Suffrage

Voting rights in the United States expanded greatly in the period 1813-55, especially as related to white males, who proved the greatest beneficiaries. It is estimated that by the War of 1812, suffrage extended to around 50 percent of all white households, or freeholders—namely, families who owned property. The next decade witnessed a drive to expand voting rights for white males. In 1824 John QuiNCY Adams became the first president elected by this enlarged franchise. But it fell upon his successor, Andrew Jackson, to usher in what became known as the “Age of the Common Man.”

As a frontier lawyer, land speculator, and army general, Jackson had rubbed shoulders with all manner of

Trappers, traders, Indian fighters, and frontiersmen, and he clearly identified with them far more than with the landed elites of the East Coast. After his inauguration in 1829, Jackson acted upon the precept that voting rights should be extended beyond landowners to all white male adult citizens. Greater power for the common man came at the expense of moneyed institutions such as the National Bank. Jackson also introduced the practice of patronage, or appointing political friends to high political office, because he firmly believed that it reduced the power of social elites and forestalled the creation of an aristocracy.

Despite its apparent egalitarianism, the ideology of “Jacksonian democracy” was wedded to the notion of racial supremacy. It promoted the continuation of slavery and the removal of Native Americans to western lands across the Mississippi River. Nor were voting benefits extended to free African-American males throughout the country, although those living in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina (among other states) had legally cast ballots since the 1790s. In this era states gradually repealed property qualifications, poll taxes, and religious requirements. But they remained free to legislate racial restrictions on the right to vote. Under the Constitution, state legislatures could disenfranchise black males, and up through 1860 only a third of all states permitted free minorities to vote. For white males, however, Jackson was the apotheosis of popular democracy, and the changes he wrought ushered out the old republican elitism of the previous Jeffersonian period.

The antebellum period also witnessed the first stirrings of the women’s movement and, with it, the drive for suffrage. New Jersey was the first state to grant women the right to vote in 1776, although it was repealed in 1807. Thereafter, females officially languished as second-class citizens without the franchise and, in many instances, without the right to own property, conduct business, or even keep the wages they earned, which automatically belonged to their husbands. These gross inequities found their undoing in the rise of social reform movements, such as temperance and abolitionism, in which women actively participated: As women campaigned for reform, they began equating their own plight with that of slaves. But as female delegates in these reform movements increasingly demanded gender equality, others in the movements resisted. The result was continuous strife, which actually split the American AntiSlavery Society in 1840.

The drive for female emancipation crystallized in 1848, when New York activists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott advertised a convention in Seneca Falls to discuss the “social, civil, and religious rights of women.” Convened on July 14, 1848, this conference was widely attended by delegates of both genders. Stanton and Mott couched their “Declaration of Sentiments” in principles drawn from the Declaration of Independence, informed by abolitionism and the ideals of Quakerism, a sect that gave women relative equality. The proceedings provoked an uproar in the press, inducing many of the 100 or so signatories to have their names struck from the document. Nonetheless, the American women’s movement had been born, and in the following month an even larger convention gathered in Rochester, New York. Progress proved painfully slow, retarded by the deep-rooted cultural ambivalence from a male-dominated political establishment. It was not until Reconstruction, when slavery had been legally abolished, that the movement for female suffrage gathered impetus.

Prospects were even more dismal for African-American females. The suffrage movement consisted mostly of middle-class women, who were fully cognizant that the presence of minorities at their conventions might hinder recruiting efforts. Thus black women were either discouraged from attending or forbidden outright. In 1851, when the black abolitionist Sojourner Truth appeared at a women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio, she was booed by many whites in the audience. Her “Ain’t I a Woman” speech may have rocked the halls, but it failed to gather many converts. As a rule women’s rights organizations throughout the antebellum period were largely all-white affairs and deliberately kept that way. The determination to keep abolitionism distinct from the women’s rights movement led to the creation of black women’s advocacy groups. One such was the American Moral Reform Society, which allowed African-American women a public, albeit limited, speaking platform in 1839. Some 80 years later, in 1920, the 19th Amendment finally granted the franchise to white women. But it was not until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that African Americans of either gender could freely exercise the same suffrage rights.

Further reading: Jean H. Baker, Sisters: The Lives of America's Suffragists (New York: Hill & Wang, 2005); Lori D. Ginzburg, Untidy Origins: A Story of Women's Rights in Antebellum New York (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Vivian Gornick, The Solitude of Self: Thinking about Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2005); Christopher Malone, Between Freedom and Bondage: Race, Party, and Voting Rights in the Antebellum North (New York: Routledge, 2007).

—John C. Fredriksen