertzog, “Female Suffrage in New Jersey, 1790-1807,” Women and Politics 10 (1990): 52-57; Richard P. McCormick, The History of Voting in New Jersey: A Study of the Development of Election Machinery, 1664-1911 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1953), 93-100; Rowland Berthoff, “Conventional Mentality: Free Blacks, Women, and Business Corporations as Unequal Persons, 1820-1870,” Journal of American History 76 (December 1989): 768; Edward R. Turner, “Women’s Suffrage in New Jersey: 1790-1807,” Smith College Studies in History 1 (October 1915-July 1916): 67-85; Marc W. Kruman, Between Authority and Liberty: State Constitution Making in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997), 103-106.
2 James M. Burns, The Vineyards of Liberty (New York, 1982), 392-393; Marchette Gaylord Chute, The First Liberty: A History of the Right to Vote in America, 1619-1850 (New York, 1969), 313; Charles H. Wesley, “Negro Suffrage in the Period of Constitution-Making, 1787-1865,” Journal of Negro History 32 (April 1947): 152-156; The Seventh Census of the U.S.: 1850, vol. 4 (Washington, DC, 1850), 83; Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in United States History (New Haven, CT, 1997), 263-268. As indicated in the notes to Tables A.4 and A.5, Georgia did not constitutionally bar blacks, and the legal history is obscure, but it seems certain that free blacks did not vote.
3 Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Democracy, Liberty, and Property—The State Constitutional Conventions of the 1820s (Indianapolis, IN, 1966), 215; 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), 1027.
4 Eighth U.S. Census, Population of the United States in 1860 (Washington, DC, 1864), ix; Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton, NJ, 1961), 303-320; Phyllis F. Field, The Politics of Race in New York: The Struggle for Black Suffrage in the Civil War Era (Ithaca, NY, 1982), 28-77; Charles M. Snyder, The Jacksonian Heritage, Pennsylvania Politics, 1833-48 (Harrisburg, PA, 1958), 105; Chilton Williamson, American Suffrage: From Property to Democracy, 1760-1860 (Princeton, NJ, 1960), 189-190; Jarvis M. Morris, A Neglected Period of Connecticut’s History, 1818-1850 (New Haven, CT, 1933), 318-331; Wright, “Negro Suffrage,” 174-175; Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (Chicago, 1961), 79-90; Christopher Malone, Between Freedom and Bondage: Race, Party, and Voting Rights in the Antebellum North (New York, 2008), 13. Malone’s study is rich in details, particularly regarding New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts.
5 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), 214-216, 223-235, 278; Proceedings and Debates of the Convention of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to Propose Amendments to the Constitution, Commenced at Harrisburg, May 2, 1837, vol. 9 (Harrisburg, PA, 1838), 321; Report of the Debates and Proceedings of the Convention for the Revision of the Constitution of the State of Indiana (Indianapolis, IN, 1850), 233, 247, 251; The Constitution of the State of New York, Nov. 3, 1846 (Albany, NY, 1849), 1034; Daniel J. Ryan, History of Ohio: The Rise and Progress of an American State (New York, 1912), 115; Report of the Debates and Proceedings of the Convention for the Revision of the Constitution of the State of Ohio, 1850-1851, vol. 2 (Columbus, OH, 1851), 635-638; Leonard P. Curry, The Free Black in Urban America, 1800-1850 (Chicago, 1981), 216-219, 329n; Malone, Freedom and Bondage, 57-100, esp. 67.
6 Curry, Free Black, 216-224.
7 Peterson, Democracy, 225; Journal New York 1846, 1029. See also Debates Indiana 1850, 245.
8 Quaife, Convention of 1846, 241-248.
9 Journal New York 1846, 1016; Debates Ohio 1850-1851, vol. 2, 549-551; Roy H. Akagi, “The Pennsylvania Constitution of 1838,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 47 (1924): 318-319, 354; Proceedings of Pennsylvania, 1838, 232. Efforts to define white frequently ended up in court cases; see, e.g., two Ohio cases decided in 1842, Jeffries v. Ankeny, 11 Ohio 372 (1842) and Thacker v. Hawk, 11 Ohio 376 (1842). For an example of a petition from blacks, see Wright, “Negro Suffrage,” 185-186.
10 Journal New York 1846, 1035; Debates Indiana 1850, 232; see also ibid., 228, 253-254, 277-280; Rufus B. Smith and Alfred B. Benedict, eds., The Verified Revised Statutes of the State of Ohio, including All Laws of a General Nature in Force January 1st, 1890, vol. 1 (Cincinnati, OH, 1891), 236, 458-459; Curry, Free Black, 224. Regarding the unusual developments in Rhode Island, see Malone, Freedom and Bondage, 101-142.
11 David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (Austin, TX, 1987), 38-39; F. Ross Brown, Report of the Debates in the Convention of California on the Formation of the Sta
te Constitution, in September and October, 1849 (Washington, DC, 1850), 67; see also ibid., 61-75, 305-309; Harold M. Dorr, ed., The Michigan Constitutional Conventions of 1835-36, Debates and Proceedings (Ann Arbor, MI, 1940), 246.
