Essay 8-C: Universal Male Suffrage and Founding Documents

Essay Read by Constituting America Founder, Actress Janine Turner

The Declaration of Independence notably expresses as a “self-evident” truth “that all men are created equal” and that governments derive “their just powers from consent of the governed.” In the decades that followed the founding of the United States, there would be much thought and debate dedicated to figuring out what exactly “created equal” and “consent of the governed” mean. There was certainly some notion that these commitments to equality and consent should allow for broad participation in political decision-making.

To see how striking this devotion was, remember the world of 1776. Almost nowhere did ordinary people vote. Even Great Britain—often considered one of the freest nations of the time—restricted suffrage so tightly that only about five percent of adults could vote and only around fifteen percent of adult males. Property qualifications for voting ensured that most Britons had no political voice. Yet Britain was still among the most democratic places on earth.

America was very different. In the United States Constitution, contrary to popular belief, nobody is excluded from voting. In fact, it contains just one explicit provision about voter qualifications. This occurs in Article One, Section Two, which sets up the House of Representatives. The Constitution says, “the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.” In other words, if you can vote for the largest chamber in your state’s legislature, you can vote for the United States House of Representatives. No one is excluded.

The other elected parts of the government, namely the United States Senate and the presidency, were handled somewhat differently. Until the Seventeenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, senators were elected by state legislatures, not by the people at large. The presidency, of course, is officially elected by the Electoral College. States allocate electors “in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct.” Therefore, states are not required to have a popular election for president, although today every state does so.
While the Constitution, then, excludes no one from voting, in practice in the founding era only New Jersey allowed women to vote, a right women lost there in the 1790s. The small number of free African Americans could vote in some places, but not in others. Of course, enslaved Blacks could not vote anywhere. Most jurisdictions had some kind of property requirement for voting, although the amount of property needed to vote was typically modest. Note, however, that all these exclusions were based on state and local law, not any constitutional provision.

What followed the Revolution was nothing short of a democratic wave. Taking “equality” and “consent of the governed” seriously, nearly every state rewrote its constitution. In each case, suffrage widened dramatically. By the mid-1790s, the United States had come close to universal free male suffrage, which in practice meant that almost all free men could vote for the House of Representatives. This stood in stark contrast to Great Britain, where roughly 85 percent of free men were still excluded from the polls.
On the presidential level, in the early years of the republic, states allocated electoral votes based on a vote of the state legislature. For example, in the 1796 presidential contest between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, the first really contested presidential election, Adams won without a single popular vote being cast. In the 1820s, however, the nation rapidly moved toward states using popular votes to determine electoral votes. In 1824 nineteen of the twenty-four states used popular elections to allocate electoral votes. By 1832 every state but one used popular vote.

This is not to say that America could not do better. African-American males were guaranteed the right to vote by the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870. But systematic discrimination, especially in Southern states, kept Black voting low after the end of Reconstruction in 1876. The Black vote would not be truly secured until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which protected voter registration, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which put federal power behind guaranteeing the right to vote.

In 1869, the territorial constitution of Wyoming gave women the right to vote. Women voted in various jurisdictions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but that right was not guaranteed on the federal level until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.

Nonetheless, when compared to other democracies, America was at its founding and up to today remarkable for the widespread right to vote. Equality and consent of the governed have been vindicated.

Dr. Jon D. Schaff is Professor of Political Science at Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota, where he has taught since 2001. He teaches classes in American political thought, American political institutions, as well as politics in literature and film. He is author of multiple articles and book chapters as well as two books:

Abraham Lincoln and the Limits of Liberal Democracy and Age of Anxiety: Meaning, Identity, and Politics in 21st Century Literature and Film (co-authored with Anthony Wachs).

He co-edited Humanitas History of America II: From Revolution to Reconstruction, 2 Vols for Classical Academic Press.

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