The Development of Party Positions on Black Suffrage,
1780-1870
David Alexander Bateman
February 24, 2014*
Abstract
This working traces the evolution of ‘black suffrage’ as a political issue in the antebellum
United States, demonstrating that in contrast to the literature there was an important transformation in how positions on black suffrage mapped onto party conflict. I examine the two
phases of this transformation—the adoption by the Democratic party of white supremacy as
a core feature of their party identity and the subsequent adoption by segments of the Whigs
and ultimately the Republican party of a race-blind vision of American republicanism—and
show that electoral competition between candidate-centered parties was not the primary motivation for these shifts. I present evidence in support of an alternative explanation, rooted in
an analysis of what the participants themselves believed to be at stake in the question of black
voting rights. Rather than being motivated by ambitious candidates’ calculations over black
voting power, the adoption of party positions on this issue were responses by party leaders
to the efforts of intense policy demanders and ideologically motivated activists within each
party’s respective coalition. To examine party change on this issue, I introduce a dataset
of roll calls from antebellum state legislatures and constitutional conventions, a dataset of
cross-institutional and common space state legislator and delegate ideal points, with political
and constituency information for each legislator, and a collection of legislative speech acts,
petitions, contemporary newspaper articles, editorials, and political pamphlets.
* This working paper reflects an report from a larger project on state politics in the 19th century. Comments,
questions, and criticisms are eagerly welcomed: [email protected]
1
I NTRODUCTION
Sometime over the course of the 20th century, “the two major parties essentially switched positions on civil rights issues” for African Americans. As noted by Brian Feinstein and Eric
Schickler, there is a broad “scholarly consensus on this very general statement,” with substantial
disagreement on its timing and cause.1 This transformation, however, was the mirror of an earlier
one, when support for political rights for African Americans went from being an issue associated
with the political left to one associated with the political right. About this earlier period, however,
there is a general consensus about the cause of party positions, about why the Whigs and later
the Republican party were relatively favorable to black voting rights while the Democratic party
was adamantly opposed, but little attention to how these positions developed over time.
In fact, most of the relevant literature suggests that there was little in the way of actual development, with standard accounts treating the Democratic Party and its precursor as always
opposed to black voting and the Republican party and its precursors as always slightly, but never
wholeheartedly, supportive. In these accounts the positions of both parties were motivated by
the same basic calculation, expressed well by a Democratic delegate to the Ohio Constitutional
Convention of 1851: “Every negro in Ohio is a Whig and if he is allowed to vote, the Whigs
will get a great accession of strength. The Whigs have too many voters now.”2 For Federalists
and later for the Whigs, the overwhelming partisan bias of the free black community in their
favor was an opportunity; for Jeffersonians and Democrats, it was a threat. And so while there
were periods during which the issue of black suffrage was more or less important in state and
national politics, the basic orientations of the parties toward the question was stable, even across
1 Feinstein
and Schickler, “Platforms and Partners: The Civil Rights Realignment Reconsidered,” Studies in American Political Development, 22(2008): 1. Estimates of its timing range from the 1920s to the 1970s, with Carmines
and Stimson emphasizing 1964 as the crucial year in which national political dynamics—and the selection of Barry
Goldwater as Republican presidential nominee—resulted in the “party of Lincoln and emancipation. . . turn[ing] its
back on one hundred years of racial progressivism.” Edward G. Carmines and James A. Stimson, Issue Evolution:
Race and the Transformation of American Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 47. Feinstein and
Schickler argue for an earlier date, and for the move toward racial egalitarianism by the Democratic party the result
not of national electoral calculations but of local political activists and the changing ideological basis of left-wing
politics. The argument presented here examines the importance of both national and state-level considerations, as
well as the different roles of electoral competition and ideologically committed activists.
2 William Sawyer, Democratic delegate from Hamilton County, in J.M. Smith, Report of the Debates and Proceedings
of the Ohio Constitutional Convention of 1850-51 (Columbus: S. Medary, 1851), 637.
1
the different ‘party systems.’
This working paper has three objectives. I begin by tracing the evolution of ‘black suffrage’
as a political issue in the antebellum United States, demonstrating that in contrast to the literature
there was an important transformation in how positions on black suffrage mapped onto party
conflict. Having demonstrated that such a change did occur, I turn to an analysis of its cause. I
examine the two phases of this transformation—the adoption by the Democratic party of white
supremacy as a core feature of their party identity and the subsequent adoption by segments of the
Whigs and ultimately the Republican party of a race-blind vision of American republicanism—
and show, in contrast to standard accounts, that electoral competition between candidate-centered
parties was not the primary motivation for these shifts. And I present evidence in support of an
alternative explanation, rooted in an analysis of what the participants themselves believed to be
at stake in the question of black voting rights, one which emphasizes coalitional politics rather
than strategies of electoral gain.
I argue that rather than being motivated by ambitious candidates’ calculations over black voting power—the standard narrative—the adoption of different policy positions on this issue were
responses by party elite to the efforts of intense policy demanders and ideologically motivated
activists within each party’s respective coalition. In a series of major and minor crises during
the early Republic, southern political elite in both the Jeffersonian and Federalist parties made
clear their belief that any suggestion of citizenship for free blacks was anathema to continued
Union. Nationally ambitious Democratic politicians sought to conciliate this vital group in the
party, and considerable pressure was brought to bear on those who refused to follow the new
party line. In response, opponents of slavery reinvigorated a longstanding theme in antislavery
rhetoric, one with roots in evangelical Christianity and late-18th century republicanism: “odious distinctions” founded on a denial of a common humanity were the necessary buttresses of
slavery. These activists, largely aligned with the Whigs but working at cross-purposes to the
party leadership, pushed the issue of black voting rights at the state and national level as part
of a wide-ranging attack against the cultural and ideological commitments they saw as central
to the maintenance of slavery. Well before 1868, and well before it was electorally expedient,
2
a large segment of the northern Whig coalition had endorsed black suffrage; they, along with
Liberty Party and Free-Soilers would continue to do so in the new Republican party, where their
influence was considerably greater.
In advancing this claim, I rely on several new data sources: (1) a dataset of roll calls from antebellum state legislatures and constitutional conventions; (2) a dataset of cross-institutional and
common space state legislator and delegate ideal points, with political and constituency information for each legislator; and (3) a collection of legislative speech acts, petitions, contemporary
newspaper articles, editorials, and political pamphlets.
This account differs from the literature in three ways. First, I provide a new perspective on
the timing and sequence of party positions on black suffrage, recovering the pro-suffrage positions of early Jeffersonians while placing black suffrage within the mainstream of the emerging
Republican coalition at an earlier date than standard accounts. Second, I shift focus from an exclusive attention to party leaders toward one that integrates the often divergent objectives of state
politicians, policy-oriented activists, and leaders seeking to reconcile policy demands with the necessity of winning elections. Third, I underscore the degree to which party positions developed
less as a function of electoral competition than as a function of opposing positions over slavery
and republican citizenship, by recovering what political actors—politicians, activists, and citizens
concerned with public affairs—believed to be at stake in the question of black voting rights.
