The Right to Vote Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  List of Tables

  Introduction

  PART I - The Road to Partial Democracy

  ONE - In the Beginning

  The Received Legacy

  The Revolution and the Vote

  The States and the Nation

  TWO - Democracy Ascendant

  The Course of Things

  Sources of Expansion

  Ideas and Arguments

  THREE - Backsliding and Sideslipping

  Women, African Americans, and Native Americans

  Paupers, Felons, and Migrants

  Registration and Immigration

  Democracy, the Working Class, and American Exceptionalism

  A Case in Point: The War in Rhode Island

  PART II - Narrowing the Portals

  FOUR - Know-Nothings, Radicals, and Redeemers

  Immigrants and Know-Nothings

  Race, War, and Reconstruction

  The Strange Odyssey of the Fifteenth Amendment

  The Lesser Effects of War

  The South Redeemed

  FIVE - The Redemption of the North

  Losing Faith

  Purifying the Electorate

  Postscript: Fraud, Class, and Motives

  Two Special Cases

  Sovereignty and Self-Rule

  The New Electoral Universe

  SIX - Women’s Suffrage

  From Seneca Falls to the Fifteenth Amendment

  Citizenship and Taxes

  Regrouping

  Doldrums and Democracy

  A Mass Movement

  The Nineteenth Amendment

  Aftermath

  PART III - Toward Universal Suffrage—and Beyond

  SEVEN - The Quiet Years

  Stasis and Its Sources

  Franklin Roosevelt and the Death of Blackstone

  War and Race

  “Our Oldest National Minority”

  EIGHT - Breaking Barriers

  Race and the Second Reconstruction

  Universal Suffrage

  The Value of the Vote

  Two Uneasy Pieces

  Getting the Electorate to the Polls

  NINE - The Story Unfinished

  November 2000

  What Is to Be Done?

  Helping Americans Vote

  Crime and Punishment

  Suppression and Fraud

  Boundaries of Competence

  A Constitutional Right to Vote

  November 2008

  APPENDIX - State Suffrage Laws, 1775-1920

  APPENDIX SOURCES

  NOTES

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  List of Tables

  TABLE A.1 Suffrage Requirements: 1776-1790

  TABLE A.2 Property and Taxpaying Requirements for Suffrage: 1790-1855

  TABLE A.3 Chronology of Property Requirements for Suffrage: 1790-1855

  TABLE A.4 Race and Citizenship Requirements for Suffrage: 1790-1855

  TABLE A.5 Chonology of Race Exclusions: 1790-1855

  TABLE A.6 Pauper Exclusions: 1790-1920

  TABLE A.7 Suffrage Exclusions for Criminal Offenses: 1790-1857

  TABLE A.8 Labor Force Changes in Selected States: 1820-1850

  TABLE A.9 Summary of Suffrage Requirements in Force: 1855

  TABLE A.10 States with Tawpaying Requirements for Suffrage: 1870-1921

  TABLE A.11 States with Property Requirements for Suffrage: 1870-1920

  TABLE A.12 States with Special Provisions Affecting Aliens and Immigrants: 1870-1926

  TABLE A.13 Literacy Requirements for Suffrage: 1870-1924

  TABLE A.14 Residency Requirements for Suffrage: 1870-1923

  TABLE A.15 Disfranchisement for Felons and Others Convicted of Crimes: Laws in Force, 1870-1920

  TABLE A.16 Native-American Voting Rights: Laws in Force, 1870-1920

  TABLE A.17 States and Territories Permitting Women to Vote in Elections Dealing with Schools Prior to the Nineteenth Amendment

  TABLE A.18 States Permitting Women to Vote in Municipal Elections or on Tax and Bond Issues Prior to the Nineteenth Amendment

  TABLE A.19 States Permitting Women to Vote in Presidential Elections Prior to the Nineteenth Amendment

  TABLE A.20 States and Territories Fully Enfranchising Women Prior to the Nineteenth Amendment

  For Natalie

  Preface to the Revised Edition

  THE RIGHT TO VOTE WAS FIRST PUBLISHED in September 2000—almost exactly two months before the prolonged and disputed presidential election that installed George W. Bush in the White House. That accident of timing brought to the book a degree of attention that it otherwise would not have received: not only did “the right to vote” rapidly (if temporarily) become everyone’s favorite right, but some of the issues and problems that surfaced in November 2000 were directly tied to developments chronicled in The Right to Vote. For the author of a historical study that began in the late eighteenth century, it was, of course, gratifying to be “relevant” to a contemporary crisis—even if that gratification came at some cost to the nation.

