You don’t have an affirmative Constitutional right to vote. (Did you know that?) The right to vote was not (affirmatively) included in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, or any of the other Amendments.
The word “democracy,” which originated in ancient Greece, comes from the word “demos,” which means “people,” and “kratia,” which means power. For the Greek thinkers, though, democracy didn’t mean power to all people. It meant power to well-educated “free” male citizens. Later, in the city-states of the Roman Republic where common people were given the right to vote and thus a voice in government, the right to vote was similarly limited to an elite group of men.
The same Greeks who gave us early democracies and the word democracy understood the pitfalls of democracy. It is, therefore, no coincidence that they also gave us the word demagoguery, which literally means a leader of the people but it has come to mean “a person, especially a political leader, who wins support by exciting the emotions of ordinary people rather than by having good or morally right ideas.”
Angie Hobbs, a professor at the University of Sheffield, offers Plato’s chilling account of how a democracy can be subverted by an opportunistic demagogue:
The demagogue gains power by democratic means, claiming to be a champion of ‘the people’ and making wild promises . . . Anyone who opposes the demagogue is labeled an ‘enemy of the people’ and exiled or killed. Such tactics naturally create genuine enemies, and the demagogue quickly acquires a large bodyguard, and eventually a private army. External conflicts are also stirred up to keep the people in need of a strong leader.
Eli Merritt, a political historian at Vanderbilt University says the “golden rule of democracies” is that “Demagogues Destroy Democracy.”
This summary of Plato’s thoughts is from the Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy:
In other words, Plato and some of his contemporaries thought most people were too gullible and easily manipulated, and therefore, democracy would fall into the hands of a wily demagogue. Democracy, for Plato, was thus not the best form of government.
Voting in the Colonies
Even though there was a king, the colonists were allowed to vote for some offices, including legislators to the lower house of their assemblies.
Early voting practices fed into the worst stereotypes about how easy it would be to manipulate average voters. It was common in Colonial America for candidates for office to offer food and alcoholic drinks to sway possible voters. This is from the Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition,
When twenty-four-year-old George Washington first ran for a seat in the Virginia House of Burgesses, he attributed his defeat to his failure to provide enough alcohol for the voters. When he tried again two years later, Washington floated into office partly on the 144 gallons of rum, punch, hard cider, and beer his election agent handed out—roughly half a gallon for every vote he received.
This is from Campaigning in America: A History of Election Practices:
“If a candidate ignored the custom of treating, he often found himself in great difficulty.” When James Madison attempted to campaign in 1777 without “the corrupting influence of spiritous liquors, and other treats,” he lost to a less principled opponent.
At the same time, voting in colonial America was limited to men who owned property. The following comes from Alexander Keyssar’s The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States.
In seven colonies, men had to own land of specified acreage or monetary value in order to participate in elections; elsewhere, the ownership of personal property of a designated value (or in South Carolina, the payment of taxes) could substitute for real estate. (p. 38.)
Aside from property qualifications, there were no firm principles governing colonial voting rights, and suffrage laws accordingly were quite varied. Not only Catholics and Jews, but also Native Americans, free blacks, and non-naturalized aliens could vote in some places and not in others.10 Women were barred expressly in several colonies, including Virginia, but statutes elsewhere made no reference to gender, and in at least a few Massachusetts towns and New York counties propertied widows did legally vote.11 Absentee landowners were enfranchised in Virginia in 1736, which often meant that they could vote in more than one place. In practice, moreover, the enforcement or application of suffrage laws was uneven and dependent on local circumstances. (p. 37.)
Why the Right to Vote Was Not Included in the Constitution
The Preamble to the United States Constitution was drafted by men who had studied Plato, the democracies of early antiquity, and modern enlightenment ideas. The Preamble opens with the soaring words, “We the people.” While the founders did not speak with a single voice—there was much dissent and disagreement—they, like the creators of democracies that came before, generally assumed that we the people meant a particular subset of people. For the founders, the general thinking was that the right to vote, and hence a voice in government, should be limited to white, male-landowning men.
