2
A WHITE MAN’S REPUBLIC
I believe this government … was made by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and was intended to be administered by white men in all time to come.
—STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS, U.S. SENATOR, ILLINOIS, 1858
In the early nineteenth century, opinion makers began to question the fitness of African Americans to vote. In a story that made headlines across New England and New York, disgruntled losers of the 1803 elections in the town of Wallingford, Connecticut, complained that election officials “had the effrontery to bring forward a Negro fellow by the name of Toby” (no last name provided), who voted for their winning opponents. The critics did not claim that Toby lacked the legal qualifications to vote. Rather, they leveled a charge that became familiar over time: that “a few years hence” this “man of colour,” this “Black night walker,” had attempted to rape a white woman.1
They said that Toby had been whipped for this crime, even though eleven years earlier, the state had mandated imprisonment for attempted rape. Even if true, conviction for this alleged crime would not have barred him from voting because Connecticut law did not disqualify former felons. Still, by trivializing this black man as childlike, using his first name only, and yet stereotyping him as a predator of white women, Toby’s detractors insinuated that he should be excluded from the political community of the state. In 1818, Connecticut replaced its property qualifications with minimal tax-paying requirements. Four years earlier it had snuffed out black voting by limiting the franchise to “whites” only. In 1845, Connecticut abolished all economic qualifications for voting by white people. Yet two years later, when voters had the opportunity to reestablish black voting rights by referendum, they rejected black suffrage by nearly 4 to 1: 19,495 to 5,616.2
By expanding voting opportunities for whites while extinguishing suffrage for African Africans, Connecticut followed a pattern typical for the states in antebellum America. By the eve of the Civil War, standards for voting based on people’s intrinsic qualities had largely supplanted standards based on external possessions. As American economic life became more open and fluid for white men in the early nineteenth century, so too did access to the vote for this privileged slice of the population. In 1800, only five of sixteen states mandated white-only voting. In 1860, twenty-eight of thirty-three states, comprising about 97 percent of the nation’s free black population, had adopted such racially restrictive suffrage. Only five New England states with minimal black populations—Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont—authorized voting by African Americans and other nonwhites. Yet in 1860, no state imposed property qualifications for voting, and only a half-dozen had tax-paying requirements.3
The development of political parties, the rise of new racialist ideologies, and the increasing separation between home and work led to a belief in a “white man’s Republic.” Pursuit of this ideal expanded suffrage for white males while denying voting rights to people deemed unfit for political life: women, noncitizens, Native Americans, African Americans, and in some states felons and allegedly mentally incompetent individuals. By rules of inclusion and exclusion, white men were the winners in this new political order. Members of this privileged group, despite divisions among them, gained the advantage of shaping the nation’s laws and policies without regard to the great majority of the American people.
The movement toward a white man’s republic took place in an increasingly open polity, dominated by political parties that shattered the traditional ideal of autonomous voters and representatives. In his farewell address near the end of his two presidential terms, George Washington reaffirmed the fading vision of a public sphere fenced in by the formal processes of voting, representation, and law-making. He denounced parties as likely “to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people.” The spirit of party, he said, “agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another; foments riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption.”4
Washington was the last American president to rise above partisan squabbling. As the nation grew and diversified, white manhood suffrage expanded, and the scope of government increased. The model of the isolated, virtuous voter and representative dedicated only to the common good could no longer hold. Instead, parties became an indispensable link between voters and government, mobilizing constituents and turning them out at the polls in support of partisan candidates and policies.5
By the time Washington left office in 1797, one faction known as the Federalists had coalesced around Alexander Hamilton and John Adams. The Federalists backed a strong and active national government, promotion of commerce and industry, and support for Great Britain. Another faction known as the Democratic-Republicans centered on Thomas Jefferson, Washington’s former secretary of state, and James Madison, now serving in Congress. The Democratic-Republicans supported limited government, low taxes, states’ rights, an agrarian-based republic, and revolutionary France. The rise of political parties and their diverse platforms and constituents would make voting qualifications and the basis of representation an unending source of partisan conflict.6
After defeating Jefferson in America’s first contested presidential election in 1796, Adams and his Federalists led an effort to restrict suffrage and office-holding through federal law, although indirectly. Consistent with the emerging consensus of the time, they sought not to impose economic requirements for voting and holding office. Instead, they made it much more difficult for aliens to become citizens of the United States. Only citizens were constitutionally eligible for federal office. While just a few states at the time explicitly barred noncitizens from voting or competing for public office, other states de facto barred aliens from political life and would enshrine citizen-only suffrage into law.
In 1798, the Federalist Congress passed, and President Adams signed, the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Sedition Act made it a criminal offense to “write, print, utter or publish” false statements critical of the government. It expressed the Federalist view of an inviolate government that, once elected, should be immune to public clamor. The Alien Acts required immigrants to register with federal authorities and granted the president latitude to deport aliens judged as threatening to national security or originating from enemy nations in times of war. The president could order deportation, with no judicial recourse, even in the absence of an overt act by the alien. This provision had the potential to reduce dramatically the number of immigrants eligible to become naturalized American citizens.
