https://contestedfranchise.com Contested Franchise Tue, 29 Sep 2020 18:13:19 +0000 https://contestedfranchise.com en https://contestedfranchise.com/Splash-Page Tue, 22 Sep 2020 22:18:31 +0000 Contested Franchise https://contestedfranchise.com/Splash-Page The 15th Amendment and the Right To Vote in America An exploration of voting rights in the Civil War era and how the 15th Amendment changed everything, but did little https://contestedfranchise.com/Info Tue, 22 Sep 2020 22:18:31 +0000 Contested Franchise https://contestedfranchise.com/Info Part One&nbsp;︎︎︎Granted by the States Part 2&nbsp;︎︎︎A Revolution? Part 3&nbsp;︎︎︎Guaranteed by the Constitution Part&nbsp;4&nbsp;︎︎︎ Take Action ︎ “The right to vote of citizens of the United States remains a kind of stepchild in the family of American rights, perhaps because it is not listed in the Bill of Rights, and perhaps because Americans still retain the Framers’ ambivalence about democracy.” Journalist Garrett Epps, 2013 - The Atlantic Next&nbsp;︎︎︎ Photos in Header:George Caleb Bingham’s The County Election (1852) celebrates American democracy in the pre-Civil War period. Courtesy of The St. Louis Museum of Art.This 1870 broadside celebrates the passage of the 15th Amendment. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.Alfred Waud’s The First Vote marks the Civil Rights Act of 1867. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.Women’s voting rights activists, 1894. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.President Calvin Coolidge with Native Americans, 1925. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. Activists rally for voting rights for ex-felons, 2013. Courtesy of Flickr User Michael Fleshman, under CC BY-SA 2.0. https://contestedfranchise.com/Part-One-Granted-by-the-State Tue, 22 Sep 2020 22:25:05 +0000 Contested Franchise https://contestedfranchise.com/Part-One-Granted-by-the-State Part One ︎ &nbsp; Granted by the States&nbsp; &nbsp; https://contestedfranchise.com/Extract-from-election-lat-of-Pennsylvania Tue, 22 Sep 2020 22:22:41 +0000 Contested Franchise https://contestedfranchise.com/Extract-from-election-lat-of-Pennsylvania “What is citizenship? What is implied therein, and what the duty of civil society as to defense and protections of rights therein implied? … those who examined it must have been pained by the fruitless search in the law books and the records of our courts for a clear and satisfactory definition of the phrase “citizen of the United States.” &nbsp;Congressman C.C. Bowen, 1869.&nbsp; https://contestedfranchise.com/A-Perfect-Confusion Tue, 22 Sep 2020 22:46:18 +0000 Contested Franchise https://contestedfranchise.com/A-Perfect-Confusion A Perfect Confusion︎ The United States Constitution of 1787 made citizens. However, it did not&nbsp; explain who could be citizens. The only qualification Congress offered came in the 1790 Naturalization Act, which defined eligibility for immigrants to become citizens as those who were “white.” The Bill of Rights described some civil rights for citizens, but the Constitution left political--and therefore voting--rights up to the states. Without Federal rules, therefore, states freely granted or restricted voting rights as each saw fit. All thirteen original states imposed property qualifications to vote. To be an eligible voter, one had to own property. Interestingly, some states permitted landowning Black men to vote, and New Jersey allowed unmarried (and propertied) women to vote. Otherwise, thirteen different states had thirteen different qualifications for who had the privilege of voting, and in thirteen different states, very few people qualified. (Above) Extract from election law of Pennsylvania. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. <img width="690" height="822" width_o="690" height_o="822" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/969739118009d290eb72038a7ff3470b759efa1f231225648eec42adfe9afbfa/1A-Alexander_Lucius_Twilight_daguerrotype.jpg" data-mid="84233230" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/690/i/969739118009d290eb72038a7ff3470b759efa1f231225648eec42adfe9afbfa/1A-Alexander_Lucius_Twilight_daguerrotype.jpg" /> The Reverend Alexander Lucius Twilight served as the first African American state legislator when elected to the Vermont House of Representatives in 1836. Courtesy of Orleans County Grammar Schools. https://contestedfranchise.com/Sweep-the-Augean-Stable Tue, 22 Sep 2020 22:58:06 +0000 Contested Franchise https://contestedfranchise.com/Sweep-the-Augean-Stable “Aristocratic nations are naturally too apt to narrow the scope of human perfectibility; democratic nations, to expand it beyond reason.