The rationale for limiting the vote to men who owned land was articulated by William Blackstone in Commentaries on the Laws of England, who wrote that voters without property were too dependent on others to have “will of their own,” which, he argued, “would give a great, an artful, or a wealthy man, a larger share in elections than is consistent with general liberty.” He went on to say:
“If it were probable that every man would give his vote freely, and without influence of any kind, then, upon the true theory and genuine principles of liberty, every member of the community, however poor, should have a vote in electing those delegates, to whose charge is committed the disposal of his property, his liberty, and his life. But, since that can hardly be expected in persons of indigent fortunes, or such as are under the immediate dominion of others, all popular states have been obliged to establish certain qualifications; whereby some, who are suspected to have no will of their own, are excluded from voting, in order to set other individuals, whose wills may be supposed independent, more thoroughly upon a level with each other.
The rationale for not allowing women to vote was twofold. First, women were believed to be incapable of the kind of rational thinking necessary to understand politics and government. Second, it was argued that the husband and father would vote in the best interests of his entire family.
Another fear of opening the vote to all the people was rooted in what has been called the tyranny of the majority, which can be cynically described as two wolves and a sheep voting on the dinner menu. Madison, for example, said that if the right to vote was given exclusively to the propertied class, the rights of non-landowners may be oppressed. But if the right is extended to all people, the rights of property owners may be taken away by a majority without property. He went on to say:
Who would rely on a fair decision from three individuals if two had an interest in the case opposed to the rights of the third? Make the number as great as you please, the impartiality will not be increased, nor any further security against injustice be obtained, than what may result from the greater difficulty of uniting the wills of a greater number.
To limit the dangers of a tyranny of the majority, the drafters of our Constitution devised a system of checks and balances, and a Bill of Rights designed to keep a majority in check. One of the rights conferred by the Bill of Rights was the guarantee that the government could not deprive any person of their property without due process of law. Among other things, this has been understood to mean that the government cannot seize personal property unless it’s for “public use” and the government must pay for it.
The drafters of our constitution created a liberal democracy, which was the eighteenth-century term for a representative democracy in which the people elect representatives who are then held in check by Constitutional limitations.
The question for the drafters of the Constitution remained: Who was to be included in “we the people.” John Adams said, “It is certain in theory, that the only moral foundation of government is the consent of the people. But to what an extent shall we carry this ‘principle?” James Madison understood that the right to vote was a fundamental right in democratic constitutions, but asserted that the “regulation of it is, at the same time, a task of peculiar delicacy.” John Adams believed that it was dangerous to even open the possibility of extending the vote to those beyond property-owning men because:
“There will be no end of it. New claims will arise. Women will demand a vote. Lads from 12 to 21 will think their rights not enough attended to, and every man, who has not a farthing, will demand an equal voice with any other in all acts of state. It tends to confound and destroy all distinctions, and prostrate all ranks, to one common level.”
The solution the drafters reached was to allow each state to decide for itself who would be permitted to vote. While there were exceptions, voting was largely restdepenricted to white landowning men.
People who are not included naturally want to be included. Nearly two hundred and fifty years of American history since the founding of the nation can be viewed as a struggle for out-groups to be included in “we the people.”
In the early nineteenth century, Andrew Jackson led a successful populist movement that resulted in “we the people” being opened to include all white men. His idea was that the voice of [white] farmers, ranchers, and laborers should be given the exact same weight as the wealthiest banker or landowner. After the Civil War, “we the people” expanded to include Black men—in theory. After the Civil War, three new amendments were added to the Constitution: The Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment, among other things, guaranteed rights to formerly enslaved people. The Fifteenth Amendment extended the right to vote to Black men. For a brief time after the Civil War, Black men voted in significant numbers, but angry whites found ways to prevent Black American men from voting. A law known as the “grandfather clause” stated that a person could not vote unless his grandfather voted, an impossibility for formerly enslaved people. After this law was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1915, widespread intimidation tactics and fraud succeeded in keeping most Black men away from the polls.
In 1920, women earned the right to vote, but because of cultural barriers placed in their way, power remained largely in the hands of white men. This is the newly elected US House of Representatives in 1939:
The period between the 1920s and the 1950s was one of comparative harmony. The two major parties basically got along. They were willing to compromise. They tried to see each other’s viewpoints. The parties were homogeneous. Both parties—as well as all of our institutions such as courts, universities, local governments, and industries—were controlled by white men. Neither part embraced civil rights.
It’s easy to support a democracy when all the voters are like you.