The Alien Acts further restricted immigrant voting and office-holding through stringent waiting periods for naturalized citizenship. The acts extended the waiting period for declaring the intention to become a citizen from three to five years and the residency period for final citizenship from five to fourteen years. Partisan politics, not just ideology, in post-Washington America drove the Federalists to constrain opportunities for naturalized citizenship. Adams and his allies believed that their Democratic-Republican opponents in 1796 relied on votes from Irish, French, and French-Canadian immigrants. The deportation provisions of the Alien Acts, although renewable, would expire in 1800, but the naturalization requirements would persist unless repealed by Congress.7
Raising still familiar claims, proponents of the Alien Acts condemned aliens as loyal to foreign governments, hostile to American traditions, and prone to vice and crime. Federalist representative Harrison Gray Otis warned of “wild Irishmen” and “the turbulent and disorderly of all parts of the world” who came to the United States “with a view to disturb our own tranquility after having succeeded in the overthrow of their own governments.”8 William Cranch, Adams’s nephew by marriage, said that without the Alien Acts, “A Horde of unprincipled foreigners will rush in upon us” and will “scatter in every direction the seeds of immorality & irreligion, of modern philosophy & democratic disorganization—We shall have French patriots & united Irishmen among our secretaries, our Senators and our Representatives. Law and order would disappear and America would witness the grossest scenes of rapine & plunder, murders & rapes.”9
Even the retired George Washington weighed in, calling for protection from aliens “who acknowledge no allegiance to this Country, and in many instances are sent among us (as there is the best circumstantial evidence) for the express purpose of poisoning the minds of our people.” He feared that alien participation in government threatened “to dissolve the Union” and negate “the fair and happy prospects which were unfolding to our View from the Revolution.”10
The fate of naturalized citizenship turned on the election of 1800 between Adams and Jefferson. Neither man openly campaigned for office. Presidential candidates in the early republic, following the precedent set by Washington, held that personal campaigning demeaned the dignity of the office and the need to represent all Americans. Their respective supporters, meanwhile, showed no such restraint and campaigned vigorously in the states. Even though most states then in the union still appointed members of the Electoral College, Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans proved adept at securing electoral votes, organizing at the local level and tarring Federalists as uncaring aristocrats. Merited or not, the Federalists took on the image of a party of the privileged elite and the Democratic-Republicans the party of the common folk. This was a battle that the Federalists could not win, especially as America moved toward broad white male citizen suffrage after 1800. As Abraham Lincoln later quipped, “God must love the common man, he made so many of them.”11
Jefferson seemingly won the presidency with an Electoral College majority of seventy-three votes to sixty-five for Adams. But did he? With each elector casting two votes, Jefferson’s de facto vice-presidential running mate, Aaron Burr of New York, also received seventy-three electoral votes. The prevailing constitutional rules empowered the House of Representatives to choose the president in the event of such a tied vote. Each state would cast one vote, not in the new, heavily Democratic-Republican House, but in the lame duck House that lacked a clear state-by-state partisan majority. It took thirty-six ballots for the House finally to elect Jefferson as president on February 17, 1801, barely two weeks before the commencement of the new presidential term on March 4. Burr became vice president, but his failure to remove himself from consideration for president left him isolated within the Jefferson administration.
The election of 1800 profoundly changed voting and elections in the United States. After the fiasco of an Electoral College tie, Congress passed and the states ratified the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution before the next presidential election of 1804. This amendment transformed the election of presidents by creating the modern presidential ticket system of a president and vice president, with separate balloting for each office in the Electoral College. If no presidential candidate gained an Electoral College majority, the House would again elect the president. As before, each state, no matter the size of its population, would cast a single vote for president. However, the choices open to House members would now be limited to the top three rather than the top five finishers in the Electoral College vote. Decision-makers at the time viewed the Twelfth Amendment as much more important than just a patch for a flawed electoral system. In their view it represented fundamental changes in popular versus communal sources of popular sovereignty and in the balance of power and authority between the national government and the states.
Congressional debates on the amendment delved deeply into these decisive issues of American democracy. Opponents of the amendment like Representative Gaylord Griswold of New York argued that the Constitution “was a compact formed by the several states” that no amendment should annul. He valued election both by the Electoral College and by the House of Representatives as equally sound means for choosing a president that balanced popular sovereignty with the wisdom of communal decision-making by elected representatives. The proposed new system, he warned, would entrench the odious “power of party.” With diminished prospects for House elections of the president, only major organized parties would have the resources and expertise to garner a majority of electoral votes in the states; independent candidates and nominees of minor parties would be relegated to the role of spoilers.12
Proponents countered that the amendment clarified the distinction between president and vice president and moved the choice of a president closer to the people. It avoided Electoral College ties that pitched elections into the House of Representatives, which they viewed as an evil, not a benefit, because of the intrigue and corruption that allegedly plagued legislative bodies. The amendment, they claimed, guarded against the election of fringe candidates by reducing the House’s choice from the five to the three leading competitors in electoral votes. Without a hint of irony, Representative John Clopton of Virginia affirmed, “It must be a consideration of primary importance that the modes of election be so established that in their event they may always secure a full expression of the public will.” Elections that defaulted to the House, he warned, “may terminate contrary to the public will.”13
Jefferson’s victory recalibrated the relationship between immigration and citizenship. In 1781, Jefferson had penned his own worries that aliens would “warp and bias” American democracy “and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.” He hoped that “our government be more homogeneous.”14 However, as president, he understood the political advantage to his party of moving aliens quickly to citizenship. His administration declined to renew the deportation provisions of the Alien Acts, and the new Jeffersonian-controlled Congress adopted a naturalization law that reduced the period for notice of intent to apply for citizenship from five to three years and slashed the waiting period for final approval from fourteen to five years.
Alexander Hamilton, writing under his pen name of the renowned orator of ancient Rome Lucius Crassus, lamented the easing of citizenship requirements, which would grant aliens premature voting rights. He thought the dangers of “admitting foreigners to an immediate and unreserved participation in the right of suffrage … is verified by the experience of all ages.” This grave error, he cautioned, led to the downfall of ancient civilizations. A similar fate awaited America once foreigners “get too early footing in [the] country.”15
Within the states, Democratic-Republicans pushed to eliminate economic qualifications for voting, expecting political benefits from an expanded electorate and their common-man appeal. Although many Federalists defended the stake-in-society rationale for property ownership for voting (as did some Democratic-Republicans), they tended to tread lightly for fear of antagonizing new classes of voters.
However, the Democratic-Republicans failed to apply the logic of an expanded political community to African Americans and other “nonwhites,” who they believed favored the Federalists and lacked the capacity for full participation in American life. Consistent with the rising ideology of a white man’s republic, the new Jeffersonian naturalization law continued to limit citizenship only to “free white persons.” The law both deprived nonwhites of the rights and privileges of naturalized citizenship and implicitly acknowledged their inferiority to whites. However, in leaving the meaning of “white” undefined, the law potentially denied citizenship to immigrants from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Hawaii, Latin America, and perhaps even dark-skinned people from parts of Europe. The issue of how to distinguish between “whites” and “nonwhites” emerged during antebellum debates in the states over inserting “white only” voting requirements into their constitutions. It became a vexed issue for the courts and for immigration officials responsible for the adjudication of applications by aliens for U.S. citizenship.