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835. https://contestedfranchise.com/Jacksonian-Democracy Tue, 22 Sep 2020 23:04:56 +0000 Contested Franchise https://contestedfranchise.com/Jacksonian-Democracy Jacksonian Democracy︎ Within a generation of the founding, Americans reconsidered who could vote, and who could not. The period after the War of 1812, popularly known as the age of Jacksonian Democracy, saw great expansion of the electorate—the White male electorate. In the first fifty years of the 1800s most states revised their constitutions and dropped property qualifications for voting. These moves ushered in a period of universal (White) male suffrage--most adult White men were now allowed to vote. White Americans boasted about their participation in the widest and freest electorate in the democratic world. Despite the exclusion of women and people of color, it was. (Above) This political cartoon celebrates the expansion of the franchise to the workingmen of New York. Courtesy of Columbia University Libraries. (Right) This ballot for Andrew Jackson encourages voters to “Sweep the Augean Stable”; in other words, the horse manure—or, the opposing party. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. https://contestedfranchise.com/Grand-National-Caravan-Moving-East Tue, 22 Sep 2020 23:19:47 +0000 Contested Franchise https://contestedfranchise.com/Grand-National-Caravan-Moving-East “No free negro, free mulatto, or free person of mixed blood, descended from negro ancestors to the fourth generation inclusive, (though one ancestor of each generation may have been a white person,) shall vote for members of the Senate or House of Commons.”&nbsp;Amendment to North Carolina’s constitution, 1835.&nbsp; https://contestedfranchise.com/A-White-Man-s-Democracy Tue, 22 Sep 2020 23:22:22 +0000 Contested Franchise https://contestedfranchise.com/A-White-Man-s-Democracy A White Man’s Democracy︎ As states expanded voting rights for White men by dropping property qualifications, they also restricted the franchise for Black and other non-White men.New York, for instance, disenfranchised most of its Black voters by adding property qualifications to its franchise in 1822. North Carolina similarly amended its constitution in 1835 to prevent Black and Native American voters in elections for statewide office. White Americans in this period proposed colonizing Black Americans in Africa and removing indigenous people from their eastern homelands to distant reservations beyond the Mississippi River. Changes like these indicated that few White Americans could imagine non-White people as citizens, let alone as voters. The United States Supreme Court delivered the final blow to voting rights for Black men in 1857 when it declared in the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision that Black men, enslaved or free, were not citizens under the Constitution and therefore not entitled to the rights and privileges of citizens. (Above) This cartoon satirized Andrew Jackson, showing him accompanied by a fiddling devil and a cage full of Native Americans. Courtesy of the Library of Congress <img width="736" height="1200" width_o="736" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5d2a19c4707376a7c99343144406951badfcb17ef41f268265baea6e11d223a8/1C-Taney-ACWM.jpg" data-mid="84821991" border="0" data-scale="63" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/736/i/5d2a19c4707376a7c99343144406951badfcb17ef41f268265baea6e11d223a8/1C-Taney-ACWM.jpg" />Justice Roger B. Taney. American Civil War Museum <img width="1056" height="1200" width_o="1056" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/03306685168024abf746d241514dac14065790457734eb52f849e66bd43248a1/1C-Philip-Coker.jpg" data-mid="84821990" border="0" data-scale="89" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/03306685168024abf746d241514dac14065790457734eb52f849e66bd43248a1/1C-Philip-Coker.jpg" />Philip Coker, sponsored by the American Colonization Society, migrated to Liberia. https://contestedfranchise.com/Leslie-s-At-the-Poll Tue, 29 Sep 2020 18:13:19 +0000 Contested Franchise https://contestedfranchise.com/Leslie-s-At-the-Poll “Each ballot shall be a ticket or scroll of paper, on which shall be written or printed the names of the persons for whom [the voter] intends to vote.”&nbsp;Code of Mississippi, 1848.&nbsp;