The Right to Vote Read online

  This ideological tilt, grounded in social changes that had swept the nation, was readily apparent at numerous constitutional conventions that debated and acted on proposals to enlarge the franchise. These debates generally were heated, and many of the views expressed echoed those heard at the end of the eighteenth century. But the ideological spectrum had shifted, its centerpoint sliding to the left—which was reflected not only in the substance but in the emphases, tones, and language of the debates.

  Delegates who advocated the elimination of property requirements (the central obstacle to a broader suffrage) from the outset were more aggressive and more confident in their arguments than their predecessors during the revolutionary period. These delegates paid their rhetorical respects to the founding fathers, but pointed out that the “framers” had unfortunately “retained a small relic of ancient prejudices” that it had come time to be “rid of.” As retired Senator Nathan Sanford of New York noted in 1821, the ideas that had shaped the first constitutions came from “British precedents,” from the British notion of “three estates” that ought to be represented in Parliament. “But here there is but one estate—the people.” David Buel, a young lawyer from Rensselaer County, pointed out that social conditions had changed: “without the least derogation from the wisdom . . . of the framers,” it had to be understood that their embrace of property qualifications came in response to “circumstances which then influenced them, but which no longer ought to have weight.”65

  Reform delegates frontally attacked the notion that those who owned property were somehow better qualified to vote than those who did not. “Regard for country,” argued J. T. Austin of Boston in 1820, “did not depend upon property, but upon institutions, laws, habits, and associations.” William Griffith of New Jersey, writing under the name of Eumenes, declared that it was simply an irrational prejudice, unsupported by any evidence, to claim that the ownership of “fifty pounds clear estate” made someone “more a man or citizen,” “more honest,” or “wiser than his neighbor who has but ten pounds.” The eloquent nonfreeholders of Richmond went a step further in 1829: “to ascribe to a landed possession, moral or intellectual endowments, would truly be regarded as ludicrous, were it not for the gravity with which the proposition is maintained, and still more for the grave consequences that flow from it.” Linked to such views was a complete and sometimes contemptuous dismissal of the Blackstonian notion that only real property ownership gave a man sufficient independence to be a trustworthy voter. One Virginia delegate, after a detailed, logical dissection of the claim that broadening the franchise would permit the rich to manipulate the poor, concluded that the “freehold test” had no merit “unless there be something in the ownership of land, that by enchantment or magic converts frail erring man, into an infallible and impeccable being.”66

  Some advocates of reform insisted, as their predecessors had in the late eighteenth century, that voting was a natural or universal right. New Yorker James Cheetham, writing in 1800, invoked the Declaration of Independence (“all men are created equal”) to support the notion that “the right of suffrage cannot belong to one man without belonging to another; it cannot belong to a part without belonging to the whole.”67 In the late 1840s and 1850s, the most radical advocates of democracy even mustered natural rights arguments to support the enfranchisement of African Americans, women, aliens, and paupers. On the whole, however, natural rights or universal rights arguments were notably scarce in convention debates, at least in part because reformers were well aware that such arguments would immediately provoke the conservative Pandora’s box counterattack. Josiah Quincy, a staunch defender of property requirements, leapt on a Massachusetts reformer’s claim that “every man whose life and liberty is made liable to the laws, ought therefore to have a voice, in the choice of his legislators.” Is not this argument, argued Quincy, “equally applicable to women and to minors? . . . The denial of this right to them shows that the principle is not just.”68

  To avoid such counterattacks, many who favored a broader suffrage retreated to the argument that voting was a qualified “right” that only some possessed. Niles’ Register, the voice of manufacturing interests in Connecticut, maintained that voting was “the natural right of every citizen, who is bound by the law to render personal services to the state, or aid its revenue by money.” Similarly, a delegate to the Ohio convention in the early 1850s insisted that voting was “a matter of right” for “a man who is the subject of government, and shares in its burthens.” In 1846, in New York, a delegate urged that blacks be granted “the common rights of freemen.”69

  As such language suggests, most proponents of an expanded suffrage, while rejecting the conservative view that the franchise was a privilege that the state could limit however it wished, took the position that voting was a right, but a right that had to be earned: by paying taxes, serving in the militia, or even laboring on the public roads. As Nathan Sanford put it, “those who bear the burthens of the state should choose those that rule it.”70 That simple proposition meshed well with the rhetoric of the revolution, and the principle lent force to demands that all taxpayers vote and that it was an injustice to withhold the franchise from those who fought for the nation and served in its militias. (The military service argument also was mobilized to support the enfranchisement of aliens and African Americans.)71 There was, to be sure, one glaring inconsistency in the proposed application of this principle: the exclusion of women who paid taxes and shared the burdens of the state. But this was an inconsistency that most found easy to overlook.