In the 1930s, a group of brilliant and determined Black lawyers took on the task of ending legal racial segregation in America. Their strategy was to begin by suing local school districts for failing to provide Black school children with adequate facilities while building a body of precedent that would enable them to attack the constitutionality of racial segregation itself. At the same time, they challenged unfair police practices that included routinely beating confessions out of Black men. The culmination of decades of work was Brown v. Board of Education, the case in which, in 1954, the United States Supreme Court declared racial segregation in schools to be unconstitutional.
When the Supreme Court handed down its decision Brown v. Board of Education, people caught the drift. If segregation was illegal in schools, what about buses, restaurants, and lunch counters? What about drinking fountains? In 1955, the year after Brown v. Board of Education declared racial segregation illegal—the Montgomery Bus Strike erupted.
The backlash started immediately. Mississippi Senator James Eastland said, “The South will not abide by or obey this legislative decision by the Court.” Governor Herman Talmadge of Georgia said racial integration was “the first step toward national suicide.” Virginia embarked on what it called “massive resistance” to integration. A movement arose to impeach Earl Warren, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who had presided over the Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. It took decades before some school districts allowed Black students to attend “white” schools.
In 1964 and 1965, Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson and Democratic majorities in Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Meanwhile, the modern civil rights movement ignited the modern women’s movement. As women and minorities began voting in larger numbers, elected representatives ceased being entirely white and male, and for the first time—after almost two hundred years—America began moving toward a true multi-racial and multicultural democracy in which all adult citizens would be given a voice in government.
The Fourteenth Amendment, added after the Civil War, contains the Equal Protection Clause, which says that no person can be denied “equal protection of the laws.” Under the Fifteenth Amendment, also added after the Civil War, the right to vote cannot be denied based on race or color. Under the Nineteenth Amendment, the right to vote cannot be denied based on sex or gender. The 24th Amendment, ratified in 1964, eliminated poll taxes. The tax had been used in some states to keep Black Americans from voting in federal elections. The 26th Amendment, ratified in 1971, lowered the voting age for all elections to 18.
None of this gives anyone an affirmative right to vote. The Supreme Court views the omission of an affirmative right to vote from the Constitution to mean that voting is a privilege that states may administer or infringe as they see fit—as long as the limits and infringement does not discriminate based on race, color, or gender. Pennsylvanian James Wilson, who signed of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, described suffrage as a “darling privilege of free men” but also argued that the privilege could and should be “extended as far as considerations of safety and order will permit.” (Alexander Keyssar, p. 43)
So if a state wants to deny the right to vote to anyone who has been convicted of a felony, the state can do so. If a state wants to deny the right to vote by mail, the state can do that as well. The only thing states can’t do (under the law as it now stands) is pass laws that deny the vote based on race, gender, or a suspect classification like religion or national origin.
A government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” raises a question: Who is included? Who are the people? It is obvious that if you can’t vote, you are not one of the “people” in “We the People.”
Voting didn’t matter much in the colonies because the king was sovereign and he appointed governors and filled other important posts. But colonists were allowed to vote for some offices, including legislators to the lower house of their assemblies.
Early voting practices fed into the worst stereotypes about how easy it would be to manipulate average voters. It was common in Colonial America for candidates for office to offer food and alcoholic drinks to sway possible voters. This is from the Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition,
When twenty-four-year-old George Washington first ran for a seat in the Virginia House of Burgesses, he attributed his defeat to his failure to provide enough alcohol for the voters. When he tried again two years later, Washington floated into office partly on the 144 gallons of rum, punch, hard cider, and beer his election agent handed out—roughly half a gallon for every vote he received.
This is from Campaigning in America: A History of Election Practices:
“If a candidate ignored the custom of treating, he often found himself in great difficulty.” When James Madison attempted to campaign in 1777 without “the corrupting influence of spiritous liquors, and other treats,” he lost to a less principled opponent.
At the same time, voting in colonial America was limited to men who owned property. The following comes from Alexander Keyssar’s The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States.
In seven colonies, men had to own land of specified acreage or monetary value in order to participate in elections; elsewhere, the ownership of personal property of a designated value (or in South Carolina, the payment of taxes) could substitute for real estate. (p. 38.)
Aside from property qualifications, there were no firm principles governing colonial voting rights, and suffrage laws accordingly were quite varied. Not only Catholics and Jews, but also Native Americans, free blacks, and non-naturalized aliens could vote in some places and not in others.10 Women were barred expressly in several colonies, including Virginia, but statutes elsewhere made no reference to gender, and in at least a few Massachusetts towns and New York counties propertied widows did legally vote.11 Absentee landowners were enfranchised in Virginia in 1736, which often meant that they could vote in more than one place. In practice, moreover, the enforcement or application of suffrage laws was uneven and dependent on local circumstances. (p. 37.)
