Voting is the critical key to any democracy. However, many historians (and most citizens) have no idea of the enormous extent by which Americans prevailed as voters prior to 1776.
In her otherwise excellent new book “The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote,” Elaine Weiss repeats a major error that has discombobulated the understanding of how our political process developed.
Weiss writes: “At the outset of our democratic experiment, ‘We the People’ really meant ‘We the White, Wealthy Men’ – no one else had a voice, or had a vote.” That view dominated textbooks for generations and was propounded by Charles Beard, one of the most acclaimed historians of all time.
Beard argued that colonial American society and the U.S. Constitution were undemocratic. They were dominated by aristocratic elites who used undemocratic methods in a society that was inherently undemocratic. At the core of Beard’s judgment was the ease, with which, a small number of voters could be dominated.
His voluminous and influential writings caused generations to regard early America as a profound class struggle, because “only six percent of the population voted in elections.”
Beard’s statistic was misleading because voter turnout was more accurately gauged in terms of the adult white men (20 percent of society). So six percent of this 20, shows that 30 percent actually voted. In the decades leading to 1776, only 10 percent of the adult white men qualified to vote in England (most nations in the 17th and 18th centuries did not have representative governments, hence no voting at all).
The striking contrast was that 70 to 95 percent of adult white men qualified to vote in America prior to 1776, depending on the colony in which they resided.
British leaders never adequately recognized the emerging power of people in the colonies, and, especially, the popularization of politics that fueled the American Revolution. “Salutary Neglect” was England’s term to describe benefitting from the colonies with the least oversight and costs, but this approach missed how much the colonists were also advancing.
Americans literally achieved a revolution in citizens’ voting through a plethora of circumstances and developments – some were accidental, some due to geography, and others were due to the ways power was exercised. Americans never ceased to strive for expanding the definition and power of the people.
In his magisterial study, “The Age of Democratic Revolutions,” R.R. Palmer concludes that the single key factor in the American Revolution (and key legacy for other nations) was “the people as the constituent power.”
This notable principle of government by the people has been examined and expanded several times throughout our history, as it well should be.
How the voting population advanced prior to 1776 begins with an absence of British overall authority and the privatizing of colonies established by joint-stock companies and their investors. By the time Parliament sought deeper control, every colony had its own Assembly and had expanded voters way beyond anything known in England or elsewhere in the world.
The key basic factor was that the companies in charge of individual colonies found it challenging to attract settlers. [Would you be eager to take an 8-week sailing vessel trip to a primitive land in the 1700s?] As an inducement to attract people, and to retain settlers who had arrived, various incentives were provided. Sometimes land, sometimes religious toleration, but also a chance to shape policies for the particular colony in emerging representative bodies (called “Assembly” in most; the House of Burgesses in Virginia, begun in 1619).
Initially, such participation of settlers (now voters) was intended to be limited with the council of stockholders and executives expected to have shaping power. However, not many stockholders came 3,000 miles to run the colonies, and numbers began to count as the locals sought and achieved expanded policy-making roles.
A different dimension of this situation emerged as the British government revoked privatization and took over nine of the 13 colonies, but by that time Assemblies (backed by extensive voters) had acquired growing power. The British sent royal governors (with more power than the King had in England) but they were an ocean away from their “Old World” support base, and in all the colonies the Assemblies used absence or deaths of governors to advance their power.
Increasingly, the American assemblies regarded themselves as miniature models of the House of Commons, and as the King was challenged in England by that limited representative body, the American assemblies claimed the same rights for their far more representative assemblies. The key point is that seven-to-nine times as many Americans were eligible voters compared to the 10 percent British electorate.
The huge unintended effect for voting was applying the same voting laws that had been used in England for centuries. Based on land ownership, these laws intentionally limited the suffrage to the adult white male British population who owned enough land to qualify (one of every 10 adult males).
One of my students remarked, decades ago, on an exam: “America was a land of land.” Because land ownership was rare in England, few qualified, but the exact same laws in the American context meant most adult white men could own enough land to become voters. Eventually, even those who had arrived in poverty as indentured servants acquired enough property to qualify as voters (including George Washington’s grandfather, as a recent book about his mother Mary shows).
In “Common Sense” and other writings, Tom Paine called for universal adult manhood suffrage without land-owning from the British laws (or use of an American practice of tabulating an individual’s personal property as a gauge that he was a responsible stakeholder in the society).
In his typical satirical fashion, Paine gave an illustration: “You require that a man must own $100 dollars of property or he cannot vote. Very well, take an illustration: today a man arrives to vote with his jackass who is worth $100 dollars, and the man casts his vote. The next day, alas, the jackass dies. When the man next comes to vote, he is told he cannot vote at all. Now, tell me: which was the voter, the man or the jackass?”
The contagion of liberty that characterized the American Revolution not only expanded the uniqueness of American voters, but it also posed major, timeless concerns about the machinery of politics through which the suffrage was organized or manipulated.
