The Right to Vote Read online

  Many colleagues helped me to find new sources, clarify my thinking, and sharpen my prose. Too numerous to mention are the scholars, archivists, and librarians who over the years have fielded my phone calls and e-mails about particular (often arcane) details: they know who they are, and I thank them. Closer to home, Sydney Nathans and Peter Wood generously responded to my queries about times and places that they know better than I. Larry Goodwyn, Bill Reddy, and David Montgomery posed challenging questions that I have since tried to answer. Feedback from seminar presentations at the Newberry Library, the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University, the Center for Advanced Study, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and Yale University stimulated my thinking about various pieces of the project. Valuable comments on portions of the manuscript were offered by Nancy Cott, John Demos, Robert D. Goldstein, Linda Kerber, Marc Kruman, Jonathan Prude, and James C. Scott. Benjamin I. Page read the entire manuscript, improving the product while encouraging the producer. My thanks to all of them.

  The logistical process of getting the book to press was made vastly easier by the cheerful efforts of Deborah Carver-Thien and Andrea Long. My agent, Jill Kneerim, gave me sound advice and warm support at moments when both were needed. My original editor, Tim Bartlett, made numerous contributions to the book, and his successor, Vanessa Mobley, went well beyond the call of duty to make sure that all things went smoothly. Michael Wilde has been a remarkable copyeditor; Richard Miller has superintended the production process with care, consideration, and good humor. Basic Books merits special thanks for its willingness to publish the appendix tables as a contribution to scholarship.

  This book is dedicated to my daughter, Natalie. For years, she has fallen asleep (and now, as a teenager, awakened) to the sound of tapping at my computer across the hall. An ardent democrat in her own right, she has particularly strong convictions about the role of universal suffrage within the family. I can’t honestly say that Natalie helped in the production of this book (indeed, recently she commented that it was amazing that I finished it “with one of me around”), but I hope she knows what a pleasure it always is when she interrupts me.

  Introduction

  AMERICANS NO LONGER VOTE AS MUCH as they once did. Since World War II, only half of all potential voters have shown up at the polls for most presidential elections; in state and local contests, turnout has been even lower, often dropping to 20 or 25 percent. Even when electoral turnout has spiked upwards, as it did in presidential contests in the 1960s and the early twenty-first century, more than a third of all eligible voters have stayed home.1

  Such low, or at best middling, levels of popular participation might suggest that our democracy, two centuries after the nation’s founding, has become dispirited, and that the act of voting is not greatly prized. Yet Americans do place a high value on democratic institutions, and white Americans, at least, have long thought of themselves as citizens of a democratic nation—indeed, not just any democratic nation, but the democratic nation. According to our national self-image—an image etched in popular culture and buttressed by scholarly inquiry—the United States has been the pioneer of republican and then democratic reforms for two hundred years, the standard bearer of democratic values on the stage of world history. As the influential political theorist and founder of the New Republic, Herbert Croly, put it in 1909, the United States is the “Land of Democracy,” a nation “committed to the realization of the democratic ideal.” Similarly, in a famous address to Congress in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson maintained that Americans had “fought and died for two centuries” to defend the principle of “government by consent of the governed” and the conviction that “all men are created equal.” From the late eighteenth century through the cold war and into the twenty-first century, Americans have regarded their own political institutions as models of popular government and self-rule.2

  Implicit in this democratic self-image is the belief that the right to vote is, and long has been, widely distributed among Americans, that the United States has something very close to universal suffrage. (The phrase has been historically elastic; here it means simply that all adult citizens have the right to vote.) As every schoolchild learns, thousands of soldiers fell at Gettysburg so that government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” would not perish from the earth—and presumably a government of and by the people was one that the people selected. Indeed, in popular usage, the term democracy implies that everyone, or nearly everyone, has the right to participate in elections; the image of a democratic United States is that of a nation with universal suffrage. And rightly so: although a nation certainly could have universal suffrage without being a democracy, a polity cannot be truly democratic without universal suffrage.

  In recent years, in fact, there has been a reasonably good fit between the image and reality of voting rights in the United States. As Congressional Quarterly’s Guide to U.S. Elections concluded in 1985, with a trace of patriotic hyperbole, “by the two hundredth anniversary of the nation, the only remaining restrictions [on the franchise] prevented voting by the insane, convicted felons, and otherwise eligible voters who were unable to meet short residence requirements.”3 To be sure, many scholars and activists remain deeply concerned about our “turnout problem,” about the ways in which the electoral system may discourage voting, and about the extraordinary growth in the number of persons disfranchised because they have committed felonies. Yet the vast majority of American adults do possess the right to vote, and formally at least, the United States has universal (or nearly universal) suffrage.4

  This was not always the case, however—not by a long shot. Until the 1960s most African Americans could not vote in the South. Women were barred from voting in a majority of jurisdictions until 1920. For many years, Asian immigrants were disfranchised because they could not become citizens, and Native Americans lacked the right to vote far more often than they possessed it. In the early nineteenth century, moreover, states generally granted the franchise only to property owners, and well into the twentieth century paupers often were prohibited from voting. The list could, does, and (in later chapters) will go on: for much of American history, the right to vote has been far from universal.