The shrunken Federalist Party, although more sympathetic to black rights than were their opponents, still cautiously approached the contentious issue of black voting, and many of the party’s leaders still upheld economic qualifications for voting. In the face of these hard politics, proponents of black suffrage relied mainly on such abstractions as the inherent rights of man and a suffrage that reflected fully the popular will. Yet contradicting this conception of a “universal suffrage” were widely accepted restrictions aimed at women, paupers, felons, noncitizens, transients, and the young. “I cannot clearly comprehend what is meant by the phrase Universal Suffrage,” wrote the canny old Federalist John Adams. “Is the whole human species to be allowed an equal vote—are all the Women and Children to turn out? are all the parish paupers to come to the Hustings? are all the gaols to be emptied and all the Prisoners to appear? are all the Gypsys and beggars in the town streets and the fields to be assembled?” The answer to his questions was a resounding “no.” Proponents of “universal suffrage” typically meant no more than adult white male suffrage, free of property and tax qualifications.16
Opponents of black suffrage played on the common belief that the inherent moral and mental deficiencies of African Americans rendered them ill-equipped for the vote. They charged that unscrupulous men of wealth would buy the black vote and corrupt elections with voter fraud. The opposition raised the specter of blacks flooding into states not just for voting but also for holding public office. A white-only suffrage, such people argued, would preserve the integrity, independence, and virtue of the vote.
Maryland pioneered the movement toward realizing the ideal of a white man’s republic. In 1802, the Maryland state legislature advanced the conventional vision of “universal suffrage.” For local and state offices it abolished economic requirements for voting by adult white males, which it then extended in 1810 to federal elections.17 In response, Federalists in Maryland launched a never-ending debate, which reverberated nationwide, over expanding the electorate versus guarding against voter fraud. They warned that fraud would proliferate in tandem with the extension of the vote to a lower-class electorate. At the turn of the nineteenth century, in a precursor to contemporary disputes over voter identification laws, Federalists sought without success to combat alleged fraud by requiring each potential voter to present at the polls documentary proof that he met the state’s property qualifications for voting.18 Democratic-Republicans responded with a broad ideal of popular voting rights, at least for men, whites, and citizens. They dismissed the claim that a more expansive white, male suffrage would propagate fraudulent voting. One Democrat complained that despite the lack of tangible evidence, the “Gentry, with their usual consistency, prate about illegal votes.” Such complaints would continue unabated across the centuries.19
While expanding the vote for white males, Maryland contracted the vote for African Americans. The state constitution of 1776 had granted suffrage to all freemen who met property-holding requirements, irrespective of race. However, to forestall voting by a growing free African American population, the state legislature in 1783 and 1796 selectively disenfranchised former slaves freed after 1783 as well as their free-born children. As of 1802, the legislature banned all African Americans from voting. Poll-book data from Annapolis in 1800 showed that despite earlier restrictions, African Americans had been voting in Maryland prior to the extinction of their franchise. In 1851, Maryland also abolished voting by noncitizens.20
New Jersey quickly followed suit in restricting the vote to white males. Until 1807, New Jersey had the nation’s most liberal suffrage requirements. The constitution of 1776 had authorized voting by “all inhabitants,” with the minimum requirement of real or personal property valued at fifty pounds or more. New Jersey was the only state to open voting to women, along with free blacks and aliens. Harking to fears of voter fraud, critics charged that New Jersey’s liberal suffrage led to voting by unfit people who corrupted elections. In 1799, the prominent lawyer William Griffith wrote, “It is corruption perfectly disgusting to witness the manner in which women are polled at our elections. Nothing could be a greater mockery of this invaluable and sacred right than to suffer it to be exercised by persons who do not even pretend to any judgment on the subject.” Equally objectionable was a suffrage that let “our polls swarm with the very refuse of English, Irish, Dutch, and French emigrations and transportations.” In 1802, a petition challenging a local election in Trenton charged that “Negroes and actual slaves voted,” “that aliens voted,” and that “married women voted.” In a contested 1806 election for the location of the Essex County courthouse, both sides charged the other with fraudulent voting by women, blacks, and aliens.21
In 1807, in the wake of the Essex County controversy, the New Jersey state legislature voted overwhelmingly for limiting the vote to white male citizens, while retaining the property requirements. In a preamble to the new law, the legislators lumped together categories of people that they deemed inherently unfit for the vote: “Doubts have been raised and great diversities in practice obtained throughout the state in regard to the admission of aliens, females, and persons of color, or negroes to vote in elections.” Restricting such voting “is highly necessary to the safety, quiet, good order and dignity of the state.” In 1844, New Jersey eliminated economic qualifications for voting but retained its racial, gender, and citizenship restrictions.22
In 1821, New York adopted a new constitution that eliminated property qualifications and granted the vote to male adults who paid taxes, worked on public roads, or served in the militia. Thus, New York, like several other states, viewed service to society through means other than finance as a legitimate source of suffrage rights. Still, New York had its defenders of property qualifications. Convention delegate Elisha Williams debunked the idea of universal suffrage, noting that proponents would still exclude the young and women “who cannot be, and never have been supposed, in the most extravagant theories of equality, capable of expressing their wills independently and intelligently.” Advocates of universal suffrage would also exclude “all foreigners, all paupers, and all felons.” Given that sovereignty “could not be conferred alike on all,” voting was not a natural right but a privilege earned by property-holders through “industry, frugality, and character.” Such fine points of logic did not move the majority, who reasoned that “there is no privilege given to property, as such; but those who contribute to the public support, we consider as entitled to a share in the election of rulers.”23
Simultaneously, the new constitution contracted voting rights, imposing without dispute a citizenship requirement for suffrage. More controversial was the convention’s suffrage committee’s recommendation for restricting voting to whites, washing away forty-five years of black voting under the prior 1777 constitution. Committee member John Z. Ross said that African Americans “are a peculiar people incapable, in my judgment of exercising that privilege with any sort of discretion, prudence, or independence.” He noted that “your jails and penitentiaries” are filled “by the very race, whom it is now proposed to clothe with the power of deciding upon your political rights.” Black votes, he warned, would be “at the call of the richest purchaser,” and “the blacks will claim to be represented by persons of their own colour, in your halls of legislation.” When other states began freeing their slaves, black suffrage in New York would “invite that kind of population to this state.”24
