Evolution of the American Voter

Abstract

SOME historical scholar, devoted by taste and habits to close research, might well examine the records still accessible of our colonial age, to ascertain the laws and usages which prevailed before the American Revolution in each of the thirteen original colonies concerning the elective franchise.1 For this is a subject whose exposition must depend, not upon a priori reasoning, but upon the facts. So far as the charters of that long adolescent period afford any light they make but three things plainly evident: (i) That voting was common in all these colonies under one reservation or another; (2) that in Rhode Island and Connecticut, under those highly liberal charters from Charles II. which served each state for a considerable space of this nineteenth century after royalty had been abolished, and in Massachusetts, too, under her earliest grants, this elective franchise was largely exercised; (3) that, for most of our colonial period at least, in most of the other colonies the voter's right was usually confined to the choice of local town and county officers and of local representatives in that single popular assembly or legislative branch which resembled the House of Commons in the mother country. But when we reach I776, and the era during which these thirteen commonwealths shook off united the British yoke and organized state governments apart, most of the written state constitutions are seen disclosing local predilections attaching to the right of elector. And from that date forward the evolution of the American voter may be fairly traced through a comparative study of these fundamental frameworks. No doubt under the earliest constitutions of such Revolutionary states the franchise was bestowed upon the people in accordance mainly with colonial practice and sentiment. Rhode Island and Connecticut, to be sure, retained colonial charters which left the matter largely to legislative discretion; but the other eleven states established constitutions for themselves. To take the first period of about twelve years which preceded the adoption of our federal constitution (I 776-1788), comparison shows a certain homogeneousness in the policy of admitting freemen to participate by their votes in a representative and republican state government; while at the same time appeared various points of difference. In general the voter was to be a male resident of the state, at least twenty-one years lDr. Cortlandt F. Bishop, in his recent History of Elections in the American Colonies (III. Columbia College Studies, No. I), supplies a scholarly essay on this topic. ( 665 )