The analysis is structured as follows. Section 2 situates this article in the literatures on 19th
century politics of black suffrage and party position change. After describing the data sources in
greater detail in section 3, I turn to an analysis of how the politics of black suffrage were transformed in the antebellum period in section 4. I examine the determinants of legislator position
taking on black suffrage, paying careful attention to what participants believed to be at stake in
this issue; and analyze the distinct factors that led to the adoption of the white republic by the
Democracy and Whig support for “impartial” suffrage. I conclude by discussing the relevance of
these findings for understandings of American political development.
3
2
B LACK S UFFRAGE AND P OLITICAL PARTIES
American understandings of the country’s democratization have long been structured by a progressive narrative, in which the right to vote is gradually but steadily extended. One example
among many, an introductory textbook on American government from 1922, considered the trajectory of 19th century American politics to be a “general triumph of democratic principles,” as
“property qualifications were relaxed and finally abandoned, tax-paying requirements were given
up in all but a few states, religious tests were entirely abolished, and in many states the suffrage
was extended to aliens immediately upon declaration of intention to be naturalized.” After the
Civil War, the suffrage was “broadened mainly by the enfranchisement of negroes, including the
freedmen, and by the conferring of the ballot upon women.”3 This narrative has not yet been retired from public and political commentary, as Attorney General Eric Holder attested in his 2012
claim that “the arc of American history has always moved toward expanding the electorate.”4
But while some scholars continue to insist that “the United States experienced a gradual
movement toward democracy with no reverses,” there is now broad recognition of the theoretical and substantive importance of disfranchisement and restrictions on voting qualifications for
American political development.5 This is nowhere so apparent as with the revisionist scholarship
on Reconstruction and black suffrage.6 It is with some irony, then, that for much of the late 19th
3 Frederic
Austin Ogg and P. Orman Ray, Introduction to American Government (New York: Century Co., 1922),
199, 200.
4 “Attorney General Eric Holder Speaks at the NAACP Annual Convention,” Houston Texas, July 10, 2012.
http://www.justice.gov/iso/opa/ag/speeches/2012/ag-speech-120710.html. The former Governor of Florida Charlie Crist wrote, in a similar vein, that “including as many Americans as possible in our electoral process is the spirit
of our country. It is why we have expanded rights to women and minorities but never legislated them away.” Charlie
Crist, “The voter ID mess subverts an American birthright,” Washington Post, July 20, 2012.
5 Daron Acemoğlu and James Robinson, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), xi. The most extensive coverage of the disfranchising and exclusionary trends in voting
rights in the United States is Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the
United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
6 Perhaps the best political science work on voting rights in the Reconstruction period is that of Richard Valelly, The
Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). For
work on other disfranchisements, see Joseph Groberg, “The Mormon Disfranchisements of 1882 to 1892,” BYU
Studies 16(1976): 405; Merle W. Wells, “The Idaho Anti-Mormon Test Oath,” Pacific Historical Review 24(1955):
235-252; Ron Hayduck, Democracy for All: Restoring Immigrant Voting Rights in the U.S. (New York: Routledge,
2006); Judith Klinghoffer and Lois Elkins, “‘The Petticoat Electors’: Women’s Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776-1807”
Journal of the Early Republic 12(1992): 159-93; Christopher Malone, Between Freedom and Bondage: Race, Party
and Voting Rights in the Antebellum North (New York: Routledge, 2007).
4
and early 20th centuries it was the inclusion of African Americans that was seen as the major blot
on the progressive record. The same textbook trumpeting the “general triumph of democratic
principles,” for instance, argued that while the spirit of the 15th Amendment was obviously violated, “the initial mistake was made when the freedmen were enfranchised en masse sixty years
ago.”7
Nor were they alone. Harper’s Weekly, a magazine closely associated with the Republican party and the Radical Republicans’ Reconstruction program, was by 1903 editorializing that
the “Fifteenth Amendment was a piece of immature and imprudent, if not vindictive, legislation,” and hoped that “through discussion” the public feeling against federal enforcement of the
Amendment would be “maintained, extended, and intensified.”8 The Boston Herald, dismissed
claims of “inherent rights” to the suffrage, as “it is now, we think, generally recognized that a
mistake was made at the close of our civil war in according suffrage generally to the emancipated
negroes.”9 The New York Sun, another Republican newspaper, wrote that “the fifteenth amendment to the constitution of the United States incorporates what the nation is rapidly coming to
believe was one of the most deplorable mistakes in our history,” and blamed the “hasty policy” on
“the result of supposed political expediency” and “an ignorant overestimate of the possibilities of
the development inherent in race.”10
This characterization of black suffrage as a mistake, and of the 15th Amendment as a stain
on the Constitution, was reflected in political position-taking and legislative efforts to repeal
the amendment, most aggressively by South Carolina Senator Benjamin Tillman, who warned
northern audiences that it was repeal or genocide, and Mississippi Senator James Vardaman, who
7 Ogg
and Ray, Introduction, 206.
Discussion of the Fifteenth Amendment,” Harper’s Weekly, July 11, 1903, p.1144. The editor regretted
that repeal at the present time was not practical, not for lack of popular support but for the difficulty of securing a
constitutional amendment.
9 “Suffrage in New Hampshire,” Boston Herald, March 4, 1903.
10 The article was reprinted favorably in southern newspapers, which underscored the Republican-affiliation of the
Sun. See “New York Sun Favors Repeal,” Biloxi Daily Herald, Biloxi, MS, May 4, 1903. The turn of opinion
against black voting rights was not unanimous, especially in the immediate wake of the Supreme Court’s decision
in 1903 to not interfere in Alabama’s new efforts to eliminate black voting (Giles v. Harris, 189 U.S. 475). See
Richard Price Hallowell, Why the Negro was Enfranchised: Negro Suffrage Justified (Boston: George H. Ellis
Co., 1903), and the regular responses in African American newspapers, such as the African-American Cleveland
Gazette’s edditorial against “so many of our ablest and leading journals [of the North] allowing themselves to be
deceived and misled into the idea that suffrage to the Afro-American was a mistake.” “Favors the Repeal of the
Fifteenth Amendment,” Cleveland Gazette, May 23, 1903.
8 “Recent
5
made repeal the centerpiece of his senatorial campaigns.11
But support for repeal went beyond the South and beyond the Democratic party, with many
influential Republican politicians in favor. Senator William Borah, the progressive “Lion of
Idaho,” argued that the only way a women’s suffrage amendment—which he supported—would
pass would be through repeal of the fifteenth, which had been “a blunder, engendered in a spirit
of retaliation.”12 Theodore Roosevelt, believed repeal to be impractical but also that the “passage
of the Fifteenth Amendment at the time it was passed was a mistake.”13 President Taft came
out against repeal, although like Roosevelt suggested he would not have supported it at the time.