Other delegates conceded the alleged inferiority of black people but blamed their plight on ill-treatment that could ultimately be cured only through full black participation in American life. Abraham Van Vechten said, “As to their degradation, that had been produced by the injustice of white men, and it does not become those who have acted so unjustly toward them, to urge the results of that injustice as a reason for perpetuating their degradation.” The emancipation of slaves in the state, “by necessary implication, admit their title to the native and acquired rights of citizenship.” Peter Jay argued that the presumption of black inferiority was a mere prejudice “that arises from an association of ideas. Slavery, and a black.” But, “with the diminution of slavery, the prejudice has already diminished, and, when slavery is no longer known among us, it will perhaps disappear.”25
Beyond principle, debate in the New York convention centered on the conundrum of distinguishing “whites” from “nonwhites.” Robert Clark charged that “by retaining the word ‘white,’ you impose a distinction impracticable in its operation.” Among so-called whites, he said, “there are many shades of difference in their complexion. Then how will you discriminate.” Also, “men descended from African ancestors, but who have been pretty well white-washed by their commingling with your white population, may escape your scrutiny; while others, whose blood is as pure from any African taint as any member of your Convention, may be called upon to prove his pedigree, or forfeit his rights of suffrage, because he happens to have a swarthy complexion.” Samuel Young responded that “the common sense of mankind would sufficiently direct, who were to be admitted, and who were to be excluded, by such a general provision.” This supposed “commonsense” view of whiteness would later reemerge in federal court decisions that struggled to construe the meaning of “white” in federal naturalization law.26
By a narrow margin, delegates declined to limit the vote explicitly to whites, but in practice the new constitution disenfranchised African Americans by imposing on every “man of color” a prohibitive suffrage requirement of a free and clear estate valued at $250, “which we know they cannot comply with,” said Jonas Platt.27 The voters overwhelmingly approved the constitution in January 1822. Under the new property qualification, only sixty-eight of the more than twelve thousand free African Americans in New York City could vote in 1825.28
During the 1821 New York convention, a controversy arose with national implications for suffrage rights: whether the Constitution had indirectly guaranteed voting for all citizens, including African Americans, through its clause affirming that “the citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states.” James Kent, the distinguished chancellor of the New York courts, said that “it deserved consideration whether such exclusion [of African Americans] would not be opposed to the constitution of the United States.” Another jurist, New York Supreme Court chief justice Ambrose Spencer, countered that “this clause regards mere personal rights,” not political rights. “It was intended by the constitution to admit persons of other states to purchase property, and enjoy the personal rights of the states whence they claim.” Rufus King objected that the clause includes no such limitation: “Such is not the text; it is to all rights.”29
The debate over the “privileges and immunities” clause ended inconclusively in New York, but two years later, the 1823 federal circuit court case Corfield v. Coryell, presided over by Supreme Court justice Bushrod Washington, sustained Spencer’s reservations. The decision limited the scope of the “privileges and immunities” clause in the original Constitution only to rights that are “fundamental; which belong, of right, to the citizens of all free governments; and which have, at all times, been enjoyed by the citizens of the several states which compose this Union, from the time of their becoming free, independent, and sovereign.” Such unfettered fundamental rights did not include voting, which the court considered a right constrained by “the laws or constitution of the State in which it is to be exercised.”30
When New York convened another constitutional convention in 1846, a new American party system had emerged in the states and nation. After 1800, the dominant Democratic-Republican Party had relied on a caucus of members of Congress to nominate a single candidate for president. Nomination by “King Caucus” was tantamount to election given the feeble Federalist opposition. This system disintegrated in 1824, marking the start of a transition to a new era of relatively balanced competition among reorganized and strengthened parties.
During the election of 1828, war hero Andrew Jackson easily defeated the incumbent president John Quincy Adams and became the first president from the newly emerging West and the leader of a Democratic Party that superseded the prior Democratic-Republicans of Thomas Jefferson. Styling himself as the champion of the “common man”—which for this Indian fighter and slaveholder meant the white man—Jackson proposed to expand American democracy. He called for replacing the Electoral College with a popular vote for president, limiting the presidency to a single term, and restricting federal appointments to four years. “As few impediments as possible should exist to the free operation of the public will,” Jackson said. Although he failed to win enactment of these sweeping reforms, the states did follow the precedent of “Jacksonian Democracy” by opening many new offices, including governorships and judges, to popular election.31
In 1828, for the first time in U.S. history, more than half the states chose electors by the “general ticket” method, that is, winner-take-all by a statewide vote. By the subsequent election of 1832, all but two states had adopted the general ticket procedure. As opposed to the district system, which splintered the state’s Electoral College votes, the general ticket system increased the state’s impact on presidential elections by unifying its electoral votes. In 1832, Maryland was the last holdout to maintain a district system, and South Carolina remained the final state to appoint electors by votes of the state legislature. The conversion to general ticket elections strengthened the two-party system; it diminished prospects for third parties and independent candidates, who lacked the resources to campaign statewide or the broad appeal needed to defeat the majority parties and win a statewide plurality.32
By 1834, Jackson’s opponents had coalesced into a new Whig Party led by Henry Clay and Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts. The Whigs backed an activist government that would impose tariffs on foreign goods, promote education, build the nation’s infrastructure, and enforce moral standards. The Whigs opposed the Democrats’ aggressive approach to the territorial expansion of the United States. Until the early 1850s, when the Whig Party disintegrated, Democrats and Whigs fought largely to a standstill across the nation. Unlike later party systems, partisan allegiances did not closely follow sectional lines, and neither party gained a lock on the presidency or a decisive advantage in Congress. Close partisan competition, a rising number of elected offices, and new forms of popular mobilization expanded voter turnout and led Democrats and Whigs to continue easing suffrage qualifications for white males. Neither party wanted to fall behind in the enfranchisement of new voters.