  Why was this the case? Why were so many Americans, in different places and at different times, denied the right to vote? How could Americans have thought of themselves as democratic while they possessed such a restricted franchise? Most fundamentally, perhaps, how, why, and when did the laws governing suffrage change? These questions are central in political history, critical to an understanding of the evolution of democracy; they also are central to our conceptions of what it means to be an American.

  Yet these questions rarely have been asked—or answered. The history of the right to vote in the United States has received far less scrutiny than the subject would seem to warrant. There exist, to be sure, important monographic studies of the voting rights of African Americans, focusing particularly on the post-Civil War period (when African Americans were enfranchised and then disfranchised) and on the 1950s and 1960s (when they were re-enfranchised).5 There is also a rich literature—beginning with the writings of key participants—chronicling the movement for women’s suffrage.6 In addition, historians have produced several synthetic accounts of the ways in which the franchise was reconfigured between 1800 and 1850.7

  Yet thus far, no modern, comprehensive history of the right to vote has been written. The last attempt to survey the evolution of the franchise in the United States was made more than fifty years ago; the most recent scholarly effort, written by historian Kirk Porter, was published in 1918.8 There has been, in effect, no attempt to explore in any systematic way the sweep of this story over a long period, the links between different strands of the history (e.g., suffrage for women and the voting rights of immigrants), or the overall sources and rhythms of change in the breadth of the franchise. Which is remarkable in a nation that so publicly prizes its democrati
c history.

  This scholarly silence appears to have several different sources. Foremost among them is what one might call a progressive or triumphalist presumption: a deeply embedded, yet virtually unspoken, notion that the history of suffrage is the history of gradual, inevitable reform and progress. (In England, as historian Herbert Butterfield has famously noted, such presumptions have yielded a “Whig” interpretation of history.) 9 The inventor of this idea—or at least its most well-known early celebrant—was Alexis de Tocqueville. Writing in 1835 in Democracy in America, de Tocqueville observed (or rather predicted) thatOnce a people begins to interfere with the voting qualification, one can be sure that sooner or later it will abolish it altogether. That is one of the most invariable rules of social behavior. The further the limit of voting rights is extended, the stronger is the need felt to spread them still wider; for after each new concession the forces of democracy are strengthened, and its demands increase with its augmented power. The ambition of those left below the qualifying limit increases in proportion to the number of those above it. Finally the exception becomes the rule; concessions follow one another without interruption, and there is no halting place until universal suffrage has been attained.10

  De Tocqueville’s “rule of social behavior” certainly rings a bit mechanistic to modern ears, but the broad outlines of his forecast have seemed to many analysts to match the American experience. The standard narrative, consequently, goes as follows: at the nation’s founding, the franchise was sharply restricted, but thereafter one group of citizens after another acquired the right to vote. Most propertyless white men were enfranchised during the first half of the nineteenth century; then came African Americans; then women; then African Americans again; and finally, even eighteen-year-olds. The precise causes and dynamics of change may have been less straightforward than de Tocqueville believed, but viewed from afar, the major events in American suffrage history appeared to fit the de Tocquevillian model of change that was straightforward, unidirectional, and inevitable.11 “The history of the American suffrage has been one of steady and irresistible expansion,” noted Harvard historian and political scientist William B. Munro in 1928. “One limitation after another has been swept away by constitutional amendments and laws—religious tests, property qualifications, race discriminations, and finally exclusion on grounds of sex.”12

  Interestingly—but not surprisingly—this progressive presumption has had greater currency during some periods than others. In the 1890s, when some of the first histories of suffrage were written (and when the breadth of the franchise was a very live issue), de Tocqueville’s notion was far from preeminent. An impressive study of suffrage in Michigan in the nineteenth century, for example, concluded that change was not at all unidirectional: “The tendencies which were so markedly toward liberality and extension in the earlier half of the century,” wrote Mary Jo Adams, “have been scarcely less clearly in the direction of conservatism in the later half.”13 The same conclusion was reached in 1897 by James Schouler, in the first article about American voters ever published in the American Historical Review. More or less simultaneously, writer and professor of constitutional history Francis N. Thorpe characterized the evolution of voting rights as contingent rather than inevitable; there had been, he wrote, a “struggle for the franchise, now lasting a century.”14 Two decades later, Kirk Porter’s history of suffrage, reflecting the emphasis on conflict so characteristic of his era’s historians, depicted a “vigorous” century-long “fight” over the right to vote, driven by “materialistic considerations.”15