But he claimed the southern disfranchisements were “square” with the fifteenth amendment, that
black suffrage had “proved to be a failure,” and that “it is not the disposition or within the province
of the Federal Government to interfere with the regulation by Southern States of their domestic
affairs.”14 In 1912, the Republican party dropped any mention of protecting the rights of black
voters from its national platform, provisions that in one form or another had been included in
every Republican platform from 1868 onward.15
This abandonment of black voting rights by the party that had included it on its masthead
for over thirty years would likely be unsurprising to most political scientists. Standard accounts
present the Republicans as “not an ideological party,” led by “ambitious politicians” whose primary motivation was winning and maintaining office. Lincoln’s “was a cabinet of the [William]
11 “Tillman
Talks of a Race War; He says the Fifteenth Amendment Must be Repealed; Believes North will Stand by
South on that Question,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, OH., August 10, 1903.
12 “Women Cannot Gain Vote by an Amendment, Senator Borah Says it has Aroused Negro and Japanese Questions;
Negro Vote was a Blunder,” Rockford Morning Star, Rockford Il., March 18, 1914. He clarified his position by
remarking that he favored and would support such a repeal.
13 Joseph Bucklin Bishop, Theodore Roosevelt and his Time, vol. I (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920),
350. As with the editors of Harper’s Weekly, Roosevelt did not believe it was practical to repeal the amendment,
and supported instead the eventual, but not immediate, enforcement of the 14th Amendment’s reduction of representation. Xi Wang, The Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans, 1860-1910 (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1997), 262.
14 “William Howard Taft, Inaugural Address, Thursday, March 4, 1909,” Inaugural Address of the Presidents of the
United States (Washington, D.C.: U.S. G.P.O., 1989). See also Valelly, Two Reconstructions, 133.
15 There would be no more mention of the 15th Amendment or the rights of African Americans in Republican platforms until 1932, when the platform announced that the party “do[es] not propose to depart from [its] tradition
nor to alter the spirit or letter of [its] pledge” to “maintain equal opportunity and rights for Negro citizens.” Only
in 1948 would the Democratic party unequivocally endorse voting rights for African Americans in their national
platform, although a number of state Democratic platforms had taken a position in favor of protecting black voting
rights as early as the 1920s. Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, “Republican Party Platforms”, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/platforms.php; Feinstein and Schickler, “Platforms and
Partners,” 12.
6
Sewards and [Salmon] Chases,” well-established senior politicians before their conversion to the
Republican party, whose main objective was further advancement.16 The party’s eventual embrace of black suffrage was simply an extension of this motivation.17 The close of the Civil
War meant an end to the Republican party’s artificial majorities at the national level, and these
same ambitious politicians now reasoned that only through black suffrage could they retain their
influence.
The claim that Republicans’ support for black suffrage was motivated primarily by party
leaders’ desire to secure office has been a central theme since the first monograph on the 15th
Amendment was published in 1909, which argued that once “most of the ex-Confederate States
had been in large measure rehabilitated, it was realized that the practically complete control
which [the Republican] Congress had exercised over them was gradually slipping away and must
eventually come to an end.” This fear of an impending loss in national elections was the “controlling motive which led to the enactment of the Fifteenth Amendment.”18 Likewise, one of the
earliest surveys of the development of the suffrage in the United States argued that “Republican
politicians were very likely to have something more in mind than justice to the black man when
they fought to gain suffrage for him. They wanted to make sure of Republican majorities and
permanently cripple the Democratic Party.”19 Among the most recent and compelling political
science accounts of the Republican party’s push for black suffrage likewise argues this was mo16 John
Aldrich, Why Parties? A Second Look (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 158-59.
competition between candidate-centered parties has long been one of the most important explanations
for suffrage change. Ambitious politicians will be more likely to change electoral qualifications when they either
come to power after a long-period in opposition, or are threatened with a return to opposition, and are able to
identify an excluded population that will be disproportionately likely to support them. In the first case, a party’s
long-term minority position is likely to reflect a relatively stable distribution of preferences in the existing electorate, while their recent victory might be the result of idiosyncratic factors or an exogenous shock and therefore
less likely to be replicated. In the second case, an intensification of competition, evidenced in diminishing margins of victory, lead party elite to conclude that their defeat is impending. The post-Civil War period contains
elements of both. The argument is less frequently associated with disfranchisements, although most of the work
on the post-Reconstruction period stresses the threat to southern Democrats from the Populist movement. See E.E.
Schattschneider, Party Government (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1935), 48; William Riker, Democracy in the United States (New York, MacMillan, 1953); Humberto Llavador and Robert J. Oxoby, “Partisan
Competition, Growth, and the Franchise,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 120(2005): 1155-1192.
18 John Mabry Mathews, “Legislative and Judicial History of the Fifteenth Amendment,” Johns Hopkins University
Studies in Historical and Political Science, 27(1909), 20-1.
19 Kirk Harold Porter, A History of Suffrage in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1918) p.179.
Porter notes that “the principle of negro suffrage was popular, of course.” He can only be referring to its being
popular among Republicans, as it had very limited support among the voting public.
17 Electoral
7
tivated by the party leaders’ worry of losing ascendency, with black enfranchisement intended to
secure “a great National party, which can hopefully contest nearly every State in the Union.”20
The gradual return of Democratic ascendency in the South, however, led to the reinvestment
in a strategy of western “rotten boroughs”—new states, disproportionately Republican leaning,
with tiny populations but each with two senators and at least three electoral college votes.21
Republicans abandoned black suffrage for the inverse of why they had embraced it: “Republicans
no longer needed black southerners’ votes.”22 Black suffrage, in these accounts, was never a
sincere commitment of anything but a small faction of the Republican party; the leadership and
the bulk of the party had always found it an embarrassment, and but for the period of 30 years
when it was politically expedient, were only too happy to be rid of it.
But the turn of the century disfranchisement was the second period in which black voters
were extruded from the electorate. In 1789 only Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia disfranchised free blacks; by 1860, they had been disfranchised in every state but Massachusetts,
Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, and had been re-enfranchised after 20 years of exclusion
in Rhode Island during the Dorr War. And central to most accounts of black disfranchisement
in the antebellum period is the claim that the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans—and later
Jacksonian Democrats—sought to remove free black men from the electorate in order to exclude
a constituency that was strongly biased toward their political opponents.23
These accounts, which focus almost exclusively on the curtailment of black voting rights in
the North, argue that the Jeffersonians and especially the Jacksonians had their base in a profoundly, if not exceptionally, racist constituency: the ‘laboring classes’ in the city and country.24
20 Horace
Greeley, cited in Valelly, Two Reconstructions, 32, 29.
and immediately after the war, Republicans had brought in West Virginia, Nebraska, and Nevada, in addition to excluding non-reconstructed southern states. After the heightened insecurity following the Democratic
south’s ‘Reconquista,’ Colorado, Montana, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, and two Dakotas were admitted
to the Union. Valelly notes that he is unsure whether any “member of the national Republican Party intended the
Western policy as insurance against a possible collapse of Republican or fusionist strength in the former Confederacy,” but that it had such an effect all the same. See Charles Stewart III and Barry R. Weingast, “Stacking the
Senate, Changing the Nation: Republican Rotten Boroughs, Statehood Politics, and American Political Development,” Studies in American Political Development 6(1992): 223-71.
