Property Enfranchised and Disfranchised

At the start of the American experiment, governments were almost exclusively elected by those who possessed landed property. Property-based suffrage laws reflected both the colonial economic system, under which most colonists were subsistence farmers, and English and American legal traditions, which dictated that voters with property were those members of society most connected to the state.²⁴ Only property holders, colonial Americans believed, were independent enough to act politically without being unduly influenced by others; only they had “a will of their own.”²⁵ By the time the thirteen colonies revolted against England, eleven required a voter to possess a quantity of personal or landed property in order to participate in local, state, and federal elections.²⁶

Because property was considered the most relevant determinant of voting fitness, after the Revolution many Americans who were neither white nor male but who possessed sufficient property were able to cast ballots. Before the mid-1800s in Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Vermont, free African American men were “tacitly enfranchised.”²⁷ However, local prejudice may also have served tacitly to dis-franchise any African American who sought to vote.²⁸ Thus it is hard to know the extent to which free African Americans actively voted in these states, but given the amount of property required and the constrained economic position of many northern free blacks, it is likely that the number of black voters was fairly low. African Americans certainly cast ballots in areas of New York and in at least seven counties in Pennsylvania, evidence of which comes from sources occasionally blaming them for partisan losses.²⁹ In these cases, African American voters were probably convenient political scapegoats rather than a swelling tide overtaking the polls. Regardless of how many or few African Americans voted, it is important to note that at least some northern states acknowledged their right to do so.

Although women’s voting was significantly less widespread, it was similarly permitted under the property-based franchise. In the colonial period some women voted locally in Massachusetts and New York, but after the Revolution only New Jersey permitted propertied women to vote.³⁰ The state’s first constitution used distinctly gender-neutral terms outlining its suffrage provisions, declaring that “all inhabitants of this Colony, of full age, who are worth fifty pounds in proclamation money, clear estate in the same… shall be entitled to vote.”³¹ In 1790, the state’s election law made it clear that the phrase “all inhabitants” really did mean all inhabitants. Explicitly acknowledging that women with sufficient property were voters, it declared:

Whether it was the commitment to the principle of the propertied ballot, the logic of American revolutionary political theory, or parties’ need for voters, until 1807 New Jersey’s politicians actively supported women’s enfranchisement, deeming wealthy single women sufficiently independent and capable.³³ Although it is difficult to know precisely how many of New Jersey’s female citizens voted, enough did so that they drew complaints from defeated partisans. One Democratic-Republican newspaper estimated in 1802 that women “in some townships… made up almost a fourth of the total votes.”³⁴ Although this number seems high, it is clear that some of the state’s women were sufficiently politicized and politically engaged to routinely cast ballots in the early Republic.³⁵

Despite these opportunities for women and African American men to vote, in the first few decades of America’s independence the franchise remained fairly restricted. Alexander Keyssar estimates that by the Revolution the “proportion of adult white males who were eligible to vote was probably less than 60 percent.”³⁶ During the early Republic, however, American ideas about the link between property and voting began to shift. Reflecting the war’s rallying cry of “no taxation without representation,” as well as the demands of the landless for the ballot, in the late 1700s some states expanded the franchise to taxpayers and to poor men who had served in the military.³⁷ But in the early nineteenth century, as America expanded and began to modernize and as many middle-class men moved away from land accumulation and toward commerce, industry, and professions, the link between property and the franchise weakened.³⁸

First, economic, demographic, and political changes altered the meaning of land in the American imagination. In the first few decades of the nineteenth century, in the shift from subsistence agriculture to capitalist production, farmers increasingly began to rent land. Hence land ownership lost a degree of political significance.³⁹ At the same time, America’s northern cities grew into commercial centers of industrial production and domestic economic exchange populated by growing numbers of American migrants and European immigrants—none of whom owned enough land to qualify for the franchise.⁴⁰ Cheap western land also disrupted the connection between property ownership and voting rights. In the fifty years after the Revolution, as European Americans displaced and decimated the West’s Native American populations, they opened up wide swaths of land for settlement and speculative purchase. Speculation transformed the land that once had been a “source of independence and authority,” Gordon Wood argues, into a “commodity to be exchanged… fluctuat[ing] and chang[ing] hands so frequently” that it offered “no basis for the right to vote.”⁴¹ Reflecting this sentiment, the new western states adopted suffrage laws that were more liberal than those of the older eastern states.⁴² None of the fifteen states added to the Union after 1800 required voters to own property, and only four adopted a tax-based restriction to the franchise.⁴³

Southern states were also in the process of rethinking the relationship of property to the ballot in the years after the Revolution. As northern states gradually eliminated slavery, it expanded in the South, becoming increasingly interpreted as essential to the southern way of life.⁴⁴ For slaveholders, therefore, enlisting propertyless southern whites in defense of slavery offered a powerful motivation for expanding the franchise.⁴⁵ Between 1790 and 1850, the five original slaveholding colonies dropped or reduced their property and/or taxation requirements to permit poorer whites to vote.⁴⁶

At the same time that slavery was becoming more entrenched in the South, white Americans in all regions increasingly championed their own equality and independence.⁴⁷ In the first half of the nineteenth century, Americans, particularly northerners, celebrated their own perceived equality and social mobility, revering the “self-made man” as the paragon of autonomous, political manhood.⁴⁸ In light of these shifts, many Americans began to view independence not as an artifact of property possession but rather as a reflection of how successfully a man contracted his skills in exchange for wages. As the historian Eric Foner put it, “Every man had a property in his own labor.”⁴⁹ If the most critical property men owned was their labor power, which alone identified them as autonomous individuals, it seemed excessively restrictive to identify either real estate holdings or personal wealth as the mark of an independent voter.⁵⁰

