Who Voted in Early America?

“There will be no End of it,” a worried John Adams wrote in May 1776. With independence imminent, his native Massachusetts was considering expanded voting rights beyond property-owning men. If they pursued this “dangerous” idea, he predicted, “New Claims will arise. Women will demand a Vote . . . and every Man, who has not a Farthing, will demand an equal Voice with any other in all Acts of State.” It would be an endless “Source of Controversy and Altercation.”

Adams was right about one thing—there was no end to it. Groups that had long been excluded from voting began to loudly demand suffrage. Many of them drew on the egalitarian rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence, a document Adams helped to draft just weeks after complaining about new demands for “an equal Voice” in government.

Between American independence and the Civil War, the battle for voting rights happened at the state and local levels, which makes for a complicated story. But one trend is clear: over time, American voting laws shifted from economic to biological requirements. By the mid-nineteenth century, most states no longer required voters to own property. But they did begin to limit suffrage to white men.¹ While many propertyless white men gained the right to vote in post-revolutionary America, some property-owning women and free people of color lost access to the ballot at the same time.

Most of the British American colonies only allowed people who owned property, especially land, to vote. Eighteenth-century political thinkers believed that property owners were better voters because they had a stake in political decision-making. They believed that other groups, including married women, adult children living with their parents, tenant farmers, servants, and apprentices, could be easily manipulated. Since voting usually happened in public, it was easy to imagine a landlord bullying a tenant into voting for him or a husband deciding how his wife would vote.²

Following independence, Americans debated whether to expand the right to vote. Many echoed colonial protests about taxation without representation, arguing that if they paid taxes, they should be able to vote. Landless veterans pointed out the irony of being allowed to fight for their nation, but not vote for its leaders. Because of this popular support, state constitutions increasingly removed property qualifications.³

But this wasn’t always easy. In some states, powerful elites stubbornly clung to property restrictions that benefitted them. The Massachusetts constitutional convention concluded in 1780 that they didn’t want the government run by men “who will pay less regard to the Rights of Property because they have nothing to loose.”⁴ Rhode Island’s voting laws remained unchanged despite decades of activism. In 1833, Seth Luther joked that the Declaration of Independence be revised to say, “all men are created equal, except in Rhode Island.” It took a popular revolt in 1841 led by Thomas Wilson Dorr to secure a more democratic state constitution for Rhode Island.⁵

Where they removed property requirements, states usually replaced them with new restrictions. Some states required voters to pay taxes. Some disfranchised citizens who received public assistance, those who had been incarcerated, and those who had recently arrived in the state. Many also restricted the vote to white men, excluding women and people of color. What Americans came to call “universal suffrage” in the early nineteenth century still left out more than half of the nation’s inhabitants.⁶

Only a few colonies, including Virginia, specifically required voters to be white.⁷ Since most colonies lacked a large population of property-owning free Black men, laws often did not address their voting rights. Local customs determined whether they could vote.⁸

But when state legislatures repealed property requirements for voting following the American Revolution, they usually created new racial limits for voting. For some property-owning free Black people, this meant a loss of voting rights. In 1838, for example, a new constitution for Pennsylvania proposed to take voting rights from Black men. A public meeting in Philadelphia elected a committee to draft a response. The committee, chaired by abolitionist Robert Purvis, published a pamphlet called An Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens Threatened with Disfranchisement. Purvis pointed out that history was on his side. “Those who established our present government,” he wrote, “designed it equally for all. It is for you to decide whether it shall be confined to the European complexion in future.”⁹ By 1855, only about four percent of the nation’s free Black people lived in the five states that allowed them to vote.¹⁰

When state legislatures restricted voting to white men, they often failed to explain what they meant by “white.” Did immigrants qualify? Could people with both European and African ancestry vote? Courts often had to decide if someone was white enough to vote.¹¹

American policy toward Native peoples wavered between separation and assimilation in the nineteenth century. Laws, executive actions, court decisions, and treaty obligations often offered inconsistent and confusing answers to the question of whether Native peoples could vote in U.S. elections. Some treaties created opportunities for U.S. citizenship and voting rights, but most Native people were treated as members of a foreign nation. Relatively few Native people voted in U.S. elections until the 1887 Dawes Act, which broke up reservations, distributed land to individuals, and created a pathway to citizenship for Indigenous people willing to leave behind Native society and take up what it called “civilized life.” Eventually, the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 paved the way for Indigenous people to exercise voting privileges without renouncing their Native citizenships. However, many states continued to obstruct Native voting well into the twentieth century.¹²

Most colonial laws were vague about gender requirements. While some colonies specified that only men could vote, others didn’t.¹³ Property-owning widows could vote in some colonies, but it was unusual.¹⁴ During the American Revolution, some women pressed for voting rights in recognition of their contributions to the revolutionary cause. Virginian Hannah Lee Corbin wrote to her brother Richard Henry Lee during the Revolutionary War to complain “that widows are not represented” and so shouldn’t be taxed. Her brother admitted that it made little sense to deprive property-owning women of the vote.¹⁵

After the American Revolution, only one state legally recognized women’s right to vote. New Jersey’s 1776 constitution allowed “all inhabitants” to vote. Its election laws passed in 1790 and 1797 referred to voters with the pronouns “he or she” and “his or her.”¹⁶ Women who met the state’s property requirements participated in New Jersey elections for several decades. After women voters helped to swing a 1797 election, one newspaper poem sarcastically invited readers to welcome a “government in petticoats!”¹⁷

But after fraud allegations marred an 1807 election, New Jersey’s government passed a law to limit the franchise to free white men.¹⁸ Afterward, no U.S. state allowed women to vote until Wyoming earned statehood in 1890. All American women finally received the right to vote in 1920 with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The borders of American democracy both grew and shrank over time. While colonial voting laws had focused on property ownership, following the American Revolution states began to redefine voters as white men. Some property-owning women and free people of color consequently lost the right to vote, in some cases for more than a century. Subsequent constitutional amendments have provided suffrage to women, people of color, and all people aged eighteen and up.

Since the American Revolution, voting rights have been one of the most controversial and unsettled issues in American politics. Centuries of campaigning mean that almost all adult U.S. citizens are now qualified to vote. Yet recent election results indicate that less than half of qualified voters in the United States take advantage of this fundamental right on a regular basis. If you’re a U.S. citizen, consider consulting the resources below to check your voter registration or to register to vote.