22 Valelly, Two Reconstructions, 138.
23 Malone, Between Freedom and Bondage; Klinghoffer and Elkins, “‘The Petticoat Electors’ ”; and Paul J. Polgar,
“‘Whenever They Judge it Expedient’: The Politics of Partisanship and Free Black Voting Rights in Early National
New York,” American Nineteenth Century History 12(2011): 1-23.
24 There are several works that focus on the racism of the white laboring classes, the most common term to refer
21 During
8
In part because of economic competition, in part because Federalists had been involved in the
“genteel” manumission societies, and in part, perhaps most relevantly, because the national Jeffersonian party had sought to expand slavery in the west, refused to recognize and barred trade
with Haiti, and had imposed a national embargo that crippled the one industry in which free
blacks had a foothold, free blacks were widely agreed to be disproportionately Federalist and
later Whig in their political inclination.25 As soon as the free black community was sufficiently
large to have an electoral impact, which occurred at different times in different places, Democratic
candidates worried about the prospect of electoral defeat moved to disfranchise, comfortable in
the knowledge that they would find no opposition from their constituents. And for decades afterwards they vigorously defended a policy of exclusion in order to forestall any potential gains
by their partisan opponents, who they portrayed as scheming to have the “the negroes. . . come
into the bosom of the whig party to vote down the democrats; for it is generally understood that
Sambo goes ‘coon,’ ” the latter racial slur being a label by which Democrats referred to the Whig
party.26
There is an unmistakable symmetry between accounts of Democratic opposition to and Republican support for black voting rights. They both treat the adoption of party positions as reflecting the top-down decisions of party leaders whose primary motivation is winning elections.
And certainly there is no denying that politicians and political operatives are especially likely
to calculate the impact of policies on their electoral prospects, a calculation that must be even
more common when the policy in question concerns a change to the electorate. But for the same
reason, we should be careful to interpret statements of calculation as evidence of motivation.
Consider for instance the paragons of pragmatic politicians cited above, Salmon Chase and
William Seward. They were certainly calculating and ambitious politicians, and they were relto farmers, mechanics and tradesmen, and the growing ranks of laborers and persons engaged in manufacturing.
Among the more influential are David Roediger, The wages of whiteness: race and the making of the American
working class (London: Verso, 1999); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995);
Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class, Politics and Mass Culture in NineteenthCentury America (London: Verso, 1990).
25 Polgar suggests that the “origins of the association of black New Yorkers with one political faction can be traced
to the founding of the New York Manumission Society in 1785,” one of several “genteel” and predominantly
Federalist societies supportive of gradually abolishing slavery, as well as the role of the embargo of 1807. Polgar,
“‘Whenever They Judge it Expedient.’ ”
26 “A Convention, Speech of the Hon. G.D. Beers,” Albany Argus, May 20, 1845.
9
atively early in adopting an unequivocal position in favor of black voting rights. And in their
correspondence they are frequently found weighing the ramifications of black suffrage at the ballot box. But they staked out a position in favor of black voting under conditions where it almost
certainly cost them—and they each believed it cost them—far more votes among whites than it
could potentially gain among free blacks. Chase had been an open and active proponent of black
suffrage since at least the 1840s, a position that had helped shore up support from abolitionists
in the Ohio Western Reserve but that he believed cost him dearly among the general Ohio electorate, especially in Cincinnati and Hamilton County where most state elections were decided.27
William Seward had championed black suffrage in New York State since at least the early 1840s,
likewise motivated in part by a worry that the Whig party retain abolitionist support. But as
both he and his calculating political manager—and “first last and very best of friends”—Thurlow
Weed recognized, black suffrage was a losing political battle that cost them significant numbers
of white votes, with only a slim prospect of success. From a political perspective, Seward’s
support for black suffrage was his first “folly.”28
But neither Seward nor Chase would ever renege on their commitment to an impartial suffrage, and Chase in particular would become the most insistent voice in favor of black voting
rights in the Lincoln cabinet. Their commitment did not begin when it was politically expedient,
but had been maintained for two decades despite the constant indications that it was politically
costly and despite their own caution that too energetic a stance in support would be fatal to their
ambitions.
Why did they endorse black suffrage, and thereby make themselves vulnerable to accusations
of allegiance to a “Congo Creed” and a plot to place the black man before the white?29 I argue that
27 Democrats
attacked Governor Salmon Chase, who had endorsed black suffrage in 1845 and voted for it in the
convention of 1851, on this issue, claiming the party was devoted to a “Congo Creed,” citing as evidence the black
suffrage campaign. Chase also worried that the party was “in no position to hold. . . advanced ground,” and was
very attentive to the political difficulties in supporting black suffrage. But Chase refused to repudiate his support
for black suffrage, despite the fact that “it made a potent electioneering argument against him.” William Cheek,
John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829-65 (University of Illinois Press, 1996), 323-24.
28 Andrew W. Arpey, The William Freeman Murder Trial: Insanity, Politics, and Race (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press), 52. Seward’s later purchase of Alaska on behalf of the United States was attacked alongside the
fifteenth amendment for extending U.S. territory to include the Inuit, who it was claimed would eventually claim
the suffrage after women and Chinese immigrants. See “The Great National Game,” in Punchinello, New York,
NY, April 23, 1870.
29 Cheek, John Mercer Langston, 324.
10
they did not support black suffrage because they were party leaders worried about defeat or eager
for prospective gains; they became Republican leaders in large part because they had consistently
supported black suffrage, as well as other measures intended to establish a race-blind republic.
Their influence in the party, and the influence of many others like them, reflected the fact that
they had taken positions demanded by one of the more important “intense policy demanders” in
the Whig, and later Republican, parties—the small, well-organized, and self-described ‘fanatics’
in the abolitionist movement.30 It was the sustained organizing and political campaigning of this
policy-oriented group against what they saw as the ideological and cultural infrastructure necessary to sustain slavery that led many state politicians to adopt black suffrage in the 1830s and
1840s. Similarly, the adoption of white supremacy as the standard of the Democratic Party in
the 1830s reflected less a concern with the threat of black voting power than with the renewed
demands of southern Democratic elite that measures be taken to reinforce slavery through national and northern state policy. In both cases it was not the threat of black votes that was the
primary motivation for the development of party positions. What activists and party operatives
believed was the “irrepressible conflict,” with Democrats coming to believe that black suffrage
meant disunion and Republicans coming to believe that antislavery required an assault on the
whole cultural and ideological infrastructure that sustained it.