At a high tide of competition between Democrats and Whigs, the New York constitutional convention of 1846 dragged on from June 1 to October 9, again pondering the reform of voting and elections. Consistent with the ideal of an expanded democracy, delegates from both parties agreed to eliminate economic qualifications for white voters and for the first time to elect mayors and justices of the peace. Voting rights for blacks, however, remained controversial. Delegates opposed to black suffrage mustered on their behalf the power of religion, science, and constitutional law. John Leslie Russell insisted that white-only voting was not “the expression of a prejudice. It was but the expression of the sentiment of the Almighty, who had ordained the colored man to be inferior to the free white race.” Bishop Perkins observed “that the great offence which brought the flood on the earth” was “the intercourse of one race with another that God had separated.” John Kennedy further asserted, “We are informed by physiologists, that the human family was divided into five races: all of which had distinctive characteristics. Those two which had the fewest points of resemblance were the Caucasian and Ethiopian.… Let not government dare to counteract and overthrow the distinctions and divisions that nature designed should exist.” As irrefutable proof of black inferiority, he cited the disproportionate number of colored men in the state’s Sing Sing and Clinton prisons. Consistent with Justice Washington’s construction of the Constitution’s “privileges and immunities” clause in the Corfield case, Kennedy insisted that “the elective suffrage was a privilege,—a franchise—a civil right, and not a natural right; and the governing power may limit, restrict, or extend the exercise of it in such manner as to it might seem wise and proper.”33
Delegates also debated whether to demand literacy as a condition of voting. Alpheus Greene agreed that “the right to vote is not a natural or inalienable right; but is a right conferred by the government on its members for a specific purpose,” that of choosing public officials. Given that everyone’s rights are affected by each vote cast, the community must “have a right to demand that the voter should be intelligent.” However, most delegates found persuasive William Taylor’s argument that although “we should do everything we could for the education of the rising generation,” a literacy test would “disfranchise many intelligent men—well qualified to discharge all the business of life—but who had never learned to read or write.”34
The convention dropped all economic requirements for white voters. It submitted a proposition on eliminating the stringent freehold qualifications for people of color to the voters, who rejected it by nearly 3 to 1: 224,336 to 85,406.35 Delegates declined to adopt a literacy test but required voters to provide proof of eligibility and authorized the legislature to enact laws to exclude “all persons who have been or may be convicted of bribery, larceny, or of any infamous crime.”36
Pennsylvania followed the lead of other states in revising its constitution to erase voting by African Americans. The state’s constitution of 1790 had authorized voting by all citizens twenty-one years of age or older who paid a state tax. It included no racial restrictions. The route to black disenfranchisement followed a circuitous path that led from the courts to a constitutional convention in 1837–1838.37
In 1835, William Fogg, an African American who election officials had turned away from the polls, filed America’s first voting rights lawsuit, Hobbs v. Fogg. Fogg was a free citizen of Pennsylvania, a state founded on the principle that “all men are born equally free and independent.” He charged that election officials had barred him from voting in violation of the state’s color-blind constitution simply because he looked black. Fogg won his case in a lower court, but the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld the state’s appeal in 1837, in effect by writing black people out of American democracy. The court ignored the state constitution and found that “no coloured race was party to our social compact,” and that there was no basis on which “to raise this depressed race to the level of the white one.” The court did hold out some hope for future generations, noting that a black man’s “blood, however, may become so diluted in successive descents to lose its distinctive character; and, then, both policy and justice require that previous disabilities should cease.”38
This idea of excluding blacks from the “social compact” reemerged when the commonwealth adopted a new constitution in a convention that began on May 2, 1837, and lasted until February of the following year, nearly tripling the time spent at the Philadelphia convention that drafted the nation’s Constitution. The convention maintained tax-paying qualifications for voting while abolishing the vote for nonwhites and continuing the exclusion of aliens. With Tennessee having outlawed nonwhite voting in 1834 and North Carolina in 1835, Pennsylvania’s new “white-only” provision meant that none of the sixteen pre-1800 states outside of New England authorized voting by blacks or other nonwhites.
Delegate Phineas Jenks argued to the Pennsylvania delegates that the commonwealth should replace its tax-paying requirements for suffrage with property qualifications, which he said better assured responsible voting than “white only” suffrage. He pointed to prosperous colored men of substantial means including one with riches of “a hundred thousand dollars.” He did not believe it would “be proper for an individual who has so deep a stake in society to be excluded from the exercise of the elective franchise.” Benjamin Martin responded for the majority, saying, “It is altogether futile and useless to pursue the experiment of making the African and Indian equal to the white citizen.” Perhaps thinking about the Fogg suit, Martin continued that voting rights would ill-serve blacks, because an aroused public would turn them away from the polls, thus “holding out expectations to them which could never be realized.” He warned of attracting African Americans to the state. Look to Philadelphia, he said, where blacks congregate “from all the southern States, and have so corrupted each other, that they are now in a situation far worse than the bondage from which they have escaped. It is impossible to walk through Cedar ward, in a clear warm evening, for the black population.”39
Although delegates upheld the tax-paying requirement for suffrage, they initially voted down the “whites only” clause with about 20 percent of Democrats joining a near unanimous Whig delegation. However, events intervened to reverse this verdict. On October 10, 1837, Democrats lost five of six local elections in Bucks County. They raised the issue of voter fraud, charging that the opposition had prevailed through illegal black votes and filing suit to overturn the elections. In January 1838, Judge John Fox of the Bucks County Court issued an opinion on black voting in these elections that paralleled the reasoning of the state supreme court in Hobbs v. Fogg to exclude people of color from the state’s political community.40 Although Hobbs had been decided earlier, that opinion was not published until after the end of the convention. By a vote of seventy-seven to forty-nine, delegates added a “white only” suffrage clause to the constitution.41
With a resounding protest entitled “The Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens Threatened with Disenfranchisement to the People of Pennsylvania,” black leaders condemned the new constitution for denying “that all men are born equally free by making political rights depend on the skin in which a man is born? Or to divide what our fathers bled to unite, to wit, TAXATION and REPRESENTATION.” They said that the freedom of all depended on the freedom of the least powerful and that “when you have taken from an individual his right to vote, you have made the government, in regard to him, a mere despotism, and you have taken a step toward making it a despotism for all.” Their appeal fell on deaf white ears in Pennsylvania. Without a federal guarantee of the vote, the disenfranchised black people of Pennsylvania and other states had no recourse to any authority higher than their discriminatory state constitutions and hostile state courts.42
Across the nation, black people protested their exclusion from the vote, with no more success than the free African Americans of Pennsylvania. In 1840, a “Convention of the Colored Inhabitants of the State of New York, to Consider Their Political Disabilities,” issued its own proclamation on behalf of black voting rights. The proclamation appealed to the ideology of American republicanism, citing the injustice of granting political rights to foreign-born citizens but not to native-born blacks:
We are Americans. We were born in no foreign clime.… We have not been brought up under the influence of other, strange, aristocratic, and uncongenial political relations. In this respect, we profess to be American and republican.… We call upon you to return to the pure faith of your republican fathers.… For no vested rights, for no peculiar privileges, for no extraordinary prerogatives, do we ask. We merely put forth our appeal for a republican birthright.43
More than forty conventions of black people seeking political rights followed this New York conclave, echoing similar arguments in states across the nation. Black advocates spread their message to a wide but largely unreceptive audience. A commentary in Frederick Douglass’s newspaper The North Star noted that in Ohio, “Our Colored Fellow Citizens” have “made very spirited and commendable efforts to secure the Right of Franchise. They have held conventions, sent forth addresses, passed resolutions, and delivered lectures with a view to dispose the public mind favorably to their object.” African Americans in Ohio gained voting rights only with passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870.44
Unique among antebellum conventions, Virginia’s constitutional convention, which met from October 5, 1829, through January 15, 1830, pitted distinct parts of the state against each other in a dispute over linkages among suffrage, slavery, and representation in government. “The elective franchise looks to two objects: first the persons who are to exercise it, that is, suffrage; secondly to the effect of suffrage, that is representation,” observed delegate Robert B. Taylor of Norfolk. With white-only voting a settled issue since colonial times, delegates debated Virginia’s stringent property requirements for suffrage and the apportionment of the state legislature. Urban delegates from Williamsburg, Richmond, and Norfolk and rural delegates from the newly settled, largely nonslaveholding western counties clashed with eastern tidewater slaveholders. Delegate Chapman Johnson observed that beyond principled arguments about the rights of man or the basis of sound government, “We are engaged … in a contest for power.”45
Slaveholding elites defended both strict property requirements for voting and the inclusion of slaves in the population base for apportioning legislative seats. They feared that any diffusion of political power to urban and western areas could result in taxing their slave properties and even challenging slavery itself. In defense of property qualifications, Philip Pendleton Barbour noted that given Virginia’s abundant land, a fifty-acre freehold was “within the reach of every man in the community, who possesses ordinary industry and economy. From such an arrangement, no danger can arise to the liberties of the people.” The young and brash delegate Benjamin Watkins Leigh loudly sounded the alarm against embarking on “an adventurous career of experimental reform” in abandoning the freehold qualification. He warned of the chaos that would follow from the enfranchisement of landless Virginians, whom he compared to the degraded “peasantry of Europe” and to “drunken vagabonds,” and condemned as dangerous “rabble.” “The poor and dependent,” said Philip N. Nicholas, would submit “to the seductions of wealth. The extreme rich and the extreme poor, if not natural allies, will become so in fact.”46 Defenders of the undemocratic status quo in this star-filled convention included Chief Justice John Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court, a diehard Federalist, and past Democratic-Republican presidents James Madison and James Monroe, all of them holders of slaves.