But perhaps the most significant factor weakening the link between property and voting rights was the development of competitive partisan politics. Infrastructural improvements such as roads, bridges, canals, railroads, and eventually the telegraph all facilitated the rapid movement of political ideas in the early nineteenth century.⁵¹ Further, a new sense of transparency in American political procedure also fostered the growth of popular politics; for the first time many legislatures began to offer gallery seating space for observers. Some states even mandated open legislative deliberations in their new constitutions.⁵² These policies enabled newspapers between 1810 and 1830 to begin routinely carrying transcriptions of legislative debates.⁵³ When the policies were combined with improved printing and papermaking that led to the rise of the partisan press, Americans in the early nineteenth century had greater, and faster, access to information about their communities, states, nation, and world than ever before.⁵⁴ These changes increased Americans’ interest in politics and encouraged their political engagement regardless of their economic status.⁵⁵

This interest found an outlet in the emerging competitive partisan system that was organized around dual-party competition, relied on popular appeals, and cultivated individuals’ ideological commitments to their preferred party.⁵⁶ Fostered by urban artisans’ activism and organization, the popular politics of partisan competition was codified during the presidency of Andrew Jackson with the professionalization of the Democratic Party and the emergence of the opposition Whigs.⁵⁷ Both parties’ appeals to the “egalitarian” public resulted in the development of an extraordinarily vibrant public political culture; backroom negotiations and influence wielding were replaced by democratic expressions of political fervor in the streets, taverns, and parade grounds.⁵⁸ Because this new politics of popular engagement was fundamentally incompatible with property restrictions, states began changing their suffrage laws. Of the thirty-one states present in the union, between 1790 and 1855 seventeen eliminated the possession of property as a qualification for voting.⁵⁹

Although the parties needed voters to win elections, they were interested only in certain kinds of voters: those who were white and male. In the fifteen new states added after 1800 and before 1850, all but Maine and Texas used the word “white” to define voters.⁶⁰ By 1850, only in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Georgia, and Vermont could free African Americans vote without restriction.⁶¹ Scientific racism, the general rise in hostility toward free African Americans, and increasing social marginalization of free black communities before the Civil War all fueled this trend.⁶² Contemporary science and emerging political practice combined to disfranchise women as well. Though women had once been able to engage in politics by exerting personal influence, as politics shifted to distinctly gendered spaces such as taverns, women’s political actions were interpreted as untimely, unwelcome intrusions from creatures whose biological roles precluded logical political thought and action.⁶³ State laws reflected this attitude. In 1807, New Jersey’s legislature passed a restrictive suffrage law that essentially disfranchised any but white, adult male citizens who paid taxes.⁶⁴ And it was not alone. Every state added between 1800 and 1850 explicitly defined voters as “male” in their constitutions.⁶⁵

Whereas the newer states entered the Union in the early nineteenth century with gender- and race-based franchises instead of property restrictions in their new constitutions, the oldest states had to adapt their existing suffrage provisions to the new politics. In the process, they also altered the language of their suffrage rules to specify a voter’s race and gender.⁶⁶ Of the seventeen states that changed suffrage provisions between 1800 and 1850 to reduce or eliminate property restrictions, eight added a racial qualification, and six added a gender restriction. (See table 1.) The remaining nine states that did not add a racial requirement either included the word “white” in their original constitutions (Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina, and Virginia) or were New England states with both small black populations and a tradition of liberality toward African Americans (Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts).⁶⁷ Regardless of their action on race, all states altering their constitutions in this period either added or retained a gender restriction.

As members of these eight state legislatures and constitutional conventions contemplated why the franchise should not be restricted by economic factors, they also discussed very explicitly why it should be restricted by race.⁶⁸ They did not, however, discuss why it should be restricted by gender. Apparently this fact was so obvious that it did not warrant debate. In New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, constitutional convention debates about eliminating property in favor of race (and gender) were particularly interesting because each of these states either adopted or considered adopting a property qualification for African American male voters only while either reducing or eliminating one for white men.⁶⁹ Further, in each of these reporters’ accounts of convention debates were published to supplement the convention’s journal of proceedings, indicating that the conventions’ information was being disseminated to the public.⁷⁰ These debates clearly show the link being forged between voting, whiteness, and manhood.

Table 1 State Franchise Restrictions 1790-1840

Constitutional Conventions: From Property to Service

In early debates, when delegates to the states’ constitutional revision conventions began to consider eliminating property qualifications, their central concern was that only qualified people be permitted to vote.⁷¹ Supporters of property restrictions argued that enfranchising the propertied did exactly that, eliminating those dangerous persons who were both subject to undue influence and inherently incapable of making good political decisions. For example, in 1817 the Federalist “Mentor” argued in the Connecticut Journal that universal suffrage would enable “every beggar in the streets… to decide the most important political questions, and the most interesting Elections, by their worthless votes.”⁷² Yet even as early as 1818, the influence of Federalists with these views was waning as property requirements came increasingly under fire. By 1821, when New York’s first constitutional convention took up the question, the lawyer and delegate John Cramer articulated the growing national sentiment, calling property restrictions “odious… aristocratical, [and]… worse than useless….”⁷³ But states still needed to ensure that only the qualified continued to vote. To do so, many states adopted a middle ground between the expanded suffrage Mentor feared and the landed property provisions Cramer abhorred, replacing property with a taxation or military service requirement.⁷⁴ These provisions indicated that people’s actions could entitle them to the franchise.

