men. In the same years, one eastern state after another widened the franchise. By 1840, only Rhode Island retained a propertied electorate, primarily because Yankee farmers in that state wanted to retain power in a society made up increasingly of urban, immigrant wage earners. (When Rhode Island finally reformed the franchise
in 1843, the new law included a freehold requirement that applied only to the
foreign-born, and explicitly withheld the franchise from blacks.) With that exception, the white men of every state held the vote.
Suffrage reform gave political rights to propertyless men, and thus took a long
step away from the Founders’ republic and toward mass democracy. At the same
time, however, reformers explicitly restricted the vote to those who were white and male. New Jersey’s revolutionary constitution, for instance, had granted the vote to
“persons” who met a freehold qualification. This loophole enfranchised property-
holding widows, many of whom exercised their rights. A law of 1807 abolished
property restrictions and gave the vote to all white men. The same law ended female voting. The question of woman suffrage would not be considered again until women
raised it in 1848. It would not be settled until well into the 20th century.
New restrictions also applied to blacks. The revolutionary constitutions of
Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine—northeastern states with
tiny black minorities—granted the vote to free blacks. New York and North
Carolina laws gave the vote to “all men” who met the qualifications, and proper-
tied African Americans (a tiny but symbolically crucial minority) routinely exercised the vote. Post-revolutionary laws that extended voting rights to all white men often specifically excluded or severely restricted votes for blacks. Free blacks lost the suffrage in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Maryland, Tennessee,
and North Carolina—all states in which they had previously voted. By 1840, fully
93 percent of blacks in the North lived in states that either banned or severely
restricted their right to vote, and the restrictions were explicitly about race. A delegate to the New York constitutional convention of 1821, noting the movement of
freed slaves into New York City, argued against allowing them to vote: “The whole host of Africans that now deluge our city (already too impertinent to be borne),
would be placed upon an equal with the citizens.” At the Tennessee convention
that eliminated property and residence requirements for whites while it stripped
the vote from free blacks in 1834, delegate G. W. L. Marr declared: “We the Peo-
ple” meant “we the free white people of the United States and the free white people only.” The convention declared blacks “outside the social compact.” A year later, Nathaniel Macon told a North Carolina convention that in 1776, free blacks had
been “no part of the then political family.”
Thus the “universal” suffrage of which many Americans boasted was far from
universal. New laws dissolved the ties between political rights and property, and thus saved the citizenship of thousands who were becoming propertyless tenants
and wage earners. The same laws that gave the vote to all white men, however,
explicitly barred other Americans from political participation. Faced with the disintegration of Jefferson’s republic of proprietor-patriarchs, the wielders of power had chosen to blur the emerging distinctions of social class while they hardened the
boundaries of sex and race. In 1790, citizenship had belonged to men who were
fathers and farm owners. Forty years later, the citizenry was made up of those
who were (the phrase came into use at this time) “free, white, and twenty-one.”
Conclusion
373
Much more explicitly and completely than had been the case at the founding,
America in 1830 was a white man’s republic.
CONCLUSION
By the second quarter of the 19th century, Americans had made a patchwork of
regional, class, and ethnic cultures. The new middle classes of the North and West compounded their Protestant and republican inheritance with a new entrepreneurial faith in progress. The result was a way of life grounded in the self-made and morally accountable individual and the sentimentalized (often feminized) domestic unit.
Most Americans, however, did not live and think like the middle class. The
poorer urban dwellers and farmers of the North remained grimly loyal to the
unsentimental, male-dominated families of their fathers and grandfathers, to new
and old religious sects that preached human depravity and the mysterious workings of providence, and to the suspicion that perfidy and disorder lurked behind the
smiling moral order of market economics and middle-class culture.
In the South, most white farmers persisted in a neighborhood-based, intensely
evangelical, and socially conservative way of life; when asked their opinions, they often talked like classic Jeffersonian yeomen. Southern planters, although they shared in the northern elite’s belief in material progress and the magic of the market, were bound by family values, a system of slave labor, and a code of honor that was strikingly at variance with middle-class faith in an orderly universe and perfectible individuals. And we have seen (Chapter 9) that slaves in these years continued to make
cultural forms of their own. Despite their exclusion from the white world of liberty and equality, they tied their aspirations to the family, to an evangelical Protestant God, and to the individual and collective dignity that republics promise to their citizens.
11
WHIGS AND DEMOCRATS