Reformers rejected all arguments by slaveholders as pretext to seal in place eastern control of state government by restricting the suffrage. The vote “is the substratum, the paramount right upon which all these [others] rest for protection, preservation, and safety,” said Lucas P. Thompson. A “minority of one class have taken possession of this right,” he observed, “not by the consent of the majority, but by consent among themselves.” A petition from the “non-freeholders of the City of Richmond” declared that many citizens of Virginia are engaged in pursuits with “no less integrity, requiring as much intelligence … as agricultural pursuits.” Rather than advancing virtue, the privileging of wealth “corrupts and vitiates the very persons it is intended to benefit,” said Robert B. Taylor.47
The base of representation in the state legislature underlay this regional power struggle. In a reprise of controversies at the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, delegates debated whether to include slaves in the basis of legislative representation. The Virginia debates, however, occurred in the context of a state that recognized slaves only as property, raising the question of whether property should be included with people in apportioning state legislative districts.
Eastern delegates insisted on basing representation according to both people and property, because both required protection under the law, they claimed. On the eve of the convention, Justice Marshall said that slave property “is among the most productive funds for taxation, it bears a great portion of the burthens of government and has peculiar claims of that body which is to be entrusted with the power of imposing taxes.” Slave representation, he insisted, was “perhaps the only security against oppressive taxation.” Like slaves, he added, “females, minors, &etc are excluded from the polls, but are included in the enumeration of persons on whom representation is apportioned.”48 John Randolph of Roanoke conceded that he spoke for “the great tobacco-growing and slave-holding interest.” He railed against the tyranny of “King Numbers,” represented by the more numerous nonslaveholders who would oppress those who held slave property with “their monstrous claims of power.”49
The Richmond contingent argued instead for representation based only on people to the exclusion of slaves, the so-called white basis of representation. Otherwise, the slave power would “preponderate and oppress the rest.… Its safest check, its best corrective, is found in a general admission of all upon a footing of equality.” Robert B. Taylor added that just representation must consider only “the people represented.… Property cannot vote; it cannot delegate power; and yet we are told that is to have a representative.”50
Reformers fell two votes short of adopting universal white male suffrage and apportioning the legislature into districts of equal white populations. Instead, the convention compromised on limited economic requirements that modestly increased the pool of eligible voters. It marginally adjusted the apportionment of state legislative seats, with representation still lodged disproportionately in the slaveholding east.51 Former president Monroe pronounced himself satisfied with the new arrangement, saying he supported “some tie which shall connect the voter to the soil,” but that a leasehold still represents “some hold on the land” and gives “security by it to our system of Government.”52 Two decades later, at the constitutional convention of 1850–1851, Virginia slid into conformity with most other states in eliminating its remaining economic qualifications for suffrage. A compromise on representation gave the western part of the commonwealth a majority of seats in the Virginia House of Delegates and the east a state senate majority.53
Rhode Island adopted a new constitution in 1842 in the wake of a domestic insurgency known as Dorr’s Rebellion, which demanded voting rights for disenfranchised whites. By 1840, the state’s stringent property-holding qualifications had excluded about 60 percent of adult white males in a state that led the nation in its urban percentage. Rhode Island’s apportionment of the state legislature by towns cemented control of state government by a rural-based elite minority. Under the leadership of Thomas Wilson Dorr, insurgents, mostly affiliated with the Democratic Party, convened a People’s Convention.54
The Dorrites insisted that democracy did not begin and end with elections but included the right of a sovereign people to abolish and reconstruct their frame of government. The delegates drafted a new constitution that eliminated economic requirements for voting, but to mute criticism against a movement branded as radical and dangerous, upheld a practice established by statute in 1822 of restricting voting to whites only. Thus, the tensions between popular sovereignty and racial exclusion that had marked American antebellum politics emerged full blown in Rhode Island, creating what one abolitionist decried as a “glaring inconsistency” in the Dorr movement for expanded democracy.55
Once the Dorrites steered this “People’s Constitution” to ratification in a statewide popular plebiscite, newly enfranchised voters elected Dorr governor. The state’s old guard mobilized in opposition as a “Law and Order” party that returned incumbent governor Samuel Ward King to office in a separate election under prior suffrage rules. After King declared martial law, Dorr’s followers attempted an unsuccessful armed uprising. On the run from militia forces, the Dorrites disbanded. Among the 3,500 militiamen were more than 200 African Americans disillusioned with the reformers’ exclusion of their race from voting. Ultimately, the rebels gained only limited concessions for a broadened suffrage. Rather than continue to repress an insurgency, the old guard compromised and enacted a new constitution. It established a complex, multitiered system for qualifying voters. It retained property qualifications for naturalized citizens while imposing only tax-paying requirements for native-born Americans. These provisions somewhat expanded suffrage but not substantially enough to threaten the power of the state’s elite.