Taxation had an advantage as a means of regulating the franchise both because it was a simple measure of a voter’s active support of the community and because it seemed to be sanctioned by the nation’s founders, whose declaration of no taxation without representation was echoed in many suffrage debates. New Haven, Connecticut’s Democratic Columbian Register argued in November of 1818 that requiring voters to pay taxes was grounded in “the doctrine that ‘taxation and representation should go together’” and would prevent corrupt Federalist rivals from secretly smuggling into the polls “the very dregs of society,—men who never paid a tax or shouldered a musket in their lives.”⁷⁵ In Pennsylvania’s 1837 convention, the future congressman and Pennsylvania convention delegate Thaddeus Stevens likewise defended a taxation requirement as an important means of preventing those “victims of vice, intemperance, and folly” from casting ballots.⁷⁶ Aside from keeping the undesirable poor from voting, some delegates argued that tax payment was the best indication of a person’s stake in the community. Stevens’s fellow Pennsylvania delegate Andrew J. Cline argued that the state, like other collective “associations,” should require any voting member to “divide… with his fellows the responsibility and the expense” should he desire to “exercise an equal influence with the rest.”⁷⁷

By turning to taxation as a measure of political commitment, delegates determined that it was what men did or did not do that qualified or disqualified them to vote. But was this action enough? If a poor white man without property could pay taxes to demonstrate his support for the polity, and hence his voting fitness, were other Americans who paid taxes, such as unmarried women and African American men, likewise entitled to the ballot? Some delegates, such as North Carolina’s Weldon Edwards, argued yes. Edwards claimed that because North Carolina’s bill of rights explicitly linked taxation and representation in its 1835 constitutional convention, “colored freemen equally with the whites” were entitled to vote. “It would appear wrong,” he said, “while we continue to tax them, to deny them a vote for members of the Assembly.”⁷⁸

But Weldon was in a minority. Most convention delegates felt that tax payment was insufficient to transform African Americans into desirable voters. Even Judge Joseph Daniel, the author and advocate of a proposed property provision considered for black voters in 1835, claimed that North Carolina’s “Bill of Rights did not apply to men of colour.… It embraced only free white men.”⁷⁹ Many Democratic Pennsylvania convention delegates agreed with Daniel’s principle two years later. But instead of denying the link between taxation and voting for black citizens, they claimed that black Pennsylvanians lacked any connection to the state, and thus no actions they could take would enable them safely to vote. For example, George W. Woodward, a delegate from Luzerne County, argued that African Americans in Pennsylvania were “exempted from the payment of such taxes as are assessed on the person,” and therefore were likewise exempted “from the performance of those duties which attend the right of suffrage.”⁸⁰ Not only were they not taxed, but, these delegates claimed, African American men did not engage in any kind of civic action. John Cummin of Juniata County queried, “If the negroes were citizens… were they ever permitted to come into your legislative halls? Were they ever permitted to enter a jury box? Were they ever allowed to hold any office, civil or military, in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania?… No. Sir… in no way did they ever enjoy equal privileges with white citizens.”⁸¹

Claiming that the legal restrictions that prevented African Americans from fully participating in public life were evidence that they lacked a connection to the state seems like particularly faulty circular logic, but it was a strategy that many opponents of African Americans’ enfranchisement adopted. For example, the North Carolina delegate Jesse Wilson noted that state courts would not accept the testimony of African American men against whites, even though a “white man may go to the house of a free black, mal-treat and abuse him, and commit any outrage upon his family.” Why, therefore, should the state trust a free African American man “with the more important rights of a freeman—the high privilege of exercising the function of a voter?”⁸² That free African Americans lacked both a legal voice within the court system and the right to protect their families from violence did not seem to disturb Wilson. According to these delegates, free African Americans could take no action that would demonstrate a connection to the state. As Hugh McQueen of Chatham County, North Carolina, declared in convention on June 13, 1835, “The white portion of the population of this country constitutes the proper depository of political power. They bled for it, they wrote for it, they spoke for it, they expended their treasure for it.” Thus “there is no sort of polish which education or circumstance can give him, which ever will reconcile the whites to an extension of the right of suffrage to the free negro.”⁸³

Bleeding for the state was becoming increasingly central to how Americans defined legitimate voters in this period. After the War of 1812, poor veterans began to agitate for enfranchisement, asserting that their military service, and not their lack of property, entitled them to the ballot.⁸⁴ Opponents of any taxation requirements, most frequently Democrats in the 1830s, also adopted arguments like these to claim that military service, not taxation, forged the most powerful link between the individual and the state.⁸⁵ For example, the Pennsylvania delegate John Fuller claimed that poor soldiers had a greater right to the ballot than wealthy taxpayers: “The poor man alone was called to do military duty in time of war, while the rich man provided a substitute instead of going in person.” While “the rich man… discharged his duty,” Fuller “considered the mere payment of fines as very inferior in merit to personal service.”⁸⁶

If poor white men had proved their commitment to the state with their military service, could African American men show the same commitment? As with the question of taxation, opponents of a race-neutral franchise denied that this was a possibility. Primarily they argued that African Americans had never served in the military. For example, in New York’s 1821 convention the former congressman Erastus Root argued that African American men should be disfranchised because they did not serve as soldiers: “In case of an invasion or insurrection, neither the alien nor black man is bound to defend your country. They are not called on, because it is supposed… they might desert the standard and join your enemy—they have not any anchorage in your country which the government is willing to trust.” In view of this exclusion from military duty, Root declared that black men “cannot complain at being excluded from voting, inasmuch as they are not bound to assist in the defense of the country. It would be improper that they should… vote for the election of a commander in chief, whom they were not bound to obey.”⁸⁷ Root’s fellow delegate John Ross agreed. “But why,” he said, “it will probably be asked, are blacks to be excluded? I answer because they are seldom, if ever, required to share in the common burthens or defense of the state.”⁸⁸

