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Universal manhood suffrage is a form of voting rights in which all adult male citizens within a political system are allowed to vote, regardless of income, property, religion, race, or any other qualification. It is sometimes summarized by the slogan, "one man, one vote".
Tragically, the democratization of American politics to include nearly universal white manhood suffrage also intensified discrimination by race and gender. The idea of total democracy remained too radical for full implementation. The Expansion of the Vote: A White Man's Democracy.
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On the eve of the Civil War a handful of states retained a taxpayer qualification, but it is fair to conclude that a near-universal white manhood suffrage had been achieved in the United States. Three important points must be made about this seemingly relentless march toward a broader, more democratic electorate.
Universal suffrage or universal franchise ensures the right to vote for as many people bound by a government's laws as possible, as supported by the " one person, one vote " principle. For many, the term universal suffrage assumes the exclusion of the young and non-citizens (among others).
- Voting Rights on The Eve of The Revolution
- The Impact of The Revolution
- The Constitution and Voting Rights
- Political Democratization
- The Dorr War
- The Civil War and Reconstruction
- The Mississippi Plan
- The Late Nineteenth Century
- Women’s Suffrage
- Declining Participation in Elections
The basic principle that governed voting in colonial America was that voters should have a "stake in society." Leading colonists associated democracy with disorder and mob rule, and believed that the vote should be restricted to those who owned property or paid taxes. Only these people, in their view, were committed members of the community and wer...
The American Revolution was fought in part over the issue of voting. The Revolutionaries rejected the British argument that representation in Parliament could be virtual (that is, that English members of Parliament could adequately represent the interests of the colonists). Instead, the Revolutionaries argued that government derived its legitimacy ...
The US Constitution left the issue of voting rights up to the states. The only thing that the Constitution said about voting was that those entitled to vote for the "most numerous Branch of the state legislature" could vote for members of the House of Representatives.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, the election process changed dramatically. Voting by voice was replaced by voting by written ballot. This was not the same thing as a secret ballot, which was instituted only in the late nineteenth century; parties printed ballots on colored paper, so that it was still possible to determine who had v...
The transition from property qualifications to universal white manhood suffrage occurred gradually, without violence and with surprisingly little dissension, except in Rhode Island, where lack of progress toward democratization provoked an episode known as the Dorr War. In 1841, Rhode Island, still operating under a Royal Charter granted in 1663, r...
Although Abraham Lincoln had spoken about extending the vote to black soldiers, opposition to granting suffrage to African American men was strong in the North. Between 1863 and 1870, fifteen Northern states and territories rejected proposals to extend suffrage to African Americans. During Reconstruction, for a variety of reasons, a growing number ...
In 1890, Mississippi pioneered new methods to prevent African Americans from voting. Through lengthy residence requirements, poll taxes, literacy tests, property requirements, cumbersome registration procedures, and laws disenfranchising voters for minor criminal offenses, Southern states drastically reduced black voting. In Mississippi, just 9,000...
Fears of corruption and of fraudulent voting led a number of northern and western states to enact "reforms" similar to those in the South. Reformers were especially troubled by big-city machines that paid or promised jobs to voters. Reforms that were enacted included pre-election registration, long residence qualifications, revocation of state laws...
In 1848, at the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, delegates adopted a resolution calling for women’s suffrage. But it would take seventy-two years before most American women could vote. Why did it take so long? Why did significant numbers of women oppose women’s suffrage? The Constitution speaks of "persons"; only rarely do...
Voter turnout began to fall after the election of 1896. Participation in presidential elections fell from a high of about 80 percent overall to about 60 percent in the North in the 1920s and about 20 percent in the South. Contributing to the decline in voter participation was single-party dominance in large parts of the country; laws making it diff...
Jacksonian democracy was a 19th-century political philosophy in the United States that expanded suffrage to most white men over the age of 21 and restructured a number of federal institutions. Originating with the seventh U.S. president, Andrew Jackson and his supporters, it became the nation's dominant political worldview for a generation.
The early 1800s saw an age of deference give way to universal manhood suffrage and a new type of political organization based on loyalty to the party. The election of 1824 was a fight among Democratic-Republicans that ended up pitting southerner Andrew Jackson against northerner John Quincy Adams.
