“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
—William Faulkner
Every generation likes to say the challenges they’re facing are unprecedented—but when it comes to attacks on our right to vote, the reason we need to be vigilant isn’t that this threat is novel. It’s that it isn’t.
For most of America’s history, democracy hasn’t been the rule. It’s been the exception.
That was true before the first shots were fired in Lexington and Concord. Back then, each of the thirteen colonies had its own rules for voting. What they had in common, though, was that their elections didn’t reflect the will of the people.
There were exceptions, but for the most part, if you were Native American, you couldn’t vote. If you were African American, you couldn’t vote. If you were a woman, you couldn’t vote. And even if you were a white man, you couldn’t vote, unless you owned enough property or paid enough in taxes.
In this way, when America was founded, voting wasn’t a right. It was a privilege, one our founders believed should be reserved only for citizens with white skin, both X and Y chromosomes, and enough land, cash, or bodies—yes, bodies—to their name.
Exactly how much property you needed to own varied from colony to colony. In New Hampshire, they measured property based on its value in cash: If you weren’t worth 50 pounds, you were out of luck. In Virginia, whether you could vote came down to how much land you owned: If you had 100 acres, you were good. If you only had 25, they needed to be well manicured. And if you had any fewer, you’d better not show up on Election Day, lest you be told you were too broke to vote.
In some colonies, like Connecticut, property qualifications were, as Governor Oliver Wolcott wrote, “essentially nugatory,” meaning they weren’t enforced at all. But in most, they were binding. And in some, if you were Catholic or Jewish it didn’t even matter how much property you had; unless you were Protestant, you had no business casting a ballot.
But while restrictions on the right to vote are as old as America, so too is the desire among Americans to be the masters of our own fate. That belief in the power of the people is what inspired the colonies to declare their independence from an empire. And in the centuries that have followed, generation after generation of suffragists have devoted their lives to making the dream of self-determination a reality for all.
As you read the following chapters, you will recognize, as I do every time I reflect on the history of our country, that the expansion of the franchise was anything but inevitable. It was, instead, the work of Americans from all backgrounds—rich and poor, Black and white, men and women—none of whom were perfect, some of whom you’ve heard of, others of whom have been forgotten, all of whom shared a conviction that they should have a say in how they were governed, even if they had to risk their lives to win it.
Thomas Wilson Dorr was one of those Americans, but he wasn’t exactly the kind of guy you’d expect to become a leader in the fight for voting rights. He was a rich kid who went to Phillips Exeter Academy for high school and became a Harvard freshman at fourteen years old. A portrait of a populist he was not.
But Dorr didn’t want to be the kind of aristocrat who, as one nearby newspaper satirized, “gets up leisurely, breakfasts comfortably, reads the papers regularly, dresses fashionably, lounges fastidiously, eats a tart gravely, talks insipidly, dines considerably, drinks superfluously, kills time indifferently, sups elegantly, goes to bed stupidly, and lives uselessly.”
He much preferred to spend his time with people who had it worse than he did—people like Seth Luther, a self-proclaimed “journeyman carpenter” from Providence, Rhode Island, who helped convince Dorr that their home state was in need of a revolution.
For more than a century, Rhode Island had laws in place that limited the right to vote to residents who owned property valued at upward of $134. For Luther, whose father was a veteran of the Revolutionary War, this felt arbitrary, and not only that—it also felt like a slap in the face of those who risked their lives for independence from Britain. “This law is contrary to the Declaration of Independence,” he declared in his 1833 “Address on the Right of Free Suffrage,” adding that it was “strange that a self-evident truth should require proof.” He then left those who disagreed with him with an insult fit for a rap battle: “May all Traitors, Tyrants, Tories, and Aristocrats never find anything but onions to wipe their weeping eyes.”
Dorr lacked Luther’s oratory gifts, but he was a more palatable messenger—and in July 1841, a decade after Luther delivered his speech, the Harvard wunderkind teamed up with the members of the Rhode Island Suffrage Association to lead a movement aimed at expanding the franchise. Together, they convened a People’s Constitutional Convention, invited folks who didn’t have access to the ballot from across the state to join them, and drafted a document they proposed should be the new constitution of Rhode Island. This “People’s Constitution,” if implemented, would have eliminated property qualifications once and for, well, not all. Despite objections from abolitionists—and despite Dorr’s past membership in the American Anti-Slavery Society—the People’s Constitutional Convention decided to bar African Americans from voting.