On the other hand, supporters of black men’s continued enfranchisement in New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania pointed to many historical examples of African Americans’ military service. For example, in New York in 1821 the Delaware County physician Robert Clarke argued that “in the war of the Revolution, [African Americans] helped to fight your battles by land and by sea.… In [the War of 1812] they contributed largely toward some of your most splendid victories.” More significant, Clarke argued, was the fact that this service was entirely voluntary and in defense of a nation that treated them poorly. In North Carolina’s 1835 convention, the Halifax judge Joseph Daniel also noted that during the Revolutionary War, “a number of free persons of color rendered effectual service in the ranks of the army.”⁸⁹ This service, if supplemented with a property provision, Daniel argued, legitimized free African Americans’ right to participate in the states’ governance. The Pennsylvania delegate William Darlington of Chester County turned to the former president and Democratic party hero Andrew Jackson to support black men’s claim of service to the state. Jackson’s proclamation of September 1, 1814, addressed to the “free coloured inhabitants of Louisiana,” identified free black soldiers as “noble-hearted freemen,” “sons of freedom” who would receive bounties equal to those of “the white soldiers of the United States” for their voluntary participation in the Battle of New Orleans.⁹⁰ Darlington’s fellow Pennsylvanian James Montgomery was more direct: “I do not know of a single instance, where the blacks have been called upon to perform military duty, where they have refused to do it.… It strikes me that it would be a poor way to pay them for fighting the battles of their country, to deprive them of their votes.”⁹¹

Faced with incontrovertible evidence of African American men’s satisfactory military service, opponents of their voting rights were then forced to argue that military service did not mean one had a legitimate stake in the state. For example, in North Carolina in 1835, the convention delegate James W. Bryan of Carteret County, although conceding that free African Americans had fought during the Revolution, noted that “this argument would apply with equal force and pertinency to our slaves, many of whom… ‘did the State great and important services,’ in that trying and momentous period, and fought manfully and bravely in the embattled ranks of our Revolutionary armies.”⁹² Yet no North Carolinian was willing to enfranchise the enslaved. Further, Bryan claimed, the meaning of black men’s military service was significantly “diminished” after the Revolution when Congress prohibited free African Americans from serving in the militia. This exclusion, he insisted, was tantamount to a public declaration that African Americans did not constitute part of the body politic. Like Bryan, the Pennsylvania delegate E. W. Sturdevant of Luzerne County also noted legal restrictions on black men’s military service. Since Pennsylvania’s 1790 constitution required that the “freemen” of the commonwealth “shall be armed and disciplined for its defense,” but its militia laws prevented “negroes… from doing militia duty,” then black men were not full members of the polity. Otherwise, “why exclude them if they are freemen?”⁹³ The North Carolina convention president Nathaniel Macon articulated this point more concisely: “[Black men] have been employed to fight, but were never made citizens—they made no part of the political family.”⁹⁴ If contesting the meaning of African American men’s service was too oblique, simple denial was also an option, as the Pennsylvania delegate John Sterigere demonstrated: “No Pennsylvania negro,” he said, “periled his life or shed his blood to acquire the glorious privileges secured by the Revolutionary War.”⁹⁵

Although paying taxes and serving in the military were ways for some men to demonstrate their commitment to the state, these were not politically meaningful choices available to women. In the early conventions, women were simply not considered persons who could, with their actions, demonstrate their commitment to the state and thereby their legitimacy as voters. In New York in 1821 and North Carolina in 1835, women were hardly even mentioned in convention debates.⁹⁶ When their connection to the state was raised, it was usually to defend a constrained franchise. For example, in New York’s 1821 convention, the lawyer and Columbia County delegate Elisha Williams argued that suffrage was not universally given to all people in any political community, particularly those “who are helpless and dependent,” and incapable of “expressing their wills independently and intelligently.”⁹⁷ This arrangement, Williams argued, was natural because “all are entitled to civil and religious liberty… yet they have not all a voice in choosing their rulers; many female, as well as many a legal infant, is in possession of large estates, but they cannot vote.”⁹⁸ As a defender of the link between property and the franchise, Williams used property-owning women as a rhetorical foil to demonstrate that neither land ownership nor membership in the state directly conveyed political rights.

Discussions about taxpaying women’s legal disfranchisement was more prevalent in later conventions, particularly after the 1820s when delegates started to use women’s status as a way to oppose enfranchising African American men. To reject the idea that tax payment conferred a right to the ballot, opponents of black men’s voting rights noted that although white women also paid taxes, by common consent they did not vote. For example, the Philadelphian John McCahen asked if “taxation and representation… should go together,” then what about white women? Did not “the white women of this commonwealth… pay taxes on their real estate, and on the food they ate?” In light of this, McCahen challenged his rivals to declare “whether [they] did not think it good and sound policy, too, that although these women and minors pay taxes, they should be excluded from participating in the right of suffrage?”⁹⁹

