Suffrage

Suffrage. Suffrage, the right or privilege of voting to choose candidates or enact laws in a public election, has been practiced and regulated since classical times. In England, in 1430, Parliament imposed property restrictions that in effect limited those permitted to vote in parliamentary elections to no more than 15 percent of adult males. In the American colonies, land was cheap; rank was fluid; and suffrage restrictions, such as property, civility, and religious qualifications, were casually enforced and easily evaded. Surviving eighteenth‐century voting records suggest that most adult white males could vote in local elections.

In the United States, war has often been a catalyst for the extension of suffrage. Religious qualifications were largely abandoned during and after the Revolutionary War. So were property qualifications, though later and more grudgingly, as landless veterans sought a voice in government, party competition became the rule, and property qualifications proved hard to enforce. Often they were replaced by a poll‐tax requirement. Rhode Island became the last state to drop the freehold requirement, following the so‐called Dorr Rebellion of 1841. In that year a convention of Rhode Island men led by Thomas W. Dorr proposed a “People's Constitution” granting universal adult male suffrage. This constitution was overwhelmingly approved by popular vote but was not recognized by Rhode Island's conservative legislature. Each side held its own elections and mobilized its own militia. Dorr's side soon lost heart and disbanded, but the victorious charter government in 1843 enacted most of the reforms Dorr had demanded. Women and blacks remained generally unfranchised, though a few free blacks could vote in New England and New York. Virtually all suffrage disputes before the Civil War were decided at the state level.

After the Civil War, Radical Republicans in Congress became concerned with suffrage, primarily to block southern Democrats' return to power. With the Fourteenth Amendment (1868), Radical Republicans attempted to disfranchise southern whites without enfranchising more northern blacks. With the Fifteenth Amendment (1870), they barred the states from restricting the franchise of U.S. citizens on the basis of race, but they neglected to ban literacy or character tests or registration and poll‐tax requirements. These were later used, along with white primaries and grandfather clauses, to keep southern blacks (and poor whites) from the polls.

The greatest single expansion of suffrage came in 1920 with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the vote and capping a campaign by women's rights advocates dating from the 1840s. Wyoming was the first state to adopt women's suffrage (1869), and other western states followed suit. A woman‐suffrage campaign in New York State succeeded in 1917. The final victory reflected the larger Progressive Era reform spirit, with a tinge of nativism as well. President Woodrow Wilson supported the amendment campaign in part because of women's contributions during World War I.

In the 1940s, suffrage debates shifted from legislatures to the Supreme Court, with more emphasis on the constitutional rights of the unfranchised and less concern about political results. In Smith v. Allwright (1944), the Court outlawed white‐only primaries. In Baker v. Carr (1962), it ruled that state legislative districts must be of equal size under the principle of “one person, one vote.”

In both cases the Court used novel constitutional doctrines to fill a void left by state and federal legislative inaction. These rulings, together with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (which suspended literacy tests and was long construed by lower federal courts to require “affirmative action” gerrymandering of electoral districts), fundamentally altered the political landscape. In the South, black voter registration rose from 5 percent in 1940 to 66 percent in 1969; southern white registration in the same period rose from 15 to 83 percent. Black officeholders, rare in the 1940s, numbered over two thousand by 1970. Blacks in Congress grew from one or two in the 1940s to forty by 1992.

Thanks to affirmative action gerrymanders, most of these African American members of Congress were Democrats from safe, overwhelmingly black districts, strongly committed to black issues, many with high seniority. The Black Caucus was among the most powerful and united voting blocs in the Democrat‐controlled 103d Congress (1992–1994). However, racial gerrymandering also contributed to the Democrats' loss of Congress in 1994, by removing black Democrats from otherwise winnable swing districts and delivering those districts to Republican candidates. The Democrats' loss of Congress gravely diminished the power of the Black Caucus. Some observers argued that partisan and incumbent‐serving gerrymandering, which was also indirectly encouraged by “one person, one vote” requirements, diminished competitiveness, lowered turnover, polarized party politics, and helped fuel the movement to impose term limits on legislators.

Other post‐1960 suffrage extensions—enfranchising the District of Columbia for presidential elections (1961), abolishing the poll tax (1964), and lowering the voting age to eighteen (1971)—took place through constitutional amendments, not judicial interpretation. None of these had much impact on politics, and they may be the last domestic extensions of the franchise. By the 1970s, only juveniles, noncitizens, convicted felons, and insane persons could not vote in most states. In California, however, mental patients were inadvertently enfranchised by a 1972 referendum. They voted in every election thereafter, making no discernible difference in the state's politics.
See also African Americans; Civil Rights Legislation; Civil Rights Movements; Constitution; Republicanism; Woman Suffrage Movement.

Bibliography

Chilton Williamson , American Suffrage from Property to Democracy, 1960.
William Gillette , The Right to Vote: Politics and the Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, 1965.
J.R. Pole , Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic, 1966.
Alan P. Grimes , The Puritan Ethic and Woman Suffrage, 1967.
J. Morgan Kousser , The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One‐Party South, 1880–1910, 1974.
Ward Elliott , The Rise of Guardian Democracy: The Supreme Court's Role in Voting Rights Disputes, 1845–1969, 1975.
Michael Perman , Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908, 2001.

Ward E.Y. Elliot