Supporters of the People’s Convention organized a statewide referendum on the new constitution: to their delight, when the votes were counted in January 1842, fourteen thousand people, a clear majority of all adult male Rhode Islanders, had voted to ratify their constitution. To Dorr and his followers, this expression of popular will meant that their constitution was now the legitimate, fundamental law of the state; they were further heartened when an alternative constitution, proposed by the Landholders’ Convention (representing the charter government), was defeated in a referendum. Tension mounted during the spring of 1842, as supporters and opponents of suffrage expansion denounced one another in street confrontations, in pamphlet wars, speaking tours, and rhetorical appeals to the federal government. Tensions were exacerbated further when the reformers proceeded to hold elections under the new constitution: although turnout was disappointing, a new legislature was elected and Dorr voted in as governor.40
Meanwhile, the conservatives, now organized as the Law and Order Party, succeeded in persuading the General Assembly to pass a series of laws aimed at “certain designing persons . . . endeavoring to carry through a plan for the subversion of our government.” These laws (called the Algerine laws by suffragists, in reference to the well-known contemporary tyrant, the Dey of Algiers) imposed harsh penalties on those who were candidates in unauthorized elections and on those who presided at meetings held under the People’s Constitution. Any person who attempted to assume office under the People’s Constitution would be guilty of treason and subject to life imprisonment.41
The Algerine laws successfully splintered the Suffrage Association—since many backers of reform were reluctant to risk jail terms for the cause. A growing fear of civil or even military conflict, moreover, led many moderate supporters of suffrage reform to distance themselves from Dorr and his more radical, generally working-class, allies. Nonetheless, in early May, the People’s government marched into Providence surrounded by thousands of supporters, including armed militia companies, to inaugurate Dorr as governor and open a session of the new legislature. That legislature promptly swore in state officials, passed a wide array of new laws, and repealed the Algerine restrictions on political activity. The new legislature also instructed Dorr to inform the United States Congress and the President of the United States that Rhode Island had a new government.42
For several weeks thereafter, things remained at a standstill, with two different groups claiming to be the legitimate government of the state. The nation’s attention was riveted on the unprecedented conflict, with reactions closely following partisan lines. Democrats, including Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, embraced the Dorrites, endorsing the right of “the people” to “alter and amend their system of government when a majority wills it.” Whigs, in contrast, denounced the reformers as pernicious advocates of rebellion and anarchy.43
The stalemate was broken on the night of May 18, when Dorr and a small group of armed followers attempted to exercise their sovereign power by assembling in front of the state arsenal and demanding that it be turned over to them. When their demands were refused, they attacked the arsenal, but both of their cannons misfired, and the Dorrites were then beaten back. Dorr himself promptly left the state, his followers scattered, and some, including Seth Luther, were sent to prison. Over the course of the next few months, radical suffrage advocates attempted a few other military escapades (resulting in several deaths), with similarly disheartening and tragicomic results. The charter government remained in control of the state, backed by federal troops sent by Whig President John Tyler; political support for Dorr was undercut by dismay at his adventurism, and the Dorr War ended with more whimper than bang. In 1843, Dorr, after spending more than a year in quasi-exile (largely in states controlled by Democrats who refused to pursue him), returned to Rhode Island, where he was promptly arrested, convicted of treason, and sentenced to life in prison, at hard labor. Twenty months later, his health ruined by imprisonment, he was quietly released from jail, in part at the behest of his former adversaries.44
Despite their victory, the Law and Order Party and the charter government were at least mildly chastened by the events of 1841-1842, and they drew up a new constitution with a somewhat broader suffrage. All native-born adult males were permitted to vote if they met a minimal taxpaying requirement; consistent with Whig principles (and perhaps out of gratitude for their nonsupport of Dorr), the conservatives also enfranchised taxpaying blacks. The far more numerous immigrant working-class groups that had supported the rebellion, however, were not treated as generously. Foreign-born naturalized citizens were obliged to meet the existing property qualification, as well as a lengthy residence requirement. In addition, only property owners were permitted to vote for the city council of Providence or on any matters affecting taxation and financial policy in all cities and towns. The electorate in effect remained circumscribed by class and ethnic boundaries, and the state settled into an era of political apathy in which relatively few people bothered to vote.45
The final legal chapter of the rebellion was written in the Supreme Court’s decision in the landmark case of Luther v. Borden in 1848. The case had arisen in 1842, when Martin Luther, a Suffragist, sued Luther Borden for illegal breaking and entering: Borden was a Rhode Island military official who had been sent by the charter government to arrest Luther. The Suffragists claimed that the government that had dispatched Borden had been nullified by the ratification of the People’s Constitution and thus that Borden lacked any legal authority to enter Luther’s home and arrest him. The claim that the People’s Constitution had become the legitimate blueprint of Rhode Island’s government was justified by appealing to article 4 of the U.S. Constitution, which guaranteed to each state “a republican form of government.” What was at stake in the lawsuit was the capacity, under federal law, of a popular majority of any state to create or recreate its own governing institutions. The Supreme Court dodged the issue, offering little sympathy to the Suffragists and no judicial support for the theory that a majority of the people could erect their own government in place of one ruled by a minority. The Court affirmed a lower court ruling that Borden had not trespassed and asserted that the definition of “a republican form of government” was a political issue to be decided by the “Political Department” and not by the judiciary.46 The Court in effect declined to interpret the Constitution as requiring state governments to be democratic.