  By the middle of the twentieth century, however, this sense of conflict and contingency had receded; perhaps because women finally had gained the franchise and because cold war liberalism provided a congenial ideological climate, the idea of an inexorable march toward universal suffrage became preeminent. “One of the easiest victories of the democratic cause,” proclaimed political scientist E. E. Schattschneider in 1960, “has been the struggle for the extension of the suffrage. . . . The struggle for the ballot was almost bloodless, almost completely peaceful and astonishingly easy.” It is testimony both to the paucity of historical research and to the ideological power of triumphalism that Schattschneider, a learned and insightful critic of American politics, could pen such sentences despite the violent struggles over suffrage in the post-Civil War South—and while most blacks remained voteless. Similarly, in 1978, an eminent and concerned trio of political scientists could identify “the history of the franchise” simply as “the history of the removal of barriers based on economic condition or sex or skill and often the lowering of the age threshold. . . . The result is a system with wide political rights equally available to all citizens.” This triumphalist spirit also informed the only scholarly synthesis written during this period, Chilton Williamson’s study of colonial and antebellum reform, tellingly subtitled From Property to Democracy.16

  More important, the progressive presumption appears to have dampened interest in the subject, to have deflected the spotlight of inquiry away from the history of the right to vote, even at a time when the struggle for voting rights was generating conflict and violence in the South. “Invariable rules of social behavior” and “irresistible expansions”—by whatever name—are phenomena that tend to be taken as historical givens rather than as problems inviting research. The expansion of democratic political rights in the United States was not deemed to require explanation: it was the nation’s natural destiny. Accordingly, many mid-twentieth-century historians—particularly those of the consensus persuasion—were likely to agree with Munro that the history of suffrage was “a long and not a very interesting story.”17 This opinion was shared by the revisionist social historians of a slightly later generation (including the author), at least in part because we were inclined to view electoral politics as mere superstructure and thus irrelevant or of scant interest.18 Within the scholarly community, the evolution of the right to vote attracted attention primarily among students of comparative politics, who were interested less in historical inquiry or specific national histories than in theory building.19

  This book is an attempt to break the odd silence about the history of suffrage, to take a new look, with fresh eyes, at a venerable, if neglected, subject. It offers a chronicle of the history of the right to vote in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present, an account of the evolution of the laws—municipal, state, and federal—that have defined and circumscribed the American electorate. It is a narrative detailing the ways in which women, African Americans, industrial workers, immigrants, and many other groups (or categories of individuals) acquired, and sometimes lost, the right to vote.

  This book also is an attempt to puzzle over the story, to avoid taking familiar things for granted, to interrogate the past with wonder. It is well known, for instance, that only property owners could vote at the end of the eighteenth century, but why exactly was this the case? Why in fact did it take so long for women to gain the right to vote? Or, for that matter, why did the right to vote expand at all? Why did those who were already enfranchised, such as property-owning white males, cut anybody else in on the deal? It is by no means self-evident, as one looks at modern history, that individuals who possess political power will (or can be expected to) share that power with others, millions of others. Why did it happen, and why did the right to vote expand at certain times and certain places, while contracting in others?

  To pose such questions is to inquire both into the origins of democracy and into the obstacles or threats to the existence of democratic polities. The two inquiries necessarily accompany and implicate one another: as global politics in the twentieth century made abundantly clear, democracies do not thrive under all conditions, and democratic yearnings do not necessarily produce durable democratic institutions. The United States is not and has not been an exception in this regard. Our history is complex, at times contradictory, befitting a nation that began as a republic that tolerated slavery.20 The ev
olution of democracy rarely followed a straight path, and it always has been accompanied by profound antidemocratic countercurrents. The history of suffrage in the United States is a history of both expansion and contraction, of inclusion and exclusion, of shifts in direction and momentum at different places and at different times.

  In addition to charting such shifts and reversals, this book offers a framework for understanding and explaining them—a framework that may provoke controversy and perhaps inspire further research. Stated briefly, the argument is as follows: the expansion of suffrage in the United States was generated by a number of key forces and factors, some of which have long been celebrated by scholars, journalists, politicians, and teachers. These include the dynamics of frontier settlement (as Frederick Jackson Turner pointed out a century ago), the rise of competitive political parties, the growth of cities and industry, the flourishing of democratic ideals and beliefs, and effective efforts at mobilization on the part of the disfranchised themselves.21

  Yet alongside these factors was another, less celebrated force: war. Nearly all of the major expansions of the franchise that have occurred in American history took place either during or in the wake of wars. The historical record indicates that this was not a coincidence: the demands of both war itself and preparedness for war created powerful pressures to enlarge the right to vote. Armies had to be recruited, often from the so-called lower orders of society, and it was rhetorically as well as practically difficult to compel men to bear arms while denying them the franchise; similarly, conducting a war meant mobilizing popular support, which gave political leverage to any social groups excluded from the polity. While it may seem less exceptional and romantic than the frontier, without doubt war played a greater role in the evolution of American democracy.22