3
R ESEARCH S TRATEGY AND DATA S OURCES
A feature of much of the literature on black suffrage in the 19th century is its bifurcated focus. Analyses of the Democratic Party’s support for disfranchisement focus almost exclusively
on state politics and the local incentives underpinning this, while analyses of the Republicans’
support for black suffrage in the 1860s focus almost exclusively on national conditions, and the
need to secure a national governing coalition. This bifurcation is problematic for assessing the
importance of different causal factors. While black suffrage was “achieved” in 1868-1870, a
30 The
importance of intense policy demanders to political parties is detailed in Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans
Noel, and John Zaller, The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2008), 30. For a discussion of the “fanaticism” of abolition, and a defense of a democratic
zealotry, see Joel Olson, “The Freshness of Fanaticism: The Abolitionist Defense of Zealotry,” Perspectives on
Politics 5(2007): 685-701.
11
limited focus on national politics might leave the impression that it had only become a relevant
issue a few years after the Civil War, when the Republican Party and its policy accomplishments
were threatened by an unreconstructed Democratic Party. And while the antebellum disfranchisements were undertaken by state actors, a focus on their actions divorced from the national context
or concerns with their national coalition would, I suggest, bias researchers toward an electoral
competition motive.
This article aims to integrate these two levels in analyses of party and issue development, by a
careful attention to how both local and national considerations shaped the behavior of elected representatives and aspiring party leaders. To map out and assess the development of party positions,
I utilize a new data source that will hopefully expand our ability to ask and answer questions of
American political development.The dataset, which is still under construction, will ultimately
include all roll calls for every published legislative journal, for all the states and territories in
the 19th century.31 Using the roll call data, we are able to estimate cross-institutional and crossspace ideal point estimates for state politicians, using the technique developed by Shor, Berry,
and McCarty.32 An initial pooled-scaling estimation is performed for each legislature, using an
aggregated matrix of all roll call votes and legislators for a given institution, using those who
served multiple terms to connect these legislatures longitudinally. Next, we identify bridge actors who served across different institutions—in this case who served in state legislatures as well
31 These
are being coded by issue area, using the coding scheme outlined in Katznelson and Lapinski, in order to
have some measure of the issue agenda across the states and across time and to assist researchers interested in
particular issue areas to begin tracing their development across time at the state level. This process, however, is
at a very early phase. Ira Katznelson and John S. Lapinski, “Studying Policy Content and Legislative Behavior,”
The Macropolitics of Congress, E. Scott Adler and John S. Lapinski, editors (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2006). Several factors ensure that while the data-collection will be a considerable undertaking, it is not
excessively so. For one, many of the journals have already been scanned—in various levels of quality—and are
available online. An additional factor is that many of the states did not publish their journals, or their journals
have been lost. For instance, Connecticut was required by its constitution to publish a journal of proceedings from
1818 onwards; and yet neither Grace E. MacDonald and the other researchers who compiled the Check-List of
Legislative Journals of States of the United States of America in the 1930s nor I have been able to find any that
exist before 1834. A third reason is the fact that many of the legislative sessions were short, and the number of roll
call votes were relatively few. Finally, the antebellum period presents the unique advantage that there were fewer
states, making it more feasible to collect data on each that published journals. Grace E. MacDonald, Check-List of
Legislative Journals of States of the United States of America (Providence: Oxford Press, 1938)
32 Boris Shor, Christopher Berry, and Nolan McCarty, “A Bridge to Somewhere: Mapping State and Congressional
Ideology on a Cross-Institutional Common Space,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 35(2010): 417-448; Boris Shor
and Nolan McCarty, “The Ideological Mapping of American Legislatures,” American Political Science Review
105(2011): 530-551.
12
as in Congress—and adjust their scores using the TurboADA technique developed by Groseclose,
Levitt, and Snyder.33 This procedure does rely on the identifying assumption that members’ ideal
points will remain relatively stable across institutions, although idiosyncratic variation across
time and institutions is allowed.34
In order to accomplish the bridging, however, a database of state and national legislators is
required. This is being compiled by relying on the Civil Lists or Legislative Manuals published
by various states, as well as official histories, and then by using an identity resolution algorithm
to match existing lists of members of Congress with the state files. When the algorithm returns a
possible match, these are checked manually using the biographical data on members of Congress.
Finally, the electoral districts of every state are being matched with the relevant census information and with existing or new data sources of county- or town-level vote tallies, matching a
database of constituency demographic and political variables with the legislator-level data.35 The
political variables include the vote tallies for governor and president—when available—in the
county, sets of counties, or towns in the previous electoral cycle; the main demographic variables
included are the proportion of the population held in slavery, the size of the free black population,
the proportion of persons employed in manufacturing versus agriculture and commerce, and the
proportion foreign born.36 The end result will be an integrated dataset of legislator voting, ideal
33 Tim
Groseclose, Steven D. Levitt, and James Snyder, Jr., “Comparing Interest Group Scores across Time and
Chambers: Adjusted ADA Scores for the U.S. Congress,” American Political Science Review 93(1999): 33-50.
34 If state politics leads to considerably different coalitional patterns than national ones—more likely in the antebellum than in the contemporary period—then the resulting estimates will be biased. The result, however, will
be exploding estimates. TurboADA proceeds by estimating a shift (a) and a stretch parameter (b), effectively the
constant and the regression coefficient of a legislature’s member scores against a weighted average of all members’ scores across time. The adjusted scores are calculated as (NominalScore − a)/b. If a particular legislature
is off-cleavage, the stretch coefficient b will decline toward zero, resulting in greatly inflated estimates. This is
itself a measure of interest, as it relates information about the degree to which state and national politics was organized along similar axes of conflict. At least so far, this has not occurred with bridging state legislatures and
Congress for the antebellum period, although further exploration is required to ensure that this is not a function
of the number of bridge actors relative to the composition of the legislatures. David A. Bateman and John S.
Lapinski, “Issue-specific Ideal Points and Comparability,” forthcoming.
35 Various census sources were integrated, including Edmund P. Willis, Tax and Census Records, New York City,
1789-1790 and 1810 (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research , 2000),
doi:10.3886/ICPSR02863/; Lee Benson and Joel Silbey, Electoral and Demographic Data for New York, 18301875, ICPSR version. (Ithaca, NY; Ann Arbor, MI: Cornell University and Inter-university Consortium for
Political and Social Research, 1984, 2002), doi:10.3886/ICPSR0692. See also the census reports available at
http://www.nysl.nysed.gov/scandocs/nyscensus.htm
36 Data on the manufacturing employment and foreign-birth are available only for a few census years, and are not
available anywhere before 1820. Most of the census data comes from Michael R. Haines and Inter-university
Consortium for Political and Social Research. Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United
13
point estimates, and constituency demographic and political information, which will hopefully
prove of broad interest to students of American political development.