The rationale for limiting political power to who those owned land was offered by the jurist William Blackstone who, in 1769 in Commentaries on the Laws of England, wrote that voters without property were too dependent on others to have “will of their own.” He argued that this meant they would be too easily manipulated by those upon whom they were dependent, which “would give a great, an artful, or a wealthy man, a larger share in elections than is consistent with general liberty.”
Ben Franklin made fun of the idea that voting rights should hinge on the amount of property a man owned:
Today a man owns a jackass worth fifty dollars and he is entitled to vote; but before the next election the jackass dies. The man in the meantime has become more experienced, his knowledge of the principles of government, and his acquaintance with mankind, are more extensive, and he is therefore better qualified to make a proper selection of rulers—but the jackass is dead and the man cannot vote. Now gentlemen, pray inform me, in whom is the right of suffrage? In the man or in the jackass?
Another rationale for limiting the vote to people who owned property was that property owners had more of a stake in the laws. The rationale for not including women was the widespread belief that women were incapable of the kind of rational thinking necessary to understand politics and government. (In other words, these rich guys thought that women and poor people were too easily manipulated by men like them, so poor people and women should not be allowed to vote.)
Fear of Demagogues
In 1787, when the nation was in chaos because the Articles of Confederation were failing, George Washington wrote to Lafayette to express his fears that a demagogue would take advantage of the chaos to seize power:
In watching the young nation come close to collapse under the Articles of Confederation, the drafters of the Constitution thus had what they believed to be direct evidence that the common people could only be trusted so far.
Founding a democracy while not trusting the ability of common people to make decisions is obviously problematic. John Adams recognized this problem in 1776, when he said, “It is certain in theory, that the only moral foundation of government is the consent of the people. But to what an extent shall we carry this ‘principle?”
He went on to say:
Adams understood that simply opening the possibility of extending the vote and thereby giving political power to those beyond property-owning men was problematic because:
The Constitutional Convention
It is not surprising that when early American leaders became delegates to the Constitution Convention, they brought their skepticism that the common people could make good decisions and elect the most qualified leaders.
Gouverneur Morris said to his fellow delegates, “We should remember that the people never act from reason alone. The rich will take advantage of their passions & make these the instruments for oppressing them.” Later, he said, “Give the votes to people who have no property, and they will sell them to the rich who will be able to buy them.”
The underlying fear seemed to be this: If you let everyone vote, including the poor and those with less education, what will they vote for?
James Madison laid out the problem as he (and many of his contemporaries) understood it:
The right of suffrage is a fundamental Article in Republican Constitutions. The regulation of it is, at the same time, a task of peculiar delicacy. Allow the right exclusively to property, and the rights of persons may be oppressed. The feudal polity alone sufficiently proves it. Extend it equally to all, and the rights of property or the claims of justice may be overruled by a majority without property, or interested in measures of injustice. Of this abundant proof is afforded by other popular Govts. and is not without examples in our own, particularly in the laws impairing the obligation of contracts.
He went on to say that in a civilized and free society, personal rights as well as property rights must be guarded. The problem is this: If you limit the vote to people who have property, they may vote to limit the personal rights of others. But if you allow all people, including those without property to vote, the many (those without property) may vote to seize the property of the few.
In making his point, Madison also explained a concept known as the tyranny of the majority:
Another way of saying the same thing is: allowing non-propertied people to vote would be like two wolves and a lamb deciding on the dinner menu. There would be nothing to stop the wolves (those without property) from preying on the lamb.
At the same time, Madison understood that giving the vote only to the rich created problems because:
The drafters sought to mitigate the potential problem of demagogues and to limit a possible tyranny of the majority by setting up institutional checks and balances so that, should a demagogue come to power, his ability to wreak havoc would be (at least somewhat) limited. Similarly, they viewed dividing the power and creating checks, particularly the judicial branch, as a way to help prevent a tyranny of the majority.
But they were less sure how to deal with the problem of defining who could vote. They understood that deciding who should vote and who should not vote was “a task of peculiar delicacy.”