Opponents of enfranchising black men also used women to refute the link between military service and the state, noting that despite many women’s military sacrifices for the state, they remained disfranchised. In New York’s 1821 convention delegate Williams opposed removing the property restriction in favor of a service requirement because, he argued, if such a connection existed, then the widowed mother of a dead soldier would be entitled to vote on the basis of both her own sacrifice and her son’s military service.¹⁰⁰ Pennsylvania delegate McCahen contended in 1838 that if Pennsylvanians continued to allow African American men to vote because of their military service, then “would [delegates] not be equally justified in asking this convention to confer the same right upon the white women of this commonwealth?… We read in history of [women’s] heroism… in the field, in dressing the wounds of the gallant soldier, or soothing him in his dying moments. Surely this class of our population, were as much entitled to vote as the negroes!” Moreover, McCahen claimed that white women had a greater sense of patriotism, and hence a deeper emotional connection to the state: “What has the negro cared in time of war, whose arms were victorious? His feelings were dead to every joy in the success of the American arms.” Women, on the other hand, had prayed “by day and by night… that the God of battles would guide our countrymen unto victory.” White women’s demonstrated commitment to the state rendered them “as well qualified to exercise the right of suffrage as the… negro.”¹⁰¹

Although these delegates argued that the logic of a franchise based on either military or fiscal service to the state could be applied to women as easily as to African American men, women’s enfranchisement was not an outcome they sought. Despite his tribute to white women’s patriotism, McCahen dismissed their enfranchisement in a sentence: “We, perhaps, ought to give the right of suffrage to every human being, but then, the interest and happiness of the whole people, required [that it] should not be thus given.”¹⁰² But what alternative was there? If property was no longer an acceptable model and a service-based franchise opened up complicated questions about whether or not the service of such problematic potential voters as women and African American men counted, then delegates needed to find a different foundation for voting rights. By 1838, as the Pennsylvania delegates were critiquing the service-based franchise, they were already offering an alternative—one based on racial and gender distinctions. As the Philadelphia delegate Charles Brown argued, “We have to look to the colored race, as one marked by God and nature as distinct from that to which we belong. We do not degrade them by acting on this distinction. Did it degrade the females, when the state of New Jersey took from the ladies the right to vote?… It is in obedience to the natural order of things, that we make a division between distinct species of men.”¹⁰³ After 1838, Brown’s suggestion that biological distinctions between people serve as a guide for making political distinctions between potential voters would come to dominate convention discourse and, ultimately, suffrage law.¹⁰⁴

Constitutional Conventions: From Service to Identity

In New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania convention delegates who argued that race and gender, rather than service or property, determined voting fitness had a particular problem: in their states African American men already were enfranchised and had been so for decades—if they had enough property. Therefore, anti-black suffrage delegates had to explain exactly why black men should be disfranchised. While some delegates did this by arguing that African American men could not take the proper actions to indicate a connection to the state, others claimed that black men’s actions—as voters—endangered the state. For example, in North Carolina’s 1835 convention, delegate McQueen claimed that if a “foreign power from abroad” were to invade North Carolina, free blacks would “as soon take sides with that power as with the citizens of this State,” presumably because they would fare better under a different regime.¹⁰⁵ This threat seemed fairly distant, but the prospect that free African Americans would make bad political decisions (or perhaps bad partisan decisions) seemed fairly likely to some delegates.¹⁰⁶ McQueen’s Carteret County colleague, James Bryan, claimed that black men’s voting behavior during county elections was sufficient evidence of their inability to handle the franchise:

If free African Americans were so easily manipulated at election time in a section of the state where illegal local practice prevented them from actually voting, what damage could these men do, Bryan asked, if given the right to vote without restriction in the whole state? “Long experience, expediency, and good policy,” he declared, “have convinced all our southern sister States, that they are dangerous and useless citizens.”¹⁰⁸

Southerners seeking to align their voting laws with the imperatives of slavery were not alone in arguing that African American men’s actions would harm the state. In 1837–38, some conservative Pennsylvania delegates also expressed concern that black voters would spell certain doom for democracy. If black men were permitted to vote en masse, these delegates contended, there would be two troubling consequences: a race-neutral franchise would attract hordes of free blacks to Pennsylvania, and whites would react violently. Delegates were particularly worried about potential social unrest, perhaps thinking of Pennsylvania’s recent race riots.¹⁰⁹ Charles Brown of Philadelphia County declared that

Whereas Brown’s interest seemed to be for the safety of Philadelphia’s African American population, other delegates were more worried about white Pennsylvanians. The Crawford County delegate George Shellito contended that if Pennsylvania were to “give these negroes the right of suffrage… they will overthrow the government.… The time will come,” he said, “when every white, except the abolitionists, will be compelled to shoulder his musket, in order to defend his wife and children from the ruffian assaults and violence of the blacks.” A race-neutral franchise was not a step in the creation of equality for peoples of the state, he argued, but a dangerous inversion of the currently accepted social hierarchy: “The moment that the right of suffrage was conferred on the black man, that moment would he raise his head above the white, and… shed his blood [when] the first favorable opportunity should occur.”¹¹¹ The scene of rioting black voters that Shellito imagined seemed more consistent with southerners’ fear of slave uprisings than with northerners’ experiences with race-based violence directed at African Americans. But connection to and concern for the South dominated many Pennsylvania Democratic delegates’ approach to the suffrage question in the 1830s.¹¹² Conservative delegates particularly argued that the Union’s safety, as well as that of Pennsylvania’s citizens, depended on black men’s disfranchisement.¹¹³