  The 2000 election also kicked off an eventful period in the history of voting and voting rights in the United States. The election controversy itself raised pressing questions about the reliability of voting technology, the partisanship of election officials, the right of individuals to have their votes counted, the lifetime disfranchisement of felons, the Electoral College, and the relationship between state and federal authorities in conducting elections. (That list is not exhaustive.) In the aftermath of the election, state governments tackled some of these problems (as well as others linked to the administration of elections), and Congress weighed in with the Help America Vote Act in 2002. Several years later, Congress also reauthorized key portions of the landmark Voting Rights Act, which had first been enacted in 1965. Meanwhile, the courts continued to wrestle with issues of districting and minority representation, and in 2008 the Supreme Court gave its approval to strict, new identification requirements for voters. These years, in addition, witnessed heated election campaigns in which Democrats were repeatedly accused of vote fraud, while Republicans were charged with suppressing the rights of legitimate voters.

  It was the richness and complexity of these events—and not simply the passage of time—that led me to the decision to prepare a new edition of The Right to Vote. Or, to state the matter somewhat differently, a lot of history happened in the near-decade after the book’s original publication. That history—although very recent—invited examination; it also seemed best understood against the backdrop of the story already recounted in The Right to Vote. Indeed, the major developments of the years between 2000 and 2008 seemed both to illustrate critical themes of the book and to offer the opportunity to deepen the analysis by extending it to the present. The notion that political rights in the United States have always been contested, for example, seemed as applicable to the early twenty-first century as it did to the nineteenth; yet that very continuity invited further inquiry, given the numerous, significant changes that had occurred in institutional and political context.

  The present volume, then, is less a “revised edition” than an “updated” or “extended” one. The first seven chapters of the book remain largely as they were in the original edition. I have, for the most part, resisted the temptation to tinker with the prose—although, like any author, I can now spot a great many sentences where I might have said things better (or at least differently). I have added a few discussions of subjects that were somehow (!) omitted from the original edition (such as the Electoral College), and I have broadened or reshaped several interpretations (regarding felon disfranchisement, for example) to take i
nto account the findings of persuasive new research. I have also inserted a missing item in one table (Table A.12) and updated numerous endnotes to incorporate relevant work that has been published in the last nine years.

  But the great bulk of what is new in this volume deals with the years from 2000 to 2008. Chapter 9 focuses entirely on that period, tracing key developments from November 2000 to the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Where conceptually and stylistically appropriate, some post-2000 material has been integrated into a revamped version of Chapter 8 (which explored the evolution of voting rights from the 1950s through the 1990s): the renewal of the Voting Rights Act in 2006, for example, is examined in Chapter 8, directly following discussions of the renewals of 1970, 1975, and 1982. I have, in addition, recast some of the analyses in Chapter 8 in light of events that occurred after 1999. Changes in perspective and in my own thinking have also yielded modifications to the conclusion: some things do look a bit different in 2009 than they did in 1999.

  Preparing this new edition has made me acutely aware of the distinctive intellectual challenges and hazards of writing historically about the very recent past. I believed, at first, that chronicling the years from 2000 to 2008 would be relatively easy—because the events were all known to me, I had watched them unfold, I knew some of the actors, and, in a few instances, I had even been a minor participant. But, in fact, the opposite was true. Proximity complicated the process of selection, weighting, and balancing that is always at the heart of the historian’s task. (The late Herbert Gutman, an important and witty social historian, once commented that the key to writing good history was knowing what to leave out; it is particularly difficult to leave out things that loomed so important just three years or three months ago.) I have tried to meet this challenge by imagining how a historian would view this period twenty or forty years from now, and by simultaneously conceiving of this era as an outgrowth of the long history of voting rights that preceded it. Whether I have succeeded in this effort is for others to judge, but I surely have learned a great deal by wrestling with the challenge.

  Bringing this project to fruition was not a one-person operation, and I would like to thank those who helped me. The Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation, as well as the Office of the Dean at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, provided funding for the research; that funding permitted me to purchase hours of energetic information-gathering from Kenneth Weisbrode, Michael Sellitto, Meghan Cleary, Lisette Enumah, Robert King, Jonathan Warsh, and Elnigar Iltebir.

  My agent, Andrew Wylie, encouraged this new edition from the beginning. William Frucht (then at Basic Books) offered sound editorial advice; subsequent editors Lara Heimert, Alix Sleight, and Sandra Beris ably navigated the manuscript through production. Early on, John Bonifaz, Heather Gerken, and Richard Pildes helped me to think about what ought to be included in a chronicle of the recent period. Tova Wang, Heather Gerken, Jason Karlawish, and Ellen Theisen all read portions of the manuscript and responded patiently to my questions, saving me from errors of fact and interpretation.

  I would like to offer special thanks to Kathleen Schnaidt, who worked tirelessly (and with great aplomb and humor) to help me prepare the final manuscript, check (and obsessively re-check) endnotes, plug holes in the research, and navigate the sometimes clumsy process of integrating new prose into old electronic files. My colleague, Ernest May, has for years (both in the classrooms where we taught together and at our favorite Indian restaurant) generously shared his wisdom about the craft of history and its articulation with the recent past. My wife, Rosabelli, does not yet have the right to vote in American elections, but, before long, she will, and meanwhile, for everything, obrigado.

  Cambridge, Massachusetts

  January 2009

  Preface to the Original Edition

  I HAVE COME TO BELIEVE THAT BOOKS have fortuitous or unforeseen beginnings, and this one is no exception.