As far as they were concerned, universal voting rights were obviously out of the question. The enslavers who wrote the Constitution had no intention of giving up the institution of slavery. The drafters of the Constitution (with perhaps a few exceptions) didn’t believe women were capable of thinking about the complex issues involving government and politics. Moreover, they viewed women as property under the dominion of men, which essentially gave a married man two votes.
Even limiting the vote to white men created difficulties in setting down a rule. Where would they draw the line? What should the age requirement be? How much education enabled a person to analyze complex political questions? What about well-educated people who happened not to own land because they were engaged in one of the professions and frequently traveled?
The drafters of the Constitution understood that they needed popular support if the Constitution they drafted would have any hope of being ratified. How would they win popular support if they put right there, in the Constitution itself for everyone to see, that the majority of Americans would have no voice and that “we the people” didn’t really mean “all the people”?
So the Founders Kicked the Problem Down the Road
They opted to leave the issue of who should vote out of the Constitution. Instead, they designated authority for deciding who should vote to the states. This is from Article 1, section 4:
The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.
(When the above was ratified, Senators were chosen by state legislators. The 17th Amendment changed that. Under the 17th Amendment, Senators are elected by the people.)
What happened next was just what you’d expect. People who were excluded wanted to be included and thus began the struggle for the right to vote, which began when the nation was founded and continues to the present day.
First, the franchise opened up for white men.
This is from Keysslar: “The United States was the first country in the Western world to significantly broaden its electorate by permanently lowering economic barriers to voting.” Most states removed the property ownership requirement and instead instituted a tax paying requirement which allowed more men to vote. Then states gradually got rid of all economic requirements. The result was almost universal suffrage — for white men.
But white men on the margins were still often excluded: Migrants, the poor who accepted public assistance or charity, convicts, the mentally ill. Debates centered around whether penniless migrant illiterate drifters had the ability to make informed and rational decisions about who should govern or whether they would be too easily swayed by those who offered them charity.
At the same time, the franchise closed for Black Americans
The number of states that forbid freed Black Americans to vote rose steadily between 1790 and 1850. Examples: New Jersey, Maryland, and Connecticut initially allowed African Americans to vote, but by 1820, limited the franchise to whites. In 1835, North Carolina added the word “white” to its constitutional requirements. Pennsylvania, which had a liberal constitution during the revolutionary era, added “white” to its constitutional requirements in 1838.
Every state that entered the union after 1819 prohibited blacks from voting.
By 1855, only five states (Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and Rhode Island) did not discriminate against African Americans, but these states contained only 4 percent of the nation’s free black population.
The federal government also prohibited black Americans from voting in the territories it controlled.
The Progressive (or Triumphalist) Presumption
Keysslar explains what he calls the progressive presumption or triumphalist presumption, which he defines as “a deeply embedded, yet virtually unspoken, notion that the history of suffrage is the history of gradual, inevitable reform and progress.” (p. 22)
He traces the origins of this idea at least as far back as Alexis de Tocqueville, a French political thinker who came to the United States in 1831 and wrote Democracy in Americabased on what he observed. What struck Alexis de Tocqueville most about the United States was “the country’s equality of conditions, its democracy.” Yes, this was the era of slavery and restricting rights for women, but the United States was the only country in the Western world to open the suffrage to (almost) all (white) men.
While the US was ahead in some ways (removing economic barriers for white men) it was behind in others: The British empire abolished slavery in all of its holdings in 1834.
Doris Kearns Goodwin, in Team of Rivals, a Pulitzer Prize winning book about the Lincoln era, opened Chapter 3 with this image of the men in a 19th century American town discussing politics:
The opening paragraph and the painting (Stump Speaking by 19th century painter George Caleb Bingham, 1811-1879) illustrate what Alexis de Tocqueville saw and admired.
Among the things Alexis de Tocqueville concluded was:
Once 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.
His reasoning was that power becomes consolidated into the hands of a few, those few become less willing to share it. In fact, that didn’t happen. He also conclcuded that:
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.
In other words, he viewed progress as automatic: Once it starts, it will inevitably push forward. Keysslar proves through historical examples that this presumption is false. In fact, the history of voting rights shows that both of Toqueville’s conclusions were false.
Why the franchise opened up (for white men) in the first half of the 19th century
Middle class Americans in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century were mostly yeoman farmers, shopkeepers, merchants, “mechanics,” and soldiers. They were also white and almost entirely Protestant.