  The centrality of the notion of an earned right made clear that the goal of most suffrage reformers was not a universal right to vote but rather the enfranchisement of what New Yorker Samuel Young described as “the intermediate class.” Future president Martin Van Buren was more precise, as he maneuvered the New York convention toward rejection of both the status quo and demands, from a radical faction, for universal suffrage. Van Buren’s stated goal was “clothing with the right of suffrage” a “class of men, composed of mechanics, professional men, and small landholders” that constituted the “bone, pith, and muscle of the population of the state.” Such men, of course, comprised a core constituency of the Democratic Party that Van Buren was so instrumental in building.72

  Underlying these arguments for expanding suffrage to include “mechanics, professional men . . . small landholders” and others like them was a curiously static vision of the future. Although conservatives (as will be discussed) repeatedly raised the specter of the growth of manufacturing and the appearance of a large, urban proletariat, reformers—in the Northeast between 1800 and 1830 and substantially later in the Midwest—dismissed that specter as a scare tactic. David Buel, for example, acknowledged that if he believed that manufacturing would become predominant and that enormous disparities in wealth loomed in the nation’s future, then he would “hesitate in extending the right of suffrage”; to the contrary, he was convinced that “the farmers in this country will always out number all other portions of our population.” Moreover, the “supposition that, at some future day, when the poor shall become numerous . . . they may rise, in the majesty of their strength, and usurp the property of the landholders, is so unlikely to be realized that we may dismiss all fear arising from that source.” His views were seconded by convention delegates throughout the nation, including the redoubtable Daniel Webster.73

  The movement for franchise expansion thus was grounded in the conviction that the relatively agrarian and egalitarian United States of the early nineteenth century would permanently endure. Only rarely did a reformer, such as J. T. Austin of Boston, argue that suffrage should be broadened even if we did become “a great manufacturing people.” “God forbid,” declared Austin, but if it should happen, he shrewdly observed that it would be “better to let . . . the laborers in manufactories” vote. “By refusing this right to them, you array them against the laws; but give them the rights of citizens . . . and you disarm them.”74
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br />   The argument against property requirements gained momentum and became easier to make with each passing decade, in part because reformers could cite a growing number of states where no property qualifications were in force and no calamities had ensued. David Buel made this point as early as 1820. A decade later, a delegate to the Virginia convention claimed that there were no property qualifications in “twenty-two out of twenty-four sister republics,” none of which had ended up in “tumults, confusion, civil discord, and finally despotism.”75 In the South, the momentum for reform was reinforced by intensifying anxiety about slave revolts and the increasing fusion of prosuffrage arguments with the defense of slavery. As Senator Charles Morgan put it at the Virginia convention of 1829-1830, “we ought to spread wide the foundation of our government, that all white men have a direct interest in its protection.”76

  In response to this array of arguments, conservative defenders of property qualifications, who were present and vocal at all the conventions, offered the same ideas put forward in the eighteenth century but with different emphases and in different proportions. Conservatives insisted that voting was not a matter of right but “wholly a question of expediency,” and as noted earlier, they were quick to point out the inconsistencies in any rights arguments put forward by reformers. They also maintained, in the words of Samuel Jones, author of a lengthy treatise published in 1842, that “on the question, who shall be admitted to the exercise of the right of suffrage, the public safety ought to govern.” The most sharp-edged conservatives, such as Warren Dutton of Massachusetts, claimed that “in this country, where the means of subsistence were so abundant and the demand for labor great,” any man who failed to acquire property was “indolent or vicious.”77

  Notably, however, the conservatives rarely reiterated the classical Blackstonian argument that property ownership alone could provide the “independence” required of voters. Although the idea did occasionally surface, and Josiah Quincy attempted a brief—and quickly ridiculed—evocation of Blackstone by arguing that property qualifications actually aided the poor rather than the rich, the eighteenth-century linkage of independence to property or freehold ownership was largely absent from public debate. If the fallible and sometimes weary eyes of one reader of convention transcripts can be trusted, the once-totemic phrase that the franchise should not be granted to “such persons as are in so mean a situation that they have no will of their own” was never uttered in the constitutional conventions. This powerful image of the late eighteenth century simply did not mesh with the social realities or values of the 1820s and 1830s.78

  Indeed, as Gordon Wood has pointed out, nineteenth-century conservatives—faced with the charge of being aristocrats at heart—ceased to claim that the ownership of landed property was intrinsically linked to a man’s character, that real property was a source of gentility, independence, and impartiality. Instead, they retreated to a defense of agriculture as a preeminent economic interest and to a celebration of the virtues of those who cultivated the soil. Among farmers, declared New York Federalist (and later Whig) James Kent, “we always expect to find moderation, frugality, order, honesty, and a due sense of independence, liberty, and justice....Their habits, sympathies, and employments necessarily inspire them with a correct spirit of freedom and justice.” In Virginia, it was argued that freeholders deserved special political rights because they paid most of the state’s taxes and provided the funds to pay for wars. Such arguments, of course, were less redolent of aristocracy, but they undercut the notion that the owners of land possessed special qualities that entitled them to wield a disproportionate amount of political power.79