12 Jeannette Wolfley, “Jim Crow, Indian Style: The Disenfranchisement of Native Americans,” American Indian Law Review 16 (1991): 167-202; R. Alton Lee, “Indian Citizenship and the Fourteenth Amendment,” South Dakota History 4 (Spring 1974): 199-206; Felix Cohen, Handbook of Federal Indian Law (Charlottesville, VA, 1982), 157-158.
13 Wolfley, “Jim Crow,” 171-172; Mary Jo Adams, The History of Suffrage in Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI, 1898), 21-25; Acts of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia (Milledgeville, GA, 1840), 32; see also Table A.4.
14 Robert J. Steinfeld, “Property and Suffrage in the Early American Republic,” Stanford Law Review 41 (January 1989): 335-372.
15 William M. Gouge, Debates of the Delaware Convention, for Revising the Constitution of the State, or Adopting a New One, Held at Dover, November, 1831 (Wilmington, DE, 1831), 15; Steinfeld, “Property and Suffrage,” 358; Proceedings of the New Jersey State Constitutional Convention of 1844 (Trenton, NJ, 1942), 88.
16 Proceedings New Jersey 1844, 87-91, 430-433; Quaife, Convention of 1846, 208-209; J. R. Pole, “The Suffrage in New Jersey, 1790-1807,” in Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society 71 ( January 1953): 3-8. On David Naar, see Ruth M. Patt, The Sephardim of New Jersey (New Brunswick, NJ, 1992).
17 Steinfeld, “Property and Suffrage,” 335-372; Charles Theodore Russell, The Disfranchisement of Paupers: Examination of the Law of Massachusetts (Boston, 1878), 21-25; Octavius Pickering, Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, vol. 14 (Boston, 1849), 341-344; cf. David Montgomery, Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market During the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1993), 22.
18 Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen, Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy (New York, 2006), 22-28; Howard Itzkowitz and Lauren Oldak, “Restoring the Ex-Offender’s Right to Vote: Background and Developments,” The American Criminal Law Review 11 (1973): 695, 721-727.
19 Manza and Uggen, Locked Out, 44-55, 237-240. As they note, Manza and Uggen’s chronological listings of felon disfranchisement provisions differ slightly from my own; I am also less inclined than they are to see racial, rather than class, dimensions to these antebellum laws. Regarding the laws in specific states and the debates surrounding their enactment, see 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; Journal of the Proceedings of the Convention of Delegates, Convened at Hartford, August 26, 1818, for the purpose of forming a Constitution of Civil Government of the People of the State of Connecticut (Hartford, CT, 1901), 47; Debates Indiana 1850, 65, 913; Proceedings New Jersey 1844, 1, 4, 95-99, 433; Journal of the Illinois Constitutional Convention, 1818, in Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 6 (October 1913): 373; Charles Kettleborough, Constitution Making in Indiana: A Source Book of Constitutional Documents with Historical Introduction and Critical Notes, vol. 1 (Indianapolis, IN, 1916), 58, 108, 224-225, 249, 306; Dorr, Michigan 1835-36 Debates, 170-173; 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), 144, 514-515, 639; Comparative View of the State Constitutions, Manual for the New York State Constitutional Convention, 1846 (Albany, NY, 1849), 184, 240-260; The Debates and Journal of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Maine 1819-1820 (Augusta, ME, 1894), 123-125; Journal New York 1846, 2; Journal of the Proceedings of the Convention met to form a Constitution and a system of state Government for the People of Arkansas: At the Session of the Said Convention held at Little Rock, in the Territory of Arkansas which commenced on the fourth day of January, and ended on the thirtieth day of January, one thousand eight hundred and thirty-six (Little Rock, AR, 1836), 23; Journal in the Committee of the whole, of the convention of the people of the state of Delaware, assembled at Dover, by their delegates, December 7 and 8, 1852, and afterwards, by adjournment from March 10 to April 30, 1853 (Wilmington, DE, 1853), 77; Constitution of the State of Indiana: Adopted in Convention at Corydon, on the 29th of June, A.D. 1816 (Washington, DC, 1816), 22; Joseph R. Swan, ed., Statutes of the State of Ohio, in Force August 1854 (Cincinnati, OH, 1854), art. 4, sec. 1-5, xxiii; John Duer et al., The Revised Statutes of the State of New York (Albany, NY, 1846), 129; George F. Taylor, “Suffrage in Early Kentucky,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 61 ( January 1963): 31. For an interesting debate about such provisions, see J. Ross Browne, ed., Report of the Convention of California (1849), entered, according to act of Congress by J. Ross Browne, in District Court of the District of Columbia, 1850, 253-254. Regarding the mentally ill, see the discussion in Chapter 9 of this volume.