  A half dozen years ago, I began to draft a different book, a highly quantitative study of working-class participation in electoral politics in the United States. My outline for that book—developed after several years of research—called for a stage-setting chapter about the legal and political history of the right to vote. I envisioned that chapter as a simple preamble to a detailed investigation of the ways in which working people did and did not participate in elections.

  But when I sat down to write the chapter, I ran into trouble. The story line, tracing the evolution of the right to vote in the United States, began to zig and zag at unpredictable moments. Easy generalizations wilted when I tried to mold them into forceful arguments or undergird them with documentary evidence. Moreover, the evidence I had on hand, drawn from standard sources, looked increasingly skimpy and incomplete. I went back to the library for a few months and then tried again. Without success. The more I wrote, the further I seemed to be from the finish line. The chapter kept getting longer, as did my list of unanswered questions.

  Eventually I realized that the chapter with which I was wrestling was a book in itself. The subject, the right to vote, was of almost self-evident importance to American history and contemporary politics; remarkably little had been written about it, and I could not really make sense of electoral participation until I had a deeper understanding of the laws that shaped and structured that participation. I also realized that I wanted to write about the history of suffrage: the richness of the issues, their intricacy and importance, had captured my attention and imagination. Americans had debated, and fought over, limitations on the right to vote from the revolution to the late twentieth century, and those debates and contests told much about the meaning of democracy in American political life and culture. My stacks of computer printouts went back into the filing cabinet, and I went back, yet again, to the library.

  The book that has emerged from this detour is longer, and perhaps more ambitious, than I originally intended. My sojourn with the sources convinced me that the many different strands to this story—including women’s suffrage, the voting rights of African Americans and immigrants, residency and property requirements, literacy tests, felon and pauper exclusions—were closely intertwined with one another and could only be understood as part of a single fabric; similarly, the ups and downs in the narrative, the shifting and uneven mix of gains and losses, could only be comprehended as part of a lengthy chronicle. Consequently, I have tried to write a comprehensive, multifaceted history of the right to vote in the United States, from the nation’s birth to the present, a history that encompasses not only national laws and policies but also developments in the fifty states.

  Writing such a book, trying to explore such an enormous terrain, has many intellectual rewards for an author. Yet it is also a humbling experience. Although surprised initially by the absence or scarcity of systematic scholarly studies, I have been dependent nonetheless on the labors of scores of scholars who have carefully mined particular veins, who have examined specific themes, individual states, and colorful historical actors. This book would not have been possible had I not been able to build on their efforts. No one, moreover, is more aware than I of the work that remains to be done, of the many patches of terrain that have never been carefully scrutinized. As my own labors draw to a close, one of my strongest hopes is that this book will open the doors to further inquiry, that it will spark other studies of the history of suffrage, as well as the broader history of democracy, in the United States and elsewhere.

  A word about a self-imposed limit to this inquiry: this is a book about the legal and political history of suffrage; it is not a study of political practice or participation. Inescapably, questions will arise about the relationship between the legal structures and the practice of politics, about the precise—and quantitative—impact of voting laws on political behavior. Those questions, for the most part, will not be fully answered in this volume, but I do hope to address them, as completely as I can, when I return to writing the history of electoral participation that gave birth to this book
in the first place.

  This book has been a long time in the making, and it still would be were it not for the generous assistance that I received from many institutions and individuals. Having the opportunity to express my thanks is one of the (long-imagined) pleasures of sending a manuscript off to press. The Dean’s Office of the School of Humanities and Social Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology provided a grant that launched the research, and it continued with the help of a research fund provided by Duke University. A fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation gave me time to think about the materials that I was collecting. A year spent in what a friend has called “academic nirvana,” the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, offered me stimulating intellectual company as well as the opportunity to write without interruption—except for the thoughtful hours that I happily spent staring out the window at San Francisco Bay.

  The research for this book could be gathered only by casting a wide net, and over the years that net was held by a small army of student (and ex-student) research assistants. Indeed, so many have toiled in this project that I have sometimes believed that my research was responsible for the decline in the national unemployment rate. Among those who served particularly long stints were Greg Bylinsky, Ewan Campbell, Cypria Dionese, Conrad Hall, Stephen Hartzell, Roger Michel, Katie Ratte, Chris Seufert, Teddy Varno, and James Worthington. I thank them all, as well as the many others whose indentures were of shorter duration. Two people deserve special mention. Courtney Bailey has worked on and off this project for years; her thoughtful attentiveness and long hours helped me to gain control of unwieldy legal materials and made it possible for me to finish the endnotes. Laura Thoms rightfully deserves credit as co-author of the appendix. Tables always look neat and simple in print, but these tables began as clumsy boxes of photocopied documents, some of which traveled with Laura wherever she went. Translating these documents into their current tidy form took more than two years of careful sifting and cross-checking; without Laura’s indefatigable efforts, the tables might still be in boxes.