  In fact, the conservative case for the maintenance of property requirements, particularly in the Northeast, rested less on the alleged virtues of freeholders than on the fear that the growth of industry would create a large, propertyless, and dangerous urban proletariat. This was a partial reincarnation of the Blackstonian argument, complete with its internal contradictions, yet in a more anxious, fearful, and industrial form. “Manufacturers are rapidly increasing; and their employers may bring them in regiments to the polls,” declared a Connecticut legislator. In Massachusetts, Josiah Quincy developed the argument in detail:Everything indicates that the destinies of the country will eventuate in the establishment of a great manufacturing interest in the Commonwealth. There is nothing in the condition of our country to prevent manufacturers from being absolutely dependent upon their employers, here as they are everywhere else. The whole body of every manufacturing establishment, therefore, are dead votes, counted by the head, by their employer. Let the gentlemen from the country consider, how it may affect their rights, liberties, and properties, if in every county of the Commonwealth there should arise, as in time there probably will, one, two, or three manufacturing establishments, each sending as the case may be, from one to eight hundred votes to the polls depending on the will of one employer, one great capitalist. In such a case would they deem such a provision as this of no consequence? At present it is of little importance. Prospectively of very great.80

  Quincy was, in effect, maintaining that industrial workers would “have no will of their own.” At the same time, the equally conservative Chancellor Kent voiced the opposite—and more common—fear: that those who worked in manufacturing would have too much will of their own and would threaten the interests of property. A freehold requirement for the New York Senate, Kent argued, was necessary to protect:against the caprice of the motley assemblage of paupers, emigrants, journeymen manufacturers, and those undefinable classes of inhabitants which a state and city like ours is calculated to invite. This is not a fancied alarm. Universal suffrage jeopardizes property, and puts it into the power of the poor and the profligate to control the affluent.

  Kent went on to maintain that:there is a constant tendency in human society, and the history of every age proves it; there is a tendency in the poor to covet and to share the plunder of the rich; in the debtor to relax or avoid the obligation of contracts; in the majority to tyrannize over the minority, and trample down their rights; in the indolent and the profligate to cast the whole burthens of society upon the industrious and the virtuous.

  Although New York was still dominated by cultivators of the soil, it was, according to Kent, well on the road toward inequalities of a type that would spawn bitter class conflict.

  The disproportion between the men of property and of no property is daily increasing; and it will be fallacious to expect that our people will continue the same small farmers as our ancestors were. . . . As our wealth increases, so also will our poor. . . . What has been the progress of the city of New York? In 1773, it contained only 21,000 inhabitants; in 1821, 123,000 souls. It is evidently destined to become the London of America. . . . And can gentlemen seriously and honestly say, that no danger is to be apprehended from those combustible materials which such a city must ever enclose? . . . The poor man’s interest is always in opposition to his duty; and it is too much to expect of human nature, that interest will not be consulted.81

  Clearly, Kent and his many allies were not simply worried that the propertyless lacked good and independent judgment; they were overtly hostile to manufacturing workers and the urban poor. Not only would the “motley assemblage” be covetous and threatening, it also would be, in the words of another New York delegate, a repository of “ignorance, vice, and corruption.” This imagined future compelled Kent to refuse to “bow before the right of universal suffrage. This democratic principle cannot be contemplated without terror.”82

  Similar visions of a dangerous and degraded urban population were evoked, in the Midwest, by opponents of alien suffrage. One Illinois delegate in 1847 declared that “the majority of foreigners who came here” were “ignorant, and . . . none but such, and criminals and paupers, came here at all.” Another, claiming that Massachusetts was already spending huge sums to support “her foreign pauper population,” feared that the urban masses of the Northeast would soon come to Illinois “an
d cast their votes in competition with our own citizens, even while sucking from us the life blood of our bosoms.” Everywhere conservatives voiced the apprehension that eliminating property qualifications would inescapably send the nation careening down the slippery slope that led to universal suffrage. “Once break loose from the freehold qualification,” wrote a Virginian in 1825, “and it will soon be found that every argument against that qualification goes the whole length of justifying and requiring universal suffrage, and in a few years we shall have this worst of evils entailed upon us.” Moreover, as Kent ominously warned, “universal suffrage, once granted, is granted forever, and never can be recalled. . . . However mischievous the precedent may be in its consequences, or however fatal in its effects, universal suffrage never can be recalled or checked, but by the strength of the bayonet.”83

  Ironically, perhaps, the conservatives’ portrait of the nation’s future proved far more accurate than the benign, static vision offered by Republican and Democratic reformers. Yet the prospect of a society dominated by manufacturing and cities teeming with hundreds of thousands of poor, rootless workers did not seem credible to most Americans in 1820 or even 1840. In the absence of that specter, the conservative case for preserving or (as in Pennsylvania in the 1830s) reinstituting property qualifications was unpersuasive as well as incongruent with widely accepted political values. Granting exclusive political rights to landowners and others who possessed considerable property did in fact smack of aristocracy and indeed was inconsistent with the quasi-egalitarian rhetoric of the revolution and the early republic.