The bizarre culminating events of the Dorr War ought not obscure the significance of a political conflict that enveloped the state for more than a decade and gripped the nation for months. In Rhode Island, by the 1830s and 1840s, the abolition of pecuniary qualifications for voting clearly would have meant enfranchising a working-class majority, including thousands of factory operatives, many of whom were Irish Catholics. Faced with that prospect, the state’s ruling minority resisted reform with a ferocity not seen elsewhere. Chancellor Kent’s pessimistic vision of the future was a reality in Rhode Island by 1840, and inhabiting that reality—as opposed to David Buel’s benign world in which farmers and other property owners would always predominate—the middle and upper classes were willing to go to extraordinary lengths to prevent any significant expansion of the right to vote. What happened in Rhode Island highlights the critical fact that the reforms of the antebellum era were not designed or intended to enfranchise a large, industrial, and partially foreign-born working class. There is, moreover, little reason to think that other industrializing states would have avoided similar conflict and tumult—culminating in similarly restrictive suffrage laws—had they delayed franchise reform for another generation or more.
PART II
Narrowing the Portals
The right of suffrage, being the creature of the organic law, may be modified or withdrawn by the sovereign authority which conferred it, without inflicting any punishment on those who are disqualified.
—Anderson v. Baker (OCTOBER 1865)
AFTER 1850, CONFLICT OVER THE RIGHT T
O VOTE heightened dramatically. For the next seventy years, the issue was often on center stage, and always backstage, in American political life. Heated public debates surrounded the post-Civil War enfranchisement of African Americans, as well as their disfranchisement a generation later. Advocates of women’s suffrage fought battle after battle in the states and in Washington. Workers, immigrants, transients, Native Americans, paupers, and the illiterate often found themselves contending with rules that would, or did, bar them from the polls.1
The diverse forces and dynamics that had promoted an expansion of the franchise before the 1850s remained active. The demands of war and the pressure to enfranchise soldiers and ex-soldiers prompted various efforts to broaden the right to vote; political parties jockeyed even more incessantly to shape the electorate to their advantage; thinly populated states sought to stimulate settlement through generous suffrage regulations; deeply held democratic convictions inspired thousands, if not millions, of individuals to support and fight for universal suffrage; and the disfranchised themselves pressed vigorously for inclusion in the polity.
Yet there was a shift in temper after midcentury, marked by a heightened resolve on the part of those seeking to contract the right to vote or limit its further expansion. This shift was grounded in the deepening changes occurring in the nation’s economic and social structure, changes that (among other things) greatly enlarged the industrial and agricultural working class. Importantly, this sprawling, regionally diverse working class—dependent and assertive in many of the ways that Blackstone and Chancellor Kent had imagined—consisted increasingly of men and women who were racially, ethnically, and culturally unlike old-stock white Americans. In the South, the abolition of slavery gave birth to a class of black freedmen living in a state of interdependence and hostility with their former masters; these freedmen were enfranchised during Reconstruction because Republicans in Congress came to believe that freedom would be illusory without political rights. In the North and the West, millions of foreigners from Ireland, Asia, southern and eastern Europe—men and women who were non-English speaking, Catholic, and Jewish—arrived to work in the rapidly growing factories and mines, to build railroads, roads, and cities; they too were, or might become, voters. North and South, thus, the potential electorate in 1880 or 1900 looked very different than it had in 1840.
Moreover, these working people and poor people—skilled tradesmen, factory operatives, miners, agricultural laborers, sharecroppers—acquired some political and electoral strength, particularly at local levels. During and after Reconstruction, southern blacks were elected to office, put forward programs to promote their own education and economic welfare, and played a decisive role in many electoral contests. In the North, prolabor third parties became prominent in numerous cities and towns, while political machines with large, foreign-born constituencies flexed their muscles in most urban centers. Labor organizations also formed periodic alliances with the major political parties, especially the Democrats, to promote prolabor legislative agendas.2
These changes, occurring with great speed, unfolding in scores of different ways in individual states and municipalities, spawned a significant reaction against democracy and universal suffrage in certain strata of American society. Southern white leaders came to believe, with good reason, that they could not control their region if the black population remained enfranchised. Northern elites, as well as many middle-class, old-stock Americans, also feared that they would lose control of politics and state power to men who did not share their interests and values. “We have received,” noted an unsigned article in the Atlantic Monthly in 1879:an almost unlimited immigration of adult foreigners, largely illiterate, of the lowest class and of other races. We have added at one stroke four millions and more of ignorant negroes to our voting population. . . . The result of such tremendous changes is that our system moves with increasing difficulty, and its faults become more conspicuous and more threatening.