Even as some delegates were arguing that black men either did not take the right actions to justify their enfranchisement or would act dangerously when enfranchised, other delegates actively supported their right to access the ballot.¹¹⁴ They argued that denying African American men the ballot was unjust and undemocratic. They bypassed the question of African American men’s actions by rejecting the idea that voting rights were defined by either property or behavior. Instead, they capitalized on the emerging claim that only men’s identity as men determined their voting rights. For example, the Pennsylvania delegate James Clarke argued on June 19, “The time has come when the tax qualification should be dispensed with, for a man should vote because he is a man.”¹¹⁵ Like Clarke, the Philadelphia county abolitionist delegate Thomas Earle claimed that manhood was sufficient to measure anyone’s voting fitness: “A man should be entitled to vote because he is a man; and, as such, interested in all that concerns the community in which he resides, and the laws under which he lives.”¹¹⁶ Supporters of African Americans’ voting rights applied this principle fully to black men. For example, Pennsylvania’s John Montgomery declared that he was “utterly opposed to a skin qualification for voters, as I am fully persuaded that it is oppressive, as well as unjust.”¹¹⁷ Walter Forward of Allegheny County, agreed, declaring, “I will not, by word or action of mine, here or elsewhere, exclude a man from the exercise of the right of suffrage, simply upon the ground that he has a dark complexion.”¹¹⁸

Similar arguments were made in 1846 by New York convention delegates, who, after twenty-five years of property restrictions for African Americans, revisited the link between action, identity, and voting. The Delaware County representative Isaac Burr declared that the suffrage committee’s proposal to include the word “white” in New York’s constitution was “a retrograde movement” against the national trend of suffrage expansion. Burr argued that “the standing committee… intended, it seems, that the color of a man’s skin should be the test of his fitness to approach the ballot-box. [I dissent] from this altogether.” His colleague, the Madison County representative Benjamin Bruce, agreed, declaring that “Sir, distinction in the exercise of the elective franchise, on account of color or complexion, is invidious and anti-republican.”¹¹⁹ Burr’s fellow Delaware County delegate, David Waterbury, also found race-based suffrage preposterous: “The argument that because a race of men are marked by a peculiarity of color and crooked hair, they were not endowed with a mind equal to another class who had other peculiarities, was unworthy of men of sense.”¹²⁰ The Onondaga delegate Elijah Rhodes agreed, regretting that anyone “should advocate the deprivation of rights, simply on the ground of a difference in the complexion of the skin, or the curl of the hair.”¹²¹ A franchise grounded in something so arbitrarily contingent as the physical markers of racial identity, these delegates argued, was simply and fundamentally unjust. For, as Bruce declared, “If ‘colored persons’ are men then give them the rights and privileges of men.”¹²²

Yet for opponents of African American suffrage rights, the racial identity of black voters, or rather the socially perceived meaning attributed to race, was precisely the problem. In the next few decades, blatantly racist claims for restricting African Americans’ rights became increasingly prevalent in suffrage discussions. In the few days that New York’s 1846 convention debated suffrage, only a handful of delegates referenced voters’ service to the state or their connection to the community. Instead, most relied on racial prejudice to reject removing property restrictions for black voters. These delegates argued that the simple fact of black men’s race indicated that they were not universally legitimate voters. For example, the Onondaga County delegate Dr. William Taylor declared that “color constituted a physical characteristic which distinguished a class of persons who for many reasons were not supposed to be well qualified for the exercise of this right [of suffrage].”¹²³ The New York City delegate John A. Kennedy referenced the science of the time to support the restriction. Because “physiologists” had determined that the “Caucasian” and “Ethiopian” races had the “fewest points of resemblance,” the distinction between two kinds of people “was the work of nature, and was not without its object. Let not government dare to counteract and overthrow the distinctions and divisions that nature designed should exist.”¹²⁴

At the heart of these delegates’ arguments was the belief in the immutability of racial distinctions and their faith that voting rights should rely on this foundation. Although any person might serve the state, pay taxes, own property, be in the military, and hence gain political rights, no person, they believed, could change his or her racial (or gendered) nature. Hence, the polity would be protected because political rights would be forever out of reach of those who lacked the “correct” political identity. The New York City delegate John Hunt articulated these ideas more explicitly than any other member of the convention. Like Kennedy, Hunt also claimed that racial differences disqualified black men from voting, but he contended that the nature of race itself meant that this disfranchisement was impossible to change. African American men, he argued, “were aliens—aliens, not by mere accident of foreign birth—not because they spoke a different language—not from any petty distinction that a few years association might obliterate, but by the broad distinction of race—a distinction that neither education, nor intercourse, nor time could remove—a distinction that must separate our children from their children forever.”¹²⁵ No actions African Americans could take, Hunt claimed, would transform them into voters: “We might close our eyes in a fit of amiable enthusiasm,” he said, “and try to dream their wool out of curl; but our dreams did them no good. They knew and felt all the while, (that is all sane negroes,) that they were negroes and aliens by the act of God, and there was no remedy.” Hunt had no doubt that race alone accounted for black men’s unequal disfranchisement: “If any good could come of wishing, he could wish as heartily as anyone, that the Ethiopian might change his skin, and become a part of our body politic.” But, he supposed, “all such wishes and all efforts to realize them were idle.”¹²⁶

Regulating Suffrage, Making Race

For delegates like Kennedy and Hunt, the distinctions of race and gender seemed an essential way to determine voting fitness. Racial and gender identities, as these delegates understood them, were immutable, permanent, and obvious, and already served as a readily patrolled boundary between persons.¹²⁷ But not all delegates to the conventions believed race to be so simple. In particular in the northern conventions in New York in 1821 and 1846 and in Pennsylvania in 1838, some supporters of black men’s voting rights argued that racial distinctions were neither as easy to identify nor as readily regulated as their opponents seemed to think.¹²⁸ Instead, these delegates wrestled with what race meant, exactly how it was defined, and how to determine the racial identity of any individual voter.