The “Law and Order Constitution” restored the voting rights of African Americans, about 3 percent of the state’s population. Rhode Island thus became the first—and through the onset of the Civil War the only—American state to have rescinded and then restored black suffrage. However, many African Americans could not have afforded to pay the poll tax of one dollar, about equal to two days’ pay for an unskilled laborer. The constitution precluded alien voting and imposed formidable barriers to voting by naturalized citizens, who comprised a considerable portion of the state’s working class. The people of Rhode Island “would rather have the Negroes vote than the damned Irish,” wrote Elisha Potter, a leader of the Law and Order movement.56
The Dorr Rebellion led to federal litigation with important implications for voting rights. The aptly named Dorrite Martin Luther challenged the “Law and Order” Constitution. He claimed that by retaining economic restrictions on voting, it violated the provision of the U.S. Constitution (art. 4, sec. 4, clause 1) that guaranteed “to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” He petitioned the courts to strike down the Law and Order Constitution and in effect default to the Dorrite Constitution adopted by voters without economic constraints on their suffrage.
The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined in 1849, long after the rebellion’s end, to consider enforcing the “republican form of government” clause. Chief Justice Roger Taney’s opinion for the Court held that “the power of determining that a state government has been lawfully established” did not rest with the courts but with the Congress and president. Taney ruled that with the promulgation of the Law and Order Constitution, “the contest was over” regarding which constitution governed the state. Any further resolution of the matter, he found, was a political question beyond the scope of judicial resolution. Thus, the Court must “examine very carefully its own powers before it undertakes to exercise jurisdiction.” Until the 1960s, the courts generally followed Taney’s precedent and avoided intervention into what later became known as the “political thicket” of voting rights and representation without a clear legal standard. Although weakened considerably, the doctrine still holds some sway in today’s courts.57
New states of the union closely followed the pattern of older states in excluding people of color from the ballot while avoiding economic requirements entirely or imposing only tax-paying qualifications for white males. Beginning with Ohio in 1803, seventeen states entered the union through 1860, bringing the total to thirty-three. In establishing white-only suffrage, as well as eventually eliminating all economic requirements, Ohio set the pattern for other new states. In November 1802, thirty-five Ohio delegates, mostly Democratic-Republicans, drafted a constitution for the emerging state in less than a month. The constitution, which Congress quickly approved, limited voting to white men who paid taxes or labored on state roads. Delegates narrowly agreed to the exclusion of nonwhites from voting, although they outlawed slavery. The constitution apportioned both houses of the state legislature per the number of adult white male inhabitants.58 When a second constitutional convention convened in 1850, delegates decisively rejected suffrage rights for nonwhites but dropped the tax-paying requirement for voting by adult white men.59
In referenda votes, the broader electorate in new states, not just convention delegates, rejected voting rights for nonwhites. Illinois in 1848 defeated nonwhite voting by a 70 percent majority, Michigan in 1850 defeated nonwhite voting by a 71 percent majority, and Iowa in 1857 defeated nonwhite voting by an 85 percent majority. Wisconsin held three referenda over the course of a decade. Voters defeated nonwhite suffrage by 66 percent in 1847, then reversed this verdict by a 56 percent majority in 1849. After the state courts nullified this referendum because its low turnout of 9,340 failed to meet minimum state law standards, voters again rejected black suffrage in 1857 by 59 percent.60 A few of these new states enfranchised Native Americans as a special category of nonwhites. But these paper rights for Indians came with tight restrictions that nullified their effect. Some states, for example, allowed voting by so-called civilized Indians who “were not a member of any tribe.”61
To reconcile the ideal of “universal suffrage” with the disenfranchisement of nonwhites, political leaders insisted that certain people, like women and children, fell outside the political community, given their inherent inability to vote wisely and independently. Still, on the eve of the Civil War, the ideal of a “white man’s Republic” remained America’s unfinished work. American lawmakers came close but never quite achieved the finality of granting voting rights universally to adult white males. Property qualifications for voting had disappeared, and only a handful of states had tax-paying requirements. But decision-makers hedged their backing of universal suffrage even for white males by excluding people deemed unfit for political participation on grounds of moral or mental deficiency, dependence on the state, lack of a stable residence, or alien affiliation.
These exclusions were widespread. About half the states disenfranchised felons, and nearly a quarter denied the vote to individuals of unsound mind, variously defined, and to paupers, commonly defined as people dependent on state welfare. Virtually every state had residency restrictions, typically ranging from one to two years of residence in the state and three months to a year of residence in the county or town. Residency qualifications were onerous in America’s highly mobile society. Analysis of census data shows that 26 percent of white, native-born men aged twenty to twenty-nine and 11 percent of men aged forty to forty-nine moved from one state to another during the 1850s.62 Only a handful of states, mostly in the West, permitted aliens to vote. Other states either limited voting to citizens in their initial frames of government or in revised constitutions.63
Two states concluded that only the literate had the fitness to vote. In the 1850s, Massachusetts and Connecticut adopted literacy tests for voting, a sword wielded against Irish immigrants, not African Americans. Although estimates are uncertain, these many noneconomic restrictions likely disenfranchised some 10 to 15 percent of America’s adult white male citizen population.64
Most states in the antebellum period expanded the eighteenth-century roster of elected offices to include judges and governors. They also eliminated or refrained from establishing economic requirements for holding state office. However, nearly all established more stringent age and residency qualifications for office-holding than for voting, especially for state senates and governorships. States generally restricted their state senates to people aged twenty-five years old or more and their governorships to those aged thirty years or above. Residency requirements for the state senate ranged primarily from two to four years and from four to six years for governors.
Typically states adopted some form of population-based apportionment for state legislative and congressional districts, usually based on the number of qualified electors, although regional imbalances in the base of representation remained. Apportionment by population rather than fixed geography created new biases in the voting for Congress and state and local legislatures. Given the lack of clear principles or court supervision, state legislatures had a relatively free hand in drawing the boundaries of population-based districts.