Rather than proceed chronologically, beginning with a first session of a legislature and then
building the database forward from that, we have begun the data collection by selecting specific
legislatures of interest and expanding outwards from there. Drawing on the secondary literature
on black suffrage, those legislatures, constitutional conventions, and sessions of Congress that
considered and voted on this issue were identified, and roll calls for these sessions and for a
ten year period before and after were collected.37 This allows us to increase the number of
bridge actors for each legislature and provides initial seeds from which the data collection will
expand. A note of caution in interpreting results, then, is that these are likely to shift somewhat
as new instances of black suffrage votes are identified through the cataloguing process and as the
common-space ideal scores are shifted with the estimates from new legislatures.38
Table 1 lists the legislatures and constitutional conventions that were used for this analysis,
with the sessions in which black suffrage was voted upon highlighted.
[Table 1 about here.]
While this data is more fine-grained than many alternatives, there are limits to what can be
explained at such an abstract level of analysis. For one, it does not provide much information on
how participants actually perceived issues, what they believed to be at stake in black suffrage for
instance. The past is a foreign country, and we cannot simply project our own understandings
of what mattered into a radically different context. Another data source is especially important
in this regard. Every published debate on black suffrage in state legislatures and constitutional
conventions was read and categorized according to the different rationales offered by the speaker
States, 1790-2002. ICPSR02896-v3. (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, 2010), doi:10.3886/ICPSR02896.v3.
37 In all cases but Pennsylvania we have limited the collection to date to the lower house rather than the state senate.
For Pennsylvania, more information is easily available on the senate than the house.
38 Changes to the ideal points will be of two types : (1) changes that result in a shift of the members within a
legislature but no change to their rank ordering; and (2) changes that change both the members’ score and their
rank order. The first type of change occurs from the linear mapping using the TurboADA technique, while the
second will occur as more legislators are pooled. The window around each legislature however, makes it less
likely that the rank order of estimates for the particular legislatures of interest here will change dramatically, and
at least for this analysis it is the rank order with which we are most concerned.
14
in defense of their position, for or against or some more nuanced position. Where published
debates were not available, local newspapers were searched for whether they reported any of the
substance of the debate on black suffrage. And the Historical Newspaper Archives and American
Imprints series were searched across the entire period for various terms associated with black
suffrage, with each relevant finding read and categorized as being supportive or opposed and
indicating the underlying rational, if one was provided.
4
4.1
A NALYSIS
PARTY P OSITION C HANGE
Over the course of the antebellum period the legal and political circumstances of free blacks
changed dramatically. The wake of the Revolution saw the rapid growth of a free black community, as some states abolished slavery, as some slaveholders unable to reconcile their positions
with a renewed evangelical Christianity or with the republican commitments began manumitting
in increasing numbers, and as tens of thousands of slaves who used the opportunity of war to
escape began settling in new communities.
Alongside these emancipatory trends, however, was a perhaps even more profound shift in
the economics of slavery, as the cotton gin and the increasing demand from British manufacturers
gave new life to an already well-established institution. The increasing demand for slaves placed
the free black communities at considerable risk, and as early as the late 1790s there were complaints brought to Congress against the kidnapping of free men and women and their transport
south. Over the course of the next several decades, free black communities would both grow
in size and become a central object of political debate, as an increasing number of states taking
action to prevent settlement, to deny access to public services, and to disfranchise black voters.
In this section I trace out how the positions on black suffrage mapped onto the structure of party
conflict, and how this transformed over the course of the antebellum period.
A central feature of the disfranchisement trend was its strong association with the expansion
of the right to vote along class line. Figure 1 shows the proportion of states with racial, prop-
15
erty, and pecuniary (property or taxpaying) qualifications for the right to vote. This pattern of
a sharp increase in the former and decline in the latter was not coincidental. Not only were the
conventions and legislatures that enfranchised ‘laboring class’ whites the same in many cases
that disfranchised free blacks, but by the third decade of the 19th century the state coalitions that
were most adamant that property qualifications be removed were also the ones most insistent on
a color bar.39
[Figure 1 about here.]
In part as a result of these patterns, many scholars have argued that the Federalists were consistently more egalitarian than Democratic-Republicans on issues of black citizenship. With only
a few exceptions—Delaware, Connecticut, North Carolina, and Tennessee, all states with extensive investments in slavery—all of the state-level disfranchisements were pursued by legislatures
controlled by Jeffersonians or Democrats. Certainly by the 1830s, the Democratic Party was
insisting that the United States was a racial republic exclusive for the white man, and there had
long been a pattern of race-baiting by Jeffersonians and Democrats. But the same is equally true
of Federalists, who sought to make gains in the south by reminding slaveholders of the radical
implications of the Democratic-Republicans’ “jacobinical” ideology.40
In fact, an analysis of state-level voting shows that the initial base of support came from
within the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican coalition. Before 1820, 48% of DemocraticRepublicans who voted on whether or not to restrict the franchise on racial grounds voted in
favor of black suffrage, against 31% of Federalists. When this is restricted to state legislators,
excluding the few votes on the issue in Congress, the proportions remain relatively the same at
47% and 32%, respectively.
39 Nor
was it simply the case that delegates sought to retain what had been in practice a racially restricted franchise
that was becoming less so as property qualifications were removed. The growth of the free black community
certainly prompted fears over a black electorate—not for its electoral but its social consequences, as the practice
of voting remained a very social activity. There is no indication from any of the conventions or legislatures where
a class expansion was debated that black disfranchisement was seen as a necessary correlate.
40 Slave revolts increased considerably during the 1790s, and the Federalists sought to impugn the societies and
strengthen their position in the south by emphasizing that “democracy and insurrection were blood brothers.” Eugene Link, Democratic-Republican Societies, 1790-1800 (New York: Columbia University, 1942), 184; Joseph
C. Carroll, Slave Insurrections in the United States, 1800-1865 (Courier Dover Publications, 2004), 41-45. Federalists worried that slaves were learning that “equality is the natural condition of man,” an argument “highly
detrimental to the welfare and policy of [slave] state[s].” Link, Democratic-Republican Societies, 185-86.
16
This is a simple measure of support, and one objection might be that party labels are not the
best measure of political positions in this period. There is considerable truth to this, as candidates
in local and state elections were frequently nominated by both parties on their at-large county
ballots. Figure 2, however, shows the distribution of members’ ideal points across four states at
the turn of the century. While we should be hesitant to treat these as scores as reflecting a latent
dimension of ‘conservatism’ or ‘radicalism,’ there was nonetheless a clear partisan structure to
voting in these assemblies at a very early date, one that was perhaps nearly as pronounced in
Congress. Party labels did matter, even at this early date.