In the months that followed, the Suffrage Association barnstormed from town to town, making the case for change, and ultimately deciding to bring the People’s Constitution up for a statewide vote. At the time, it was unclear whether this referendum would have any standing, but at the very least they thought it would send a loud message. And it did: On Election Day, in April 1842, 14,000 Rhode Islanders voted for the People’s Constitution, while just 52 voted against it.
Later that year, under the questionable jurisdiction of this new constitution, Dorr was elected governor. But there was a problem. Rhode Island’s supreme court ruled that the People’s Constitution was…unconstitutional. And the state’s general assembly, along with the four-term incumbent governor, Samuel Ward King, made it clear that if Dorr tried to take office, he would be guilty of treason. Even President John Tyler promised to send federal troops to Rhode Island to quell the rebellion.
But none of this deterred Dorr. On May 3, 1842, the Suffrage Association came together and held an inaugural parade for him. And two weeks later, under the cover of night, they stormed the state’s arsenal—even though Dorr’s own father and uncles were in the building. They were living the mantra of Seth Luther: “Peaceably if we can. Forcibly if we must.”
The problem was that this makeshift militia wasn’t exactly built for war—especially because they had to square up against not only the state of Rhode Island, but also the African Americans who decided to fight alongside the incumbent government after they were spurned by the rebels. And when it came time for Dorr’s soldiers to fire their cannons, the weapons malfunctioned. That is how Dorr’s rebellion ended—not with a bang but a whimper.
Dorr tried to flee the state but eventually decided to return. And when he did, the governor declared martial law, which led to the arrest of Dorr and more than a hundred members of his militia, who were bound with ropes, starved for a day, and brutalized by the state. At his hearing, Dorr was sentenced to life and hard labor, but after public outcry when he fell ill behind bars, he was released, and died a few years later at the age of forty-nine—a riches-to-rags story.
Luther, meanwhile, had a mental breakdown during his imprisonment, robbed a bank when he was released, passed away in the Vermont Asylum for the Insane soon after, and was laid to rest in an unmarked grave.
But while the government crushed the rebellion, they did write up a new constitution within months. By the end of 1842, both white and Black Rhode Islanders without land could vote. And decades later, long after he died in infamy, Thomas Dorr was recognized by the state of Rhode Island as its sixteenth governor.
When America declared our independence from Great Britain and won the Revolutionary War, our founders were in an awkward spot.
On the one hand, they wanted to build a government that, unlike Britain’s, was actually representative of the people. After all, their slogan during the revolution had been “No taxation without representation,” and it would’ve been tough to just say, “Never mind,” after the war was over. On the other hand, the framers needed to receive sign-off on the Constitution from colonies where the promise of the Declaration of Independence didn’t even remotely resemble reality, as evidenced by the millions of people they enslaved. And many of the founders themselves didn’t actually believe in the equality of the polity.
So at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, they saved their debate on voting rights for the end. By that point in the convention, everyone was exhausted from months of negotiations. George Washington didn’t even bother showing up that day. He went fishing instead.
And when you look back on the minutes of that meeting, it’s hard to blame him. Things got messy.
Back then, none of the framers had even considered granting the right to vote to women, African Americans, or Native Americans—so their debate, like the one Rhode Island would have half a century later, boiled down to whether white men who didn’t own land should be able to participate in elections. At the time, most leaders believed the answer to that question was no. Their reasoning was voiced at the convention by Gouverneur Morris, the Founding Father who—because hypocrisy is as American as corn dogs, apple pie, and the McRib—is best known for deciding to start the Constitution with the words “We the People.”
First, Morris explained, he was afraid that if you “give the votes to people who have no property, they will sell them to the rich who will be able to buy them.” This was a common fear at the time, one that can be traced back to a judge in England named William Blackstone, who wrote that the justification for property qualifications was to “exclude such persons as are in so mean a situation that they are esteemed to have no will of their own.”
“If these persons had votes,” he wrote in Commentaries on the Laws of England, “they would be tempted to dispose of them under some undue influence.”