While there were always activists and idealists who believed that a country that boasted of rule by people should give all people a voice, the changes were also driven by self-interests. The leaders of the Democratic-Republicans, the party of Thomas Jefferson (which later morphed into the party of the Confederacy) knew that extending the vote to yeoman farmers and other non-elite whites would improve their electoral prospections. This group tended to vote Democratic instead of Whig. For example, in 1807, the New Jersey state legislature restricted voting rights to tax-paying, white male citizens. This was done to give the Democratic-Republican Party an advantage in the 1808 presidential election. Women often voted for the opposing Federalist Party, so taking away women’s voting rights helped the Democratic-Republicans.
In 1845, American demographics began changing. The Irish Famine of 1845 brought millions of Irish Catholics to American shores. No surprise, this was also the decade that saw the rise of an anti-Catholic political party, the Know Nothings, which flourished about 1850. The No Nothing Party was anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant. Anti-Catholic feelings in the US peaked during this large wave of immigration. Catholics were viewed as less civilized, less white, and embracing a religion viewed as tyrannical.
Then, in 1865, a period of rapid industrialization along with more waves of Jewish and Catholic immigrants into the Northern cities created a new working class, a proletariat, that hadn’t been a force in the United States earlier. These new immigrants worked in factories and in merchandizing and lived in crowded conditions in Northern urban cities. They often arrived penniless.
Keysslar argues that the elite in the early 1800s allowed white men without property or money to vote because the United States then didn’t have the proletariat class of workers so despised in Europe:
The relatively early broadening of the franchise in the United States was not simply, or even primarily, the consequence of a distinctive American commitment to democracy, of the insignificance of class, or of a belief in extending political rights to subaltern classes. Rather, the early extension of voting rights occurred—or was at least made possible—because the rights and power of those subaltern classes, despised and feared in the United States much as they were in Europe, were not at issue when suffrage reforms were adopted. (pp. 131-132).
Abolishing slavery similarly changed the demographics in the South. By the end of the Civil War, four million enslaved people had been freed.
In the early 1800s, when the Southern states opened the franchise to yeoman farmers, they never dreamed that the class of Southern farmers would one day include their own newly-freed enslaved population. Similarly, in the early 1800s, when the North opened the franchise to the urbanites, they never imagined that the end of the nineteenth century would see an enormous influx of proletariat factory workers, including Catholics, and Jews.
What happened next was a rise in restrictions including voter registration and residency requirements intended to keep these immigrants from voting. For example, in 1857, Massachusetts passed a law requiring prospective voters to demonstrate their ability to read the Constitution. This was intended to keep what the Know Nothings called the “ignorant, imbruted Irish” from the polls. (p.. 152.) In 1860 “secessionist Georgia disenfranchised propertyless whites, largely in response to the rapid growth of an Irish working-class population in Augusta and Savannah.” (p. 151).
With two exceptions, the franchise was gradually restricted in the second half of the nineteenth century. First, western states, beginning with Wyoming, allowed women to vote primarily as a way of attracting white women from the east to the new states.
The other exception was the 15th Amendment giving Black men the right to vote. There were, of course, nineteenth century idealists committed to universal suffrage behind the 15th Amendment. In fact, abolitionists had been working for decades to create equality. But there was also some self-interest. During the Reconstruction Era, the Republicans (then the anti-slavery party of Lincoln and northern industrialism) knew that Black men, if given the vote, would vote Republican. So they wanted Black men to vote. The Republicans (which was then the Party of Lincoln) knew that white southern women, if allowed to vote, would cancel out the votes of white northern women, so there was no gain, therefore no point including women. Thus women were thus not included in the 15th Amendment. This enraged the women, black and white, who had worked tirelessly to help end enslavement and create equal rights. They were shocked to find themselves left out of the 15th Amendment.
In other words, the period from 1790 to about 1870 witnessed a “checkered tale of motion forward, backward, and sideways, of local peculiarities and surprises, of rapidly changing, increasingly heterogenous society contending awkwardly with its own professed political values.”
And yet, there remains a firm belief that the history of voting rights has been one of “gradual, inevitable reform and progress.”
Keysslar notes that because the progressive presumption has dominated thinking about voting rights in the modern era, the history of voting rights has been of little interest to scholars. What is there to write about, after all, if progress in voting rights is automatic? We have the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, so all we have to do is sit back and applaud the progress and watch as it continues on its own momentum. Right? (wrong!)
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