Although the term “gerrymander” had not yet been coined at the time of the Constitutional Convention, James Madison warned delegates there, in support of Congress’s authority to make or alter state election practices, that “whenever the State Legislatures had a favorite measure to carry, they would take care so to mould their regulations as to favor the candidates they wished to succeed.… Besides, the inequality of the Representation in the Legislatures of particular States, would produce a like inequality in their representation in the Natl. Legislature.”65
When Madison ran for the first U.S. House of Representatives from Virginia in 1788, he became the target of what we now term a political gerrymander. Led by Patrick Henry, Madison’s Anti-Federalist opponents, who controlled the Virginia legislature, manipulated the drawing of congressional district lines to place Madison within a geographically extended district filled with political opponents. The legislature required a year’s residence in a congressional district, so he could not run in a more favorable district. Madison survived the gerrymander by personally campaigning across the district and appealing to Anti-Federalists by promising to support the addition of a Bill or Rights to the Constitution. Ironically, Anti-Federalist efforts to deny Madison a congressional seat contributed to their goal of obtaining a Bill of Rights as the first amendments to the new Constitution.66
Partisans in some state legislatures across the nation continued to design electoral districts for statehouses and Congress that favored their preferred candidates. Even town councils and county commissions began to design districts for partisan advantage. Although as Madison proved, the practice of custom-designing districts was not infallible, it still diluted people’s votes by minimizing their opportunities to elect candidates of their choice.
In 1812, when Elbridge Gerry, the governor of Massachusetts, signed a redistricting plan for the state senate biased toward his Democratic-Republican Party, critics decried one contorted district as a “monster,” “the spawn of the devil,” or “Beelzebub come to life.” Mostly they thought it resembled a salamander, which led them to coin the epithet “gerrymander” as a merger of the district’s shape and governor’s last name. The gerrymandering of districts became more widespread over time as party systems matured during the early nineteenth century and partisan conflict intensified.67
With minimal success some states adopted measures designed to curb the widely recognized evil of the gerrymander. These included requirements that districts must be compact and contiguous (connected at all points), that counties should not be divided, and that reapportionment must not occur more frequently than once every ten years. Some states ended the district-level election of congressional representatives and reverted to at-large elections of the state’s delegation by all voters in the state. This meant, however, that in the new age of partisanship, the dominant political party in the state could sweep the entire congressional delegation. In response, Congress passed the Apportionment Act of 1842, which required states with more than one representative to elect members of Congress in single-member, contiguous districts. Nonetheless, it did not act to curb the gerrymandering of districts, and disputes over the 1842 regulations led several states to postpone their congressional elections until the following year. Congress repealed the district election requirement in 1850 but restored it in 1862.68
Both Congress and state governments in the antebellum period left largely untouched the eighteenth-century practice of local control over the administration of elections. Decision-makers in both older and new states continued to defer to local election officials, with minimal state oversight or efforts to harmonize differing local practices. Delegates to the many constitutional conventions held prior to the Civil War either ignored or briefly and inconclusively discussed issues related to the administration of elections even as they engaged in bracing debates over laws governing suffrage and legislative apportionment. In a history of local election practices, historian Alec C. Ewald concludes, “I find not a single instance in which delegates seriously considered stripping local officials of the responsibility to decide how, when, and where American ballots would be cast and counted.” Congress likewise failed to exercise its constitutional powers to take control over the loose and inconsistent conduct of elections for federal office.69
With their eyes wide open to the enfranchisement of masses of workers without property of their own, the men who made and remade state constitutions in antebellum America adopted the model of white man’s suffrage largely unencumbered by economic requirements.70 As early as the Constitutional Convention of 1787, delegate Gouverneur Morris, a supporter of property qualifications, warned that “the time is not distant when this Country will abound with mechanics & manufacturers who will receive their bread from their employers.” James Madison backed this view, saying, “In future times a great majority of the people will not only be without landed, but any other sort of, property.”71
Defenders of property qualifications in the states made similar claims, without success. In 1800, a year before the Maryland legislature struck down property qualifications, the Federalist-controlled state senate warned that in “future times … a considerable proportion” of the state’s population “will probably be, as we find it in other countries, destitute of property, and without sufficient virtue and knowledge to resist the arts, the corruptions and the impositions of ambitious men, desirous of raising themselves to power, even on the ruins of public liberty and happiness.” The electorate dismissed the prior senate in the next election, and the new body, controlled by Democratic-Republicans, joined the House in eliminating economic qualifications.72
During New York’s constitutional convention of 1821, Chancellor James Kent futilely defended property qualification with the warning,
We are no longer to remain plain and simple republics of farmers.… The growth of the city of New York is enough to startle and awaken those who are pursuing the ignis fatuus [deceptive goal] of universal suffrage. It is rapidly swelling into the unwieldy population, and with the burdensome pauperism, of an European metropolis. New York is destined to become the future London of America; and in less than a century, that city, with the operation of universal suffrage, and under skillful direction, will govern this state.
Most delegates at the New York convention accepted broad suffrage, not because they disagreed with this vision but, as historian Chilton Williamson explains, because “it would make for repose and stability,” whereas its rejection would “shake the very foundations of society.”73
The men who wrote laws and enacted constitutions in antebellum America chose to incorporate the nonagricultural working class in the political system rather than assume the costs of exclusion and repression. Among older states, the elimination of property qualifications did not turn on the balance between those with and without an attachment to the soil. The still predominantly agricultural states of Connecticut, New York, and Maryland abolished property qualifications before 1825, whereas New Jersey, Rhode Island (largely), and Virginia did so only after 1840, when their industrial and commercial workforce outnumbered those engaged in agriculture. Among the seventeen new states entering the union after 1800, none imposed property qualifications for voting and only three required the payment of a tax.
The extinction of nonwhite voting was the essential counterpoint to the simultaneous expansion of white, working-class suffrage. The inclusion of whites and the exclusion of nonwhites from the political community reinforced the erasure of class distinctions by distinctions of race. No matter how downtrodden a white male voter, he could still look down with race pride on the disenfranchised black people beneath him. John C. Calhoun, a U.S. senator from South Carolina and former vice president of the United States, captured in 1849 the idea of white privilege that prevailed in the South and North: “With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and the poor, but white and black.” Only whites, “the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.”74
Even with the limitations of its model of a white man’s republic, the United States in 1860 remained the world’s leader in opportunities for voting and representation across social classes. In Europe and Latin America, the push for democracy generally failed to overcome the power of entrenched elites, monarchs, and self-made despots. Despite the founding of independent nations in Latin America and the upheavals of the democratic revolutions of 1848 that swept across many European nations, suffrage reform in every democratic nation through the first six decades of the nineteenth century was incomplete, leaving most ordinary citizens without voting rights. Yet, despite the relative expansiveness of American democracy in a world still ruled by privileged elites, the United States maintained a racially exclusive franchise that would become fiercely contested during the Reconstruction that followed the Civil War and the liberation of the slaves. The nation grappled with the question of whether it could redeem the sacrifices and promises of the war without according full citizenship rights, including the franchise, to its now free black population. Even more vexing was the question of whether the principle of voting rights for blacks extended to other excluded Americans.