In the eighteenth century, this fear was exacerbated by the fact that the secret ballot still hadn’t become the norm. Instead, as historian Jill Lepore writes in her essential New Yorker essay “Rock, Paper, Scissors: How We Used to Vote,” “Americans used to vote with their voices—viva voce—or with their hands or with their feet. Yea or nay. Raise your hand. All in favor of Jones, stand on this side of the town common; if you support Smith, line up over there.” This made it much easier to buy votes—because if your boss asked you to support Smith on Monday, he could see whether you lined up on the right side of the room on Tuesday.
Of course, this wasn’t the only reason leaders like Gouverneur Morris opposed allowing those who didn’t own property to vote. They also believed the poor didn’t have the requisite judgment to help decide elections. “Children do not vote,” Morris explained, comparing those without property to those without fully developed brains. “Why? Because they want prudence, because they have no will of their own.” He continued: “The ignorant and the dependent can be as little trusted with the public interest.”
John Dickinson, a delegate from Pennsylvania, agreed. Landowners, he argued, were “the best guardians of liberty,” and added that “the restriction of the right to them” was a “necessary defense against the dangerous influence of those multitudes without property and without principle.” Elbridge Gerry, the Founding Father for whom gerrymandering was named (much more on that later), said the quiet part out loud. “Democracy,” he exclaimed, is “the worst of all political evils”—an opinion that might sound radical, but actually put him in the company of James Madison, who wrote in Federalist No. 10 that democratic elections are decided through “vicious arts” by “men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs,” and John Adams, who wrote that if the propertyless were allowed to vote, “an immediate revolution would ensue.”
That’s right: The Founding Fathers believed poor people shouldn’t be enfranchised both because they would be too beholden to the wealthy and because they might end up leading a revolution against the wealthy. It never made sense. But cognitive dissonance came easily to the generation of Americans who signed a document at work that read “all men are created equal” and then went home to plantations full of men and women they enslaved.
So, those were the two public reasons the framers believed only those with property should vote—but there was a third reason, too, one they did not bring up at the convention. And it was this: They knew that if they expanded access to the ballot to any additional group, others would clamor to be next. As Adams wrote in a private letter to a friend:
The same reasoning which will induce you to admit all men, who have no property, to vote, with those who have…will prove that you ought to admit women and children; for, generally speaking, women and children have as good judgment, and as independent minds, as those men who are wholly destitute of property; these last being to all intents and purposes as much dependent upon others, who will please to feed, clothe, and employ them, as women are upon their husbands, or children on their parents.
There will be no end of it. New claims will arise; women will demand the vote; lads from twelve to twenty-one will think their rights not enough attended to; and every man who has not a farthing will demand an equal voice with any other, in all acts of state. It tends to confound and destroy all distinctions and prostrate all ranks to one common level.
This fear was widespread among our founders, but there were some who nonetheless believed in expanding the franchise. Edward Rutledge, from South Carolina, argued that “restraining the right of suffrage…would create division among the people and make enemies of all who should be excluded.” And George Mason, one of the three delegates to the convention who ultimately refused to sign the Constitution, had a strong conviction that “every man having evidence of attachment to, and permanent common interest with the society ought to share in all its rights and privileges.” To him, the idea that you needed to own land to have a voice wasn’t only wrong. It was patently ridiculous.
That’s how Benjamin Franklin saw it, too. At the convention, his arguments were more restrained, full of muted, milquetoast reasoning like, “The sons of a substantial farmer, not being themselves freeholders, would not be pleased at being disenfranchised.” But in other settings, he was far more direct in his rebuke of property requirements, laying out the case against them through an analogy that came to be known simply as Franklin’s Jackass:
Today a man owns a jackass worth fifty dollars and he is entitled to vote; but before the next election the jackass dies. The man in the meantime has become more experienced, his knowledge of the principles of government, and his acquaintance with mankind, are more extensive, and he is therefore better qualified to make a proper selection of rulers—but the jackass is dead and the man cannot vote. Now gentlemen, pray inform me, in whom is the right of suffrage? In the man or in the jackass?
It was a characteristically compelling argument—one that would be cited in the decades that followed, including by Rhode Island’s Seth Luther in his “Address on the Right of Free Suffrage.” But at the Constitutional Convention, after hours of debate, the founders decided to dodge the issue of voting rights altogether, leaving discretion to the states. Somehow, even with all the big personalities in the room, it was actually Oliver Ellsworth, one of the forgotten founders, whose logic won out: “The states,” he said, “are the best judges of the circumstances and temper of their own people,” and most ended up choosing only to allow white men with land to vote.
