| Early American Voters It used to be assumed that colonial British North America was a remarkably democratic world, where immigrants had greater opportunities to participate in the political process than they had in their European homeland. Today, however, we are much more aware that the colonies were not inhabited solely by Europeans – Native Americans and people of African descent were present, but almost none of them could vote or exercise any kind of voice in the affairs of the separate colonial governments. Moreover, not everyone who traced their roots back to Europe could either vote or participate in local government. Women, in particular, were completely excluded from the mainstream political process in all of the English-speaking colonies. Catholics and Jews were also legal and political outcasts in most places. Even if we accepted the ethnic, racial, and gender barriers that prevented so many people from voting as “normative” for the times and narrowed our conception of colonial society to all white males, we can see that other barriers existed that excluded as much as fifty percent of this part of the population from either voting or holding office. No single restriction was more important than the property qualification that served to disenfranchise so many purportedly “free” white men. As early as 1430, the English Parliament had set the stage for this characteristic feature of colonial American society when it restricted the vote in county elections to men who owned land that generated an annual income of at least forty shillings. By the eighteenth century, colonial lawmakers systematically recreated similar barriers to prevent individuals who could not meet certain property qualifications, whether in land or personal estate, from voting. In most colonies potential voters were required to possess real estate of a certain size (usually fifty acres) or have some other form of personal wealth worth as much as forty to fifty pounds. Colonial American elites assumed that a man’s economic independence was the surest evidence that he had the capacity to make informed and independent political decisions. It was a token of aristocratic belief that anyone who possessed an economic stake in society would act in the public interest, if only to provide greater security for their personal wealth and well-being. Land was more readily available in America – almost always at the expense of Native Americans – so there was a relatively large electorate. That this did not necessarily translate into “democracy,” however, is evidenced by the voices that were raised during the American Revolution in opposition to the inability of all white males to vote. This critique was a powerful part of the ideology of the American Revolution, in great part because revolutionary radicals argued that all taxpayers, not just property holders, needed the vote to protect themselves against arbitrary and excessive governmental power, particularly in the realm of taxation. By 1790 five states permitted universal manhood suffrage and thus began the revolution in American political culture that destabilized the idea that individual rights are somehow intertwined with economic power. Nonetheless, this was an incomplete revolution and to this day the propertyless and the poor still suffer the stigma of disenfranchisement. Middle- and upper-class Americans vote in larger numbers than do the less wealthy and since elections cater towards those who pull the levers in the ballot boxes, political power continues to be concentrated in the hands of those very same people who prevailed more than two hundred years ago. For this to change, all voters, regardless of social or economic class, must turn out to vote each November. <back> |