[Figure 2 about here.]
When we examine how positions on black suffrage mapped onto this structure of conflict
over time, we can see a clear transformation by which the support for free black voting rights
went from being an issue whose support was concentrated with the Jeffersonian coalition to one
where its most committed supporters were Federalists and Whigs. Figure 3 traces the location of
the median supporter and opponent of black suffrage across the different assemblies, Congresses,
and constitutional conventions where the issue was debated and voted on.41 The early Republic
saw bipartisan support for disfranchisement, although as I discuss below this does not mean the
change was not highly controversial. But insofar as positions were organized along party lines,
there was a modest tilt among Democratic-Republicans to support an equal franchise. By the
1830s, the pattern of conservative support for black voting rights against Democratic opposition
that would stand for the next century was clearly established.
[Figure 3 about here.]
This same pattern of party change is not evident on other issues, such as positions on extending the right to vote on class lines. Figure 4 provides the same information as above, but traces the
location of the median support and opponent of liberal qualifications for voting on class grounds.
[Figure 4 about here.]
41 The
image does not change significantly when we look at the mean supporter. A lowess smoother was used,
although the pattern does not change with different specifications or when we drop the smoothing altogether.
17
Moreover, while positions on racial and class qualifications had been only weakly and positively related in the early republic, by the 1830s there was a clear inversion as those most supportive of extending voting rights on class lines simultaneously staked out the most aggressive
positions against black political and civil rights. Figure 5 compares two distinct sets of ideal
points from the Pennsylvania constitutional convention of 1837-38. The first were estimated by
subsetting only those roll call votes that concerned an expansion of the franchise on class lines,
such as votes concerning the removal of a taxpaying qualification, on a reduced qualification
when this failed, and on liberalizing the residence requirement. Legislator ideal points were then
estimated on this set of roll calls. The second set were estimated by doing the same on those votes
concerning black suffrage, including votes on whether to insert the word ‘white’ and, when this
eventually succeeded, to ensure some more limited measure of enfranchisement for free blacks.
The issues of suffrage expansion on class grounds and restriction on racial grounds were arranged
with a common latent dimension.
[Figure 5 about here.]
And the Democratic Party was now wholeheartedly committed to the ‘white republic,’ in
which democratic reforms were to be pursued for the benefit of white males alone. Between
1821 and 1860, only 14% of Democrats who voted on the issue would take a position in support
of black voting rights. By contrast 43% of voting Whigs supported black suffrage, as did 84% of
voting Republicans, and 87% of third party members. What explains the development of party
positions across this period? Why did the Democracy come to wholeheartedly endorse black
disfranchisement, despite the earlier base of opposition? And why did the Whigs, third parties,
and eventually the Republican party adopt a position in favor? In the next section I turn to an
aggregate analysis of legislator voting decisions, drawing on the data sources outlined above.
4.2
C ORRELATES OF L EGISLATOR P OSITIONS
Rather than pool the analysis across the entire antebellum period, we want to take into account
the changing historical context by segmenting the analysis temporally. A few possible cut-points
18
are suggested by the figures above and by what we know of the history of the antebellum period.
The New York State constitutional convention in 1821 seems to mark a break with the earlier
pattern of Jeffersonian support for black voting rights, one that coincides with the end of the ‘first
party system.’ The disappearance of the Whigs as a national factor by 1856 suggests another
possible cut-point. We proceed by looking at the correlates of legislator voting across these three
periods.
We are especially interested in whether the prospect of black voting induced the Jeffersonians
and later the Democrats to adopt a policy of disfranchisement, and vice versa for the Federalists
through to the Republicans. If this was a motivating factor, we should expect to see it in an
interaction between a legislator’s political party and the size of the free black population in their
constituency — free blacks were by all accounts disproportionately Federalist, Whig, and later
Republican. Jeffersonians and Democrats with sizeable free black populations had the most to
lose from their continued or potential enfranchisement, and so we should expect the coefficient
on free black community size to be negative and significant for Democrats and positive and
significant for Whigs and Federalists, who had the most to gain. Our expectation, then, is for
an increase in the free black population to correspond with a decrease in the probability that a
Democrat support voting rights, and an increase in the probability that a Federalist or Whig do
so.
Our main variables of interest for the early republic are party, the free black community as
a proportion of the constituency total, and—given that slavery continued to be an important part
of the northern political economy during this period—the captive population. Later periods have
the luxury of more data, but we limit the analysis to two additional factors that are frequently
cited as relevant: the growth of an urban working class—measured here by the percent of the
constituency employed in manufacturing—and the emergence of a politically active abolitionist
movement, measured by the proportion of votes received by the Liberty Party in 1844. We
perform probit models of legislator voting, with fixed effects for the year and state, and report the
results in Table 2. The purpose here is less to conclusively establish the cause than to establish a
framework for closer analysis.
19
[Table 2 about here.]
Contrary to the expectations suggested in the literature on black disfranchisement in this
period, the size of the free black community is not significant for the early republic, either on
its own or more importantly in interaction with the legislator’s party (Table 2 column (1)).42
Nor is party identification, suggesting that while the median defender of black suffrage was a
Jeffersonian disfranchisement had bipartisan support. What is a significant and negative predictor
of support for black voting rights, in every state, is the proportion of the population held in slavery.
Figures 6 and 7 show the marginal effect of increases in the slave population on the probability
that a legislator supports an equal suffrage, in all states and again in just the northern states.43 We
will return to the importance of slavery below.
[Figure 6 about here.]
[Figure 7 about here.]
The post-1821 period (column (2)) does show a clear effect of party, with Democrats being
much more likely to oppose black suffrage (relative to the baseline Whigs) and Third Parties
being much more likely to support it. The size of the free black population, however, is not
significant, either on its own or in interaction with the party variable. Figure 8 shows that while
the intercepts were different for each party, there was no discernible impact of increasing the size
of the free black population and certainly no decline in the probability of Democratic support.
[Figure 8 about here.]
The size of the manufacturing population, however, is of clear importance, with a pronounced
difference in how Whigs and Democrats represented the same constituencies.44 The greater
42 Klinghoffer
and Elkins, “‘The Petticoat Electors’ ”; Polgar, “Judge it Expedient”; James Truslow Adams, “Disfranchisement of Negroes in New England,” The American Historical Review, 30(1925): 543-47.
43 The northern slave population in 1815 ranged from 0 in nearly 50% of districts to a high of 32% in Kings County
New York. The mean was 3.2%.