This meant that for all intents and purposes, at its founding, America was not a democracy. To put a number on it: When George Washington first ran for president, only one in sixteen Americans was eligible to vote. Six percent. And those who qualified didn’t even cast ballots for president directly. They voted, instead, on which representatives their state should send to the Electoral College—representatives who, back then, could choose to vote for whoever they liked. Races for the Senate were even less democratic, decided not by the people but by state legislatures. And the elections themselves were corrupt in innumerable ways.
As Chilton Williamson recounts in American Suffrage: From Property to Democracy:
Poll officials everywhere were variously accused of admitting illegal voters to the polls, denying qualified persons the right to vote, suppressing legal votes in the count, stuffing ballot boxes, winking at intimidation of electors, opening and closing the polls capriciously, and dropping legal votes to the floor which were later burned with the genuine debris of electoral activities.
Voter fraud may largely be a myth today, but in the early days of our democracy, it was very real. In his exhaustive survey of American elections in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Williamson found tale after tale of chicanery. In Philadelphia, for a few years, elections came down to which campaign controlled the staircase at the polling station, since they could physically block their opponents from casting ballots. In Trenton, New Jersey, the result of one particularly close election was ultimately decided by a sheriff—who closed the polls early even though he knew dozens of voters were still trying to cast their ballots, because he thought doing so would help his preferred candidate. And in towns across the country, candidates would get around property requirements by buying a plot of land right before Election Day and listing their supporters as its owners, an idea you can imagine them thinking was so crazy that it just might work. (Sometimes, it did.)
Then there was the problem of distance. In many places, voters had to travel Odyssean lengths to make their voices heard. In South Carolina, for instance, there were citizens who lived more than 150 miles from the nearest polling location. Mind you, the car would not be invented for more than a century, so if you wanted to commute to the polls, you had to do so by a mode of transportation with a horsepower of one.
Things became a bit less chaotic—and corruptible—with the proliferation of the secret ballot in the 1890s, but even then, votes were easy to suppress. As Lepore writes: “You had to bring your own ballot, a scrap of paper. You had to (a) remember and (b) know how to spell the name of every candidate and office. If ‘John Jones’ was standing for election, and you wrote ‘Jon Jones,’ your vote could be thrown out.” What’s worse: Those without money were the “least likely to know how to write,” which meant the secret ballot amounted to a literacy test.
Votes were easy to buy, too. “Shrewd partisans began bringing prewritten ballots to the polls, and handing them out with a coin or two,” Lepore writes. “Doling out cash—the money came to be called ‘soap’—wasn’t illegal; it was getting out the vote.”
Over time, however, elections became more orderly—and more inclusive. Starting with Vermont in 1791, eventually every new state admitted to the union adopted a constitution that allowed those without property to vote, which inspired the states that had been the original thirteen colonies to do the same. In 1792, Delaware eliminated its property requirement. A decade later, Maryland followed suit. When Andrew Jackson ran his populist campaign in 1828, the vast majority of white men had been granted access to the ballot. And by the end of the 1860s, after the rebellion in Rhode Island, property requirements were entirely a relic of the past.
So what changed?
As Alexander Keyssar argues in The Right to Vote, the definitive book on the history of voting rights in America, there were three main reasons the United States opened up its elections.
First and foremost, our elected officials were worried about national security. During the War of 1812, it was hard to find soldiers willing to fight for our country—and since those without property didn’t have a say in electing the government that would be sending them to war, who could blame them for refusing to enlist? Even among those who did join militias, there was widespread discontent with a democracy that could send them to die but did not allow them to vote. After all, in some units, more than seven in every ten soldiers were disenfranchised.
In states across the country—from New York to Alabama, Massachusetts to Illinois—this injustice was invoked at constitutional conventions. In Virginia, the landless lamented a government that “in the hour of danger” drew “no invidious distinctions between the sons of Virginia,” even though, “in times of peace,” it “ignominiously” blocked their access to “the polls.” Ultimately, these arguments proved persuasive.
Of course, as Keyssar points out, many of those who made them were hypocrites themselves, unwilling or unable to see why the reasoning they provided for their own enfranchisement should apply to African Americans as well. The Virginia delegation, for instance, which self-righteously declared that property requirements created “an odious distinction between members of the same community,” wrote that “for obvious reasons, by almost universal consent, women and children, aliens and slaves are excluded.” For obvious reasons, huh?