20 It also should be noted that many states during this period attempted to clarify the meaning of residence, and in so doing explicitly excluded as residents soldiers and seamen who were temporarily stationed in their state, as well as college students. See, e.g., Quaife, Convention of 1846, 743; Convention Wisconsin (1847), 207-208, 268-269; Proceedings New Jersey 1844, 92-101, 429; Comparative View 1846, 184; Constitution New York 1846, 8; and the Massachusetts case, Williams v. Whiting, 11 Mass. 424 (1814).
21 Samuel R. Jones, A Treatise on the Right of Suffrage (Boston, 1842), 127, 169; Journal of the Convention of the State of Mississippi: Held in the Town of Jackson (Jackson, MI, 1832), 45-63; Debates Indiana 1850, 1295-1307; Debates Ohio 1850-51, vol. 2, 9-10; Journal New York 1846, 111; Convention Wisconsin (1847), 129; Quaife, Convention of 1846, 208; Massachusetts Convention of Delegates, Journal of Debates and Proceedings in the Convention of Delegates, 1821 (Boston, 1853), 249-250, 554-555; Isaac Sharpless, Two Centuries of Pennsylvania History (Philadelphia, 1900), 311; Henry R. Mueller, The Whig Party in Pennsylvania (New York, 1922), 36-37; James F. Cooper, The American Democrat (1838; reprint, New York, 1956), 140-144.
22 Sharpless, Pennsylvania History, 311; Kenneth J. Winkle, The Politics of Community: Migration and Politics in Antebellum Ohio (Cambridge, UK, 1988), 60-85; 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), 128-131.
23 Winkle, Politics of Community, 60-85; J. Allen Smith, The Growth and Decadence of Constitutional Government (New York, 1930), 37-38; Fletcher M. Green, Constitutional Development in the South Atlantic States, 1776-1860: A Study in the Evolution of Democracy (Chapel Hill, NC, 1930), 280-285; Shugg, Origins of Class Struggle, 128-131; Perry H. Howard, Political Tendencies in Louisiana (Baton Rouge, LA, 1957), 51-53; Comparative View 1846, 143-144, 184; see also Peter Way, Common Labour: Workers and the Digging of North American Canals 1780-1860 (Cambridge, UK, 1993), 180-181.
24 Joseph P. Harris, The Registration of Voters in the United States (Washington, DC, 1929), 67-70; A Report of the Debates and Proceedings of the Convention of the State of New York; Held at the Capitol in the City of Albany, on the 28th Day of August, 1821 (New York, 1821), 148.
25 Harris, Registration of Voters, 69-70; Massachusetts, Acts and Laws, 1801, chap. 38; Journal New York 1846, 148, 176-177; Capen v. Foster, 29 Mass. 485 (1832).
26 Joel H. Silbey, The Partisan Imperative (New York, 1985), 141-153; Williamson, American Suffrage, 273-277; Constitution New York 1846, 65; Proceedings of the Maryland State Convention, to Frame a New Constitution. Commenced at Annapolis, November 1, 1850 (Annapolis, MD, 1850), 82; Proceedings of the New Jersey State Constitutional Convention of 1844 (Trenton, NJ, 1942), 86-92; Kettleborough, Constitution Making
in Indiana, vol. 1, ciii, cvii, cx-cxiii, 396-465; Convention Wisconsin (1847), 144.
27 Jones, Treatise, 132; Proceedings New Jersey 1844, 100-103; see also ibid., 96, 434; Kettleborough, Constitution Making in Indiana, vol. 1, cxv-cxvii; Journal New York 1846, 2, 91.
28 Arguments Proving the Inconsistency and Impolicy of Granting to Foreigners the Right of Voting by A Disciple of the Washington School (1810; reprint, Philadelphia, 1844); Speeches of Hon. Garrett Davis delivered in the Convention to Revise the Constitution of Kentucky, December 1849 (Frankfort, KY, 1855); Proceedings New Jersey 1844, 76-87; Proceedings Maryland 1850, 94; Journal New York 1846, 129; John Duer, Benjamin Butler, and John Spencer, The Revised Statutes of the State of New York, vol. 1 (Albany, NY, 1846), 138-139; Debates Indiana 1850, 1304; Kirk H. Porter, A History of Suffrage in the United States (Chicago, 1918), 115-118.
29 For an articulate example of these reservations to broadening the franchise, see Jones, Treatise, 20-21.
30 For examples of such views (and many more could be cited), see Selig Perlman, A Theory of the Labor Movement (New York, 1928); John R. Commons and Helen L. Sumner, History of Labour in the United States, vol. 1 (New York, 1926); Amy Bridges, “Becoming American: The Working Classes in the United States Before the Civil War,” in Ira Katznelson and Aristide R. Zolberg, ed., Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (Princeton, NJ, 1986), 37-38; Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge, MA, 1976).
31 Montgomery, Citizen Worker, 24-50. An important quantitative question arises here: What percentage of American workers (or male workers) was enfranchised during this period? Remarkably, this question (which, as noted in the preface, launched the present study) has never been systematically investigated.
32 Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief (Stanford, CA, 1957), 247n.6, 248-249; Montgomery, Citizen Worker, 3-5, 17-18; Proceedings New York 1821, 140-146.
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