[ There are many myths surrounding the political history of the
United States. The most deeply-held is the claim that the right to
vote has steadily expanded since 1789, incorporating an ever-broader
electorate into the worlds first democracy.]
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THE MYTH OF PROGRESS IN VOTING RIGHTS  
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Van Gosse
July 26, 2023
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_ There are many myths surrounding the political history of the
United States. The most deeply-held is the claim that the right to
vote has steadily expanded since 1789, incorporating an ever-broader
electorate into the world's first democracy. _

December 10, 2011 March for Voting Rights in New York City. Occupy
Wall Street joined the NAACP and others, as thousands marched in
midtown Manhattan to defend voting rights., Michael Fleshman from
Brooklyn, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0

 

This premise is simply false, and it leads us into hopeful delusions
about inevitable progress. We must rid ourselves of these pollyannaish
expectations. Think of President Obama's stirring second inaugural, in
which he evoked an America always moving forward, from "Seneca Falls
to Selma to Stonewall."  That's a lovely notion, but it's odds with
the facts.

The fallacy that voting rights have organically broadened over time
has real political implications. It blinds us to how access to the
ballot has see-sawed back and forth since the Founding, just as often
restricted as enlarged.

Its essence is the constant assertion by journalists, pundits, and
even scholars that "only propertied white men voted at the Founding."
This claim is wrong all counts.

First, independent (single and widowed) women voted freely in New
Jersey from 1776 to 1807 under a constitutional provision
enfranchising all "inhabitants" who owned a minimal amount of nearly
worthless revolutionary paper money.  And this was no obscure
accident, as it was affirmed by the state's highest court on several
occasions.

Second, only three of the original thirteen states (Georgia, South
Carolina, and Virginia) had a racial limit on suffrage in 1775, and
after the Revolution, the small number of free Black men began voting
in steadily increasing numbers. Here, as with New Jersey women, the
historical impetus was to dis-franchise, with Delaware (1792),
Maryland (1802), New Jersey (1807), Connecticut (1818), New York
(1821), Rhode Island (1822), and finally Tennessee (1834), North
Carolina (1835), and Pennsylvania (1838) moving to exclude or severely
limit their often-substantial Black electorates.

Many people seem to view the above, however, as exceptions to the
larger trend of democratization.  What is hardest to give up is the
notion of a universal property requirement.  As of 1775, seven of the
thirteen colonies (New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New York, Virginia,
North Carolina, Georgia, and New Jersey) kept the British suffrage
requirement of a "forty pound" freehold, e.g. owning a minimum value
of land. But Georgia, New Hampshire, and New Jersey dispensed with
their land-owning requirements early in the revolutionary era, while
Massachusetts and Pennsylvania legislated that voters pay only a
nominal local or state tax, which was at most haphazardly enforced.

Historians have long known these facts, most of which appeared in an
authoritative 1957 study. So why do pundits, journalists, and
otherwise educated folk keep repeating the mantra that the republic's
original electorate was made up exclusively of property-owning white
men?

In my view, it is a feel-good mechanism, which allows Americans avoid
the disturbing realities of U.S. history.  Many people know about the
disfranchisement of Black southerners in the Jim Crow era, from the
late nineteenth century through passage of the Voting Rights Act in
1965.  Putting the blame on one part of the country lets the rest of
us off the hook. It avoids how many people—obviously women and also
Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and various immigrants were
legally or illegally stripped of their suffrages over the past two
centuries. The constant racial gerrymanders, illegal purges of voter
rolls, removal of polling places, and spurious "voter ID" laws that
Republicans have legislated over the past decade should remind us of
how it's done.  They are just updating the history.

Voter suppression and disfranchisement are as American as cherry pie.
 Let's get rid of our myths of slow but inevitable progress and get
down to the hard work of securing the right to vote for everyone.

--
_[VAN GOSSE [[link removed]] is Professor of History at
Franklin and Marshall College, and Co-Chair, Historians for Peace &
Democracy. His most recent book is The First Reconstruction: Black
Politics in America, From the Revolution to the Civil War
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(University of North Carolina Press, 2021).]_

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