In fact, the desire to preserve slavery was actually itself an impetus for states in the South to come around to the idea of granting poor whites the right to vote on the grounds of “security.” As one delegate to Virginia’s delegation argued, “All slave-holding states are fast approaching a crisis truly alarming, a time when freemen will be needed, when every man must be at his post.” What he meant was that, when African Americans rebelled against slavery, “every free white human being” would need to “unite” to stop them.
That argument won out—and, as Keyssar lays out, it was one of the reasons the South joined the North in expanding the franchise.
The second reason was money. The United States is a big country. And in the decades after the Revolution, European settlers had still not occupied most of it, so states had to compete with one another for new settlers (and the tax dollars that came with them). One of the ways they won these settlers over was by offering them the right to vote, regardless of whether they owned property. Because, even back then, people all around the world recognized the value of the franchise. As a delegate in Illinois asked, “Should we not hold out to the world the greatest inducement for men to come amongst us, to till our prairies, to work in our mines, and to develop the vast and inexhaustible resources of our state?”
This argument gained popularity across the United States, and it led to a cycle of enfranchisement: Once one state offered an incentive for prospective residents to inhabit it, other states felt pressure to follow suit.
A similar feedback loop drove the third reason for the abolition of property requirements: politics. Beginning in the 1820s, states started to hold popular elections—and often there would be a divergence in the qualifications to vote in statewide elections and federal ones. In North Carolina, for instance, you had to own property if you wanted a say in U.S. Senate races, but didn’t need a dollar to your name to vote for governor. This meant that for the first time in the history of the United States, there was an incentive for gubernatorial candidates to campaign on expanding access to the ballot to other elections, which was exactly what North Carolina’s David Reid decided to do when he ran for governor in 1850.
According to Keyssar, at the beginning of the race, no one thought Reid had a shot, but he promised that if he won, he would pass a constitutional amendment allowing all fifty thousand free white men in North Carolina who didn’t own property to participate in Senate races. And it worked. Because people really wanted the right to vote.
On Election Day, Reid turned out an unprecedented number of voters, and as governor, he followed through on his promise to expand access to the franchise for Senate elections. Enfranchisement, in other words, begat enfranchisement.
Stories like this took place around the country—and eventually, political parties realized they had no choice but to fall in line. Because otherwise, their opponents would sweep election after election. That’s why, after Reid’s victory, the Whigs, who had previously said his proposals would lead to “a system of communism unjust and Jacobinical,” joined his effort to amend the state’s constitution.
Over the following decades, national turnout nearly tripled, from 27 percent of white men in the 1820s to 78 percent in the 1840s—and across the country, support for property requirements started to be seen as illogical, unless, as one delegate to the Virginia convention quipped, “there be something in the ownership of land, that by enchantment or magic, converts frail erring man into an infallible and impeccable being.” (The shade!)
This marked the beginning of a new era of American democracy, one where access to the ballot was no longer viewed as a privilege. Suddenly, voting was a right—as long as you were male and white.
It was an era birthed by Americans without land who made the very short logical leap from the nation’s founding creed to their right to vote and did whatever it took to get it. In Rhode Island, that meant cosplaying democracy, writing their own constitution, electing their own governor, and storming the state capitol—wielding the power of rebellion. Out west, it meant strangers agreeing to move to a strange land, but only if they were promised a say in how it was run, wielding the power of their tax dollars. In the South, it meant threatening to refuse to wear the country’s uniform in wars abroad or quell slave rebellions at home unless they were granted the vote, wielding the power to inflict fear on the powerful.
Eventually, the privileged simply deemed it more costly to continue to deny landless white men the vote than to grant it to them—though they had no intention of expanding access to the franchise any further. But as John Adams had anticipated, this equilibrium was unsustainable. Once white men felt entitled to the right to vote, so too did the African Americans, women, and other disenfranchised Americans who knew they were no less deserving of a voice in their democracy. But that didn’t mean they would get one. Because, as Frederick Douglass recognized, in America, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.”
How the next generation of Americans demanded the right to vote, and what we can learn from them, is the subject of chapters to come.
And if you’re not down with the cause, well, in Luther’s words, I hope you never find anything but onions to wipe your weeping eyes.