Convention delegates were particularly worried about how to identify an individual’s racial status to decide whether he was a legitimate voter. In New York’s 1821 convention, supporters of equal suffrage wondered who would decide the limits of each racial category if New York decided to divide its voters racially. And how, exactly, would they decide? For example, the delegate Robert Clarke declared that any racial distinction was “impracticable in its operation,” for even among those “who have never been slaves, there are many shades of difference in complexion.” Color, Clarke argued, was so widely variable, that using race as a means of determining voting rights was inherently subject to abuse: “Men descended from African ancestors, but who have been pretty well white-washed by their commingling with your white population, may escape your scrutiny” and vote without restriction.¹²⁹ A more frightening prospect for Clarke, however, was that reverse discrimination could occur: “Others, whose blood is as pure from any African taint as any member of this Convention, may be called upon to prove his pedigree, or forfeit his right of suffrage, because he happens to have a swarthy complexion.”¹³⁰ The Pennsylvania delegate John Dickey of Beaver County echoed this argument a few years later, as he worried about who, exactly, would determine a voter’s racial identity. Should that decision be “left to the arbitrary decision of the inspectors and assessors[?] [Dickey] imagined not. It might happen that a man might be excluded from the exercise of this right, because he did not happen to have as fair a skin as the inspectors and assessors required at his hands, although his ancestors might have had more pure white blood in their veins than these men.”¹³¹ And again, the potential for abuse was high: “What chance would a white man, but of dark complexion, have at the polls,” Dickey asked, “in a time of great political and party excitement?”¹³²

Although Dickey and Clarke were not particularly enlightened advocates of racial equality, they did seem to grasp that there was a vital link between the definition of the franchise and the creation of race. If, they argued, one could not tell the difference between white and black, and if the political system depends upon that difference, then how could the political system be safely regulated? More troubling for them, how could race even exist? And, the New York delegate David Buel wondered in 1821, what would that mean for whites? “In the West Indies,” he noted, “a man became white according to law, when only one sixteenth part of African blood ran in his veins.” If New York began asking “these questions,” Buel said, it “might lead to unpleasant elucidations of family history, and ought to be avoided.”¹³³ In a state that still counted the enslaved among its occupants in 1821, this concern with the limits and meaning of whiteness was not merely hypothetical. In Pennsylvania seventeen years later, John Dickey offered a solution. Although noting that if the word “white” were introduced into the state’s constitution it would “lead to… difficulties,” Dickey suggested that, as in North Carolina, in Pennsylvania “it would be necessary to set forth the exact construction that must be given to the term, so that no doubt could arise as to the true meaning of it.”¹³⁴ These delegates were essentially arguing that race was contingent, not static, and therefore it was difficult, without legal management, to define it with any degree of certainty.¹³⁵ Determining the social meanings of “black” and “white” was not a project easily undertaken at the ballot box on election day.

Some delegates emphasized the difficulty of making racial distinctions by pointing to Americans who did not fit easily into a white/black taxonomy. If a racial qualification were enacted, should these “others” be treated as white or as black? The New York delegate James Kent of Albany noted this potential problem in 1821: “What shall [be] the criterion in deciding upon the different shades of colour? The Hindoo and Chinese are called yellow—the Indian red! Shall these be excluded should they come to reside among us?” Kent “thought it inexpedient to erect a barrier that should exclude them forever from the enjoyment of this important right.”¹³⁶ His colleague David Buel seemed to agree, claiming that “philosophers have distinguished the human race by five colours, the white, black, brown, olive, and red. By [including the word “white” in the franchise provisions,] four of the races would be excluded.”¹³⁷ If different voting standards for African Americans and whites were implemented, the convention opened up questions about ethnic and racial others that New York did not have ready answers for. For example, where in the body was race situated? Was it in the skin? The blood? Or externally in the actions and prejudices of others? If race, and hence political ability, were merely a matter of skin tone, the Pennsylvania delegate James Montgomery of Mercer County argued, then white women would be qualified to vote. “If we are to make a white skin the qualification of a voter, then females will have a permanent right to vote, as we have only to open our eyes and look at females to be convinced that their skins are much finer and fairer than men’s.”¹³⁸

Like the attendees of the previous two northern conventions, some delegates in New York’s 1846 convention were also concerned about the meaning of race. In their short debate, the delegate Isaac Burr, arguing that race was a faulty standard for determining voting rights, eloquently summarized the problems of defining a voter’s race. He said that implementing a race-based franchise was “beset with difficulties. He did not see how a board of inspectors could, in all cases, determine who were ‘white male citizens.’” Burr acknowledged that readily identifiable “Anglo Saxon” and “full-blooded African” men would be permitted or denied the right to cast a ballot with no problems. But, he said, “suppose the next man who offered his vote should be a free native born citizen, whose father was a white man and his mother a black woman, and possessing all other qualifications of a voter; was not he entitled to vote?” Burr acknowledged that this individual would likely be identified as a person of color and therefore also rejected. But, he asked, how far did the principle apply? What about a person who “had but one-sixteenth of African blood”? What about those who “had skins as fair as many who never had any taint of the African”? Or even more problematic, what of someone who by “common fame” within the community was believed to be black, but “denied it.… Should the inspectors themselves be permitted to determine the question on the spot? If so, he feared that sometimes the color of a man’s political coat may be taken into consideration as well as the color of his skin.” Getting to the heart of the definitions of race, Burr was asking his fellow delegates what exactly they meant by people of color and how they thought such a people should be identified.¹³⁹ Whether partisan or race politics dominated these scenarios, Burr was clearly concerned that race was by no means a simple rule easily applied. Rather, he seems to have been grappling with the social and constructed nature of race, both acknowledging that its meanings shifted between communities and recognizing that what defined black and white was either arbitrary law or equally arbitrary social practice. Indeed, his arguments suggest that he was at least in some measure concerned that the legal actions the convention took to make racial distinctions were, in some way, actually making race as well.

