Who Are “the People”?
When the Continental Congress called for state constitutions based on “the authority of the people,” and when the Virginia bill of rights granted “all men” certain rights, who was meant by “the people”? Who exactly were the citizens of this new country, and how far would the principle of democratic government extend? Different people answered these questions differently, but in the 1770s certain limits to political participation were widely agreed on.
One limit was defined by property. In nearly every state, voters and political candidates had to meet varying property qualifications. In Maryland, candidates for governor had to be worth the large sum of £5,000, while voters had to own fifty acres of land or £30. In the most democratic state, Pennsylvania, voters and candidates simply needed to be property tax payers, large or small. Only property owners were presumed to possess the necessary independence of mind to make wise political choices. Are not propertyless men, asked John Adams, “too little acquainted with public affairs to form a right judgment, and too dependent upon other men to have a will of their own?” Property qualifications probably disfranchised from one-quarter to one-half of adult white males in all the states. Not all of them took their nonvoter status quietly. One Maryland man wondered what was so special about being worth £30, his state’s threshold for voting: “Every poor man has a life, a personal liberty, and a right to his earnings; and is in danger of being injured by government in a variety of ways.” Others noted that propertyless men were fighting and dying in the Revolutionary War; surely they had legitimate political concerns. A few radical voices challenged the notion that wealth was correlated with good citizenship; maybe the opposite was true. But ideas like this were outside the mainstream. The writers of the new constitutions, themselves men of property, viewed the right to own and preserve property as a central principle of the Revolution.
Another exclusion from voting—women—was so ingrained that few stopped to question it. Yet the logic of allowing propertied females to vote did occur to a handful of well-placed women. Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John, in 1782, “Even in the freest countrys our property is subject to the controul and disposal of our partners, to whom the Laws have given a sovereign Authority. Deprived of a voice in Legislation, obliged to submit to those Laws which are imposed upon us, is it not sufficient to make us indifferent to the publick Welfare?”
A Possible Voter in Essex County, New Jersey Mrs. Annis Boudinot Stockton, widow of a New Jersey politician, frequently entertained members of the Continental Congress. General George Washington became a close friend and long-term correspondent starting in 1781. The politically connected Mrs. Stockton would have been eligible to vote in state elections under New Jersey’s unique enfranchisement of property-holding women. She died in 1801, before suffrage was redefined to be the exclusive right of males.
Princeton University Art Museum/Art Resource, NY.
Only three states specified that voters had to be male, so powerful was the unspoken assumption that only men could vote. Yet in New Jersey, small numbers of women began to go to the polls in the 1780s. The state’s constitution of 1776 enfranchised all free inhabitants worth more than £50, language that in theory opened the door to free blacks and unmarried women who met the property requirement. (Married women owned no property, for by law their husbands held title to everything.) Little fanfare accompanied this radical shift, and some historians have inferred that the inclusion of unmarried women and blacks was an oversight. Yet other parts of the suffrage clause pertaining to residency and property were extensively debated when the clause was put in the state constitution, and no objections were raised at that time to its gender- and race-free language. Thus other historians have concluded that the law was intentionally inclusive. In 1790, a revised election law used the words he or she in reference to voters, making woman suffrage explicit. As one New Jersey legislator declared, “Our Constitution gives this right to maids or widows black or white.” However, that legislator was complaining, not bragging, so his words do not mean that egalitarian suffrage was a fact accepted by all.
In 1790, only about 1,000 free black adults of both sexes lived in New Jersey, a state with a population of 184,000. The number of unmarried adult white women was probably also small and comprised mainly widows. In view of the property requirement, the voter blocs enfranchised under this law were minuscule. Still, this highly unusual situation lasted until 1807, when a new state law specifically disfranchised both blacks and women. Henceforth, independence of mind, held essential for voting, was redefined to be sex- and race-specific.
In the 1780s, voting everywhere was class-specific because of property restrictions. John Adams urged the framers of the Massachusetts constitution to stick with traditional property qualifications. If suffrage is brought up for debate, he warned, “there will be no end of it. New claims will arise; women will demand a vote; lads from twelve to twenty-one will think their rights not enough attended to; and every man who has not a farthing, will demand an equal voice with any other.”