As a consequence, afeeling of distrust and fear in regard to the holders of sovereign power . . . is manifesting itself more and more among the most intelligent classes of the community. No careful observer can have failed to notice the change of sentiment in this respect. . . . Thirty or forty years ago it was considered the rankest heresy to doubt that a government based on universal suffrage was the wisest and best that could be devised. . . . Such is not now the case. Expressions of doubt and distrust in regard to universal suffrage are heard constantly in conversation, and in all parts of the country.
Such views were indeed echoed “in all parts of the country.” The buoyant optimism about popular participation, so visible in the 1830s and 1840s, gave way to apprehension and fear by the late 1870s and 1880s. The high tide of faith in democracy in the United States was reached at midcentury; thereafter it ebbed. In the words of the Atlantic Monthly, “the democratic principle . . . reached its culmination about 1850.”3
The result was a long period, stretching into the second decade of the twentieth century, marked less by the exuberant forward march of democracy than by often mean-spirited battles and skirmishes over suffrage: while various social groups and political factions supporting them fought to broaden the franchise, others struggled, sometimes frantically and often with success, to block the road to the polls. These years did not, as they are commonly portrayed, witness an ongoing enlargement of democracy, marred only by the well-known and exceptional disfranchisement of southern blacks between 1890 and 1910. Quite the contrary: the exceptional event, the aberration from prevailing patterns, was the temporary enfranchisement of African Americans under the extremely unusual conditions of Reconstruction. The dominant trend of the era was toward a narrowing of the franchise: in many states, the years between 1855 and World War I constituted something of a slow Thermidor, a piecemeal rolling back of gains achieved in earlier decades.
Several distinct yet related stories unfolded during this period. One was the highly contentious effort to enfranchise—and then to disfranchise—blacks in the South in the decades that followed emancipation. Second was the battle for political rights that enveloped working-class men, many of them immigrants, in the North and the West. Third was the halting movement toward suffrage for women, a story with its own distinctive dynamics and—at the very end of this period—a happier conclusion. All of these stories included episodes of both enfranchisement and disfranchisement; all involved the intersection of class tensions with racial, ethnic, religious, gender, and cultural differences. Overall, the period witnessed a checkered tale of motion forward, backward, and sideways, of local peculiarities and surprises, of a rapidly changing, increasingly heterogenous society contending awkwardly with its own professed political values.
FOUR
Know-Nothings, Radicals, and Redeemers
IN JANUARY 1865, AS THE CIVIL WAR was drawing to a close, Andrew Tait and fifty-eight other African-American residents of Tennessee addressed a lengthy petition to a convention of pro-Union whites meeting in Nashville to discuss changes in the government of the state. They “most respectfully” asked for “a patient hearing of your honorable body in regard to matters deeply affecting the future condition of our unfortunate and long suffering race.” Those “matters” were simply stated. The petitioners asked the convention “to complete the work begun by the nation at large, and abolish the last vestige of slavery,” to “cut up by the roots the system of slavery, which is not only a wrong to us, but the source of all the evil which . . . afflicts the State.” The petitioners requested a transformation of the judicial system, so that blacks could testify in court and be freed from the “malignant persecution” they suffered at the hands of angry Confederate rebels.1
Finally, they asked for citizenship and the right to vote. Acknowledging “that the negro suffrage proposition may shock popular prejudice at first sight,” the petitioners observed that this was not “a conclusive argument against its wisdom.” After all, popular opinion had maintained blacks could not be good soldiers, an assertio
n that had been amply disproven. Indeed, the heroic military service of blacks during the Civil War was a good reason to enfranchise them. “Nearly 200,000 of our brethren are today performing military duty in the ranks of the Union army,” they pointed out. “Thousands of them have already died. . . . If we are called on to do military duty against the rebel enemies in the field, why should we be denied the privilege of voting . . . ? The latter is as necessary to save the Government as the former.” Reaching to broader principles, the petitioners also noted that “this is a democracy—a government of the people.” If men were “good law-abiding citizens . . . why deny them the right to have a voice in the election of its rulers?” In addition, “the most rich, intelligent, enlightened and prosperous” states, such as Massachusetts, had long permitted blacks to vote and had “never had reason to repent the day when she gave them” the franchise.2
Not surprisingly, the petition offered a plea as well as arguments: “How boundless would be the love of the colored citizen . . . how enthusiastic and how lasting would be his gratitude,” Tait and his fellow residents wrote, “if his white brethren were to take him by the hand and say, ‘You have been ever loyal to our government; henceforward be voters. ’” Several weeks later, the Union convention voted in favor of a state constitutional amendment to abolish slavery—but it declined to act on the question of suffrage.3
Immigrants and Know-Nothings
The Right to Vote Page 13