Opponents of African Americans’ voting rights in the conventions also recognized that race-based suffrage laws were responsible for making racial meaning, and thus they sought to defend the boundaries of whiteness. In particular, conservative delegates argued that racial intermingling at the polls would result in racial intermingling in other spheres of life, which, they contended, would “degrade” whiteness. In New York in 1821, Colonel Young declared that a race-neutral franchise would be abhorrent to whites: “No white man will stand shoulder to shoulder with a negro in the train band or jury-room. He will not invite him to a seat at his table, nor in his pew in the church. And yet he must be placed on a footing of equality in the right of voting, and on no other occasion whatever, either civil or social.”¹⁴⁰ Other delegates echoed the claim that political mixing would result in other modes of racial mixing. Admitting blacks and whites to the franchise equally, Erastus Root declared in 1821, “will disturb our political family.”¹⁴¹ In 1838, the Philadelphia delegate John Scott concurred, declaring that he did “not wish the coloured man to come into our political family.”¹⁴² Delegates’ depiction of African Americans as members of the political family raised a scenario in which whites and blacks would interact socially, perhaps within a biological family, not just a metaphoric one. Whether it was the virtual mixing of the races in political and social interactions that the delegates feared or the questions that could arise from literal intermingling of the races in sexual interactions, they viewed black men’s equal enfranchisement as a challenge to racial distinctions.

Delegates concerned with protecting and patrolling whiteness made no effort to disguise that power lay at the heart of their concerns. The Pennsylvania conservative John Sterigere claimed in 1837 that whites’ political power would be diminished by a race-neutral franchise because an “effect of admitting negroes to vote, will be to keep respectable citizens… from the elections. Such persons will not go to the polls and jostle with negroes. You will then have, as substitutes for such persons, a posse of shoeblacks.”¹⁴³ Although it seems unlikely that Sterigere truly feared that whites would surrender their political power rather than submit to political integration, he did seek to arouse other delegates’ fear of sharing power. In 1846, the New York delegate John Russell articulated this fear most explicitly, claiming that whites “want no co-partners to share with their elections… who comes fresh from an inferior race of men.”¹⁴⁴ At the heart of conservatives’ fears of race mixing lay just this: the idea that any integration or social interaction between the races would invert current racial hierarchies and deprive white men of their traditionally held power over others. As the Pennsylvania delegate George Shellito argued, “Give these negroes the right of suffrage, and your sons and your daughters will, by and by, become waiters and cooks for them. Yes! For these black gentry—that will be the result of it.”¹⁴⁵ Delegates like Shellito patently ignored the fact that propertied African American men had been voting in Pennsylvania and New York for decades without causing such transformations in social hierarchies. This perhaps did not matter as much as their fear that racial boundaries would be transgressed if political rights were defined without reference to race. Grounding voting rights in the fertile ground of racial identity, these delegates contended, was the best way to keep the nation, and whites’ political power, safe.

Over the course of the antebellum period Americans such as these convention delegates gradually defined race and participatory citizenship as mutually dependent—so much so that any change to one threatened the other. In earlier decades, when suffrage rights were dependent upon the acquisition of property, they were presumably accessible by anyone able to acquire enough property to meet the requirements. This system was, in theory, fluid—the boundaries of the body politic expanded or contracted given the number of people who qualified to vote. But over the course of the first half of the nineteenth century, as ideas about the meanings of property ownership changed and more people gained access to the ballot, Americans shifted their means of determining the franchise and turned to service as a better marker of voting fitness. This too was a fluid system, for men at least. Ostensibly, if a disfranchised man desired the ballot, he could serve the state in numerous ways to indicate his commitment to the political community and hence acquire the ballot. But even this came to be seen by many antebellum Americans as a restrictive system: taxpaying provisions echoed too directly the idea that economic status conveyed voting privileges. To substitute for property and service, delegates to constitutional conventions like the ones held in New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania turned to gender and race to mark voters. To white men making decisions to expand their franchises, permitting all white men to vote seemed to be a move toward greater national equality. Further, identifying voters by their gender and race offered a means of limiting the political community that was seemingly more stable, as these social categories were ostensibly unchanging; individuals could not alter their gender or racial status to acquire the ballot.

However, as the delegates themselves revealed in convention debates, race, at least, was truly not a stable category that was defined the same way everywhere and by all people. But in the process of eliminating or restricting black voters from the polity, these delegates created and emphasized racial distance, defining suffrage by race, and race and gender through suffrage. By exchanging gender and racial position for property as indicators of political independence and hence as makers of legitimate status as political actors, white men created a white male polity across class, ethnic, sectarian, regional, and partisan divides. Through this polity, they forged a collective white male identity that alleviated and diffused tensions among white men that had the potential to threaten the peace and safety of the nation state.¹⁴⁶ This imagined fraternity, what the literary critic Dana Nelson calls “national manhood,” tied all white men to each other and to the state through their gender and race.¹⁴⁷ Disfranchising African Americans and women made the national white male voting fraternity possible. But it also fixed in state law and national imagination a connection between Judd’s personal considerations—whiteness and manhood—and voting rights, a connection that would persist in the American polity through the end of the Civil War. This connection, which forged the white man’s government, would face numerous challenges in the ensuing decades.