44 Other researchers have found that throughout much of the nineteenth century Democrats and Republicans represented similar constituencies, at least in terms of manufacturing activity. The findings here, if generalizable
across different issue areas, suggest that they may have represented similar constituencies but represented them in
very different ways. See Jeffrey A. Jenkins, Eric Schickler, and Jamie L. Carson, “Constituency Cleavages and
Congressional Parties: Measuring Homogeneity and Polarization, 1857-1913,” Social Science History, 28(2004):
537-73.
20
the manufacturing population, the lower the probability that Democrats would support an equal
suffrage provision, with the exact opposite for the Whigs (Figure 9. In column (3) we subset the
data, including only northern states that debated black suffrage after the emergence of an explicit
abolitionist political party in 1840. Liberty Party support, either by presenting a challenge to
the Whigs, by signaling constituent support for abolition, or simply by reflecting more racially
egalitarian districts, had a clear relationship on support for black suffrage for the Whigs and other
Third Parties (Figure 10).
[Figure 9 about here.]
[Figure 10 about here.]
In columns (4) and (5), we perform a simple check on the relationship between the variables
of interest and the decisions of northern Whigs and the early Republican legislators. During the
periods 1844-1855 and 1856-1860, 54% and 84% of Whigs and Republicans in our sample voted
in support of equal suffrage. And yet there is little evidence that this was driven by legislators
looking at free blacks in their constituency and seeing the prospect of electoral gain. While the
Liberty Party vote share is significant, there is no effect of free black community size for Whigs
and a negative effect for Republicans: the Republicans who did vote against black voting rights
in this period came disproportionately from districts with larger free black populations, who they
would have almost certainly expected to vote for them. This pattern continues when we extend
the analysis to 1870 in column (6) (see Figure 11).
[Figure 11 about here.]
The analysis so far finds little support for the claim that candidates seeking electoral gain from
black votes—or from black disfranchisement—was responsible for the development of positions
on the suffrage in the antebellum period. But there are limits to what can be learned at this level of
analysis. The next section examines the historical context and contemporary discourse to assess
what the participants themselves believed to be at stake in the issue of black suffrage.
21
4.3
T HE S TAKES OF B LACK C ITIZENSHIP
The emphasis in accounts on black suffrage on the electoral calculations of party leaders leaves
us ill-equipped to answer the question of what contemporary participants—national party leaders,
state legislators, minor political activists, and the broad array of citizens who participated in party
and other forms of politics—believed to be at stake. Rather than being concerned primarily with
the threat or opportunity implied by black suffrage, this array of participants saw voting rights
for free blacks primarily through the frames of slavery and union. This was especially the case
with the activists who pushed black suffrage back onto the political agenda. But it was also the
case with the state politicians who had disfranchised free blacks in the first place.
Throughout the first few decades of the 19th century, the question of black citizenship posed
a recurring problem to national and state leaders. The Revolution had helped foster a deep reservoir of hostility to slavery, among the non-slaveholders at least, and both Christian and republican
discourse of the time reveals strong opposition to the broader question of racial distinctions. But
“slaveholders made their political claims through the Jeffersonian Republican party, not against
it,” and were a powerful and important policy demander within the coalition.45 And a recurring demand of the southern slaveholding class was that the rights of citizenship could not be
recognized as extending to free blacks. On the issue of black citizenship, then, the party would
repeatedly find itself torn between the demands of the southern elite who constituted the hub of
the party, and the northern activists who were needed to maintain a bisectional coalition.
When the New York Council of Revision—composed of future Democratic-Republicans—
vetoed an emancipation bill that would have disfranchised free and to-be-freed blacks, they argued that a racial distinction was offensive to republican principles.46 Similar rhetoric was used
during the constitutional convention in Ohio in 1802. The fight over black suffrage in the soonto-be-state was almost certainly not about the electoral consequences, given that there were only
400 free blacks in the entire territory. And yet the issue dominated the campaign and the de45 Padraig Griffin Riley, Northern Republicans and Southern Slavery:
Democracy in the Age of Jefferson, 1800-1819.
(Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2007), 31.
46 When a similar emancipation bill passed without such an amendment, another Council of Revision embraced it.
Alfred Billings Street, The Council of Revision of the State of New York, (William Gould: Albany, 1859), 268.
22
bates. Rather, the denial of political equality through a racial qualification was understood to
be part of a broader agenda to pave the way for the expansion of slavery in the state. There
had been a heated campaign for the convention, with opposition to slavery and support for black
civil and political rights interwoven in candidates’ and committees’ rhetoric. Hamilton county
Democratic-Republican committees “recommended that voters elect delegates who were willing
to grant suffrage to every male inhabitant of Ohio, including blacks.” Slavery and racial distinctions were denounced in terms of natural and political rights, as against “republican sentiment.”47
It was at the national level that the party divided most repeatedly over the question of black
citizenship, despite the entreaties of James Madison to “banish[] every other distinction than that
between enemies and friends to republic government.” During debates over whether free blacks
should be disfranchised from the elections to a Louisiana constitutional convention, northern
Democratic-Republicans contended that,
“we could not, upon republican principles, and the principles of the American act
of independence and of the constitution, exclude any portion of the free male inhabitants. . . , from the common privileges of free citizens—That the American act of
independence and constitution, guaranteed equal privileges, and a republican form of
government—That the latter would be in vain without the former—That if we were
about establishing a free government for these people, let it be free, and provide
(which would be the same in principle) that a freeman to be entitled to vote, shall be
40 years old, 6 feet high, or of a particular shade of color.”48
Most northern, and half of southern Democratic-Republicans, voted against most Federalists in
support of black voting rights, although they eventually receded when it became clear that this
might kill the possibility of Louisiana statehood in the near future.
It was the Missouri Crises that deeply split the party and revealed the extent to which the
issue of black citizenship could threaten both party and national unity. The first Missouri Crisis
is well-known; the second, which followed shortly after the first had been resolved, concerned a
clause in the proposed Missouri constitution that barred the entrance of free blacks into the new
state, the debate turning on the question of whether free blacks were American citizens within
47 Scioto
Gazette, September 11, 1802. Helen M. Thurston, “The 1802 Constitutional Convention and Status of the
Negro,” Ohio History , 81(1972):, 24, fn.21.
48 “From our Correspondent at Washington,” Commercial Advertiser, New-York, NY, February 16, 1811.
23
the meaning of the Privileges and Immunities clause of the U.S. Constitution.
Northern Democratic-Republicans pointed specifically to the right of free blacks to vote:
“there were free blacks and mulattoes who were citizens and enjoying all the rights of citizenship. . . . They are expressly recognized in our election laws. . . . We have admitted free blacks. . . to
the distinguishing characteristic of a citizen, the elective franchise.”49 They continued to press
this same theme, noting that “a person must be considered a citizen, who, by the fundamental
laws of a state, is vested with political rights” and then proceeding to list those states where
free blacks could vote, a fact which came as a surprise to many southern representatives who
had insisted that in no place were free blacks recognized as voters.50 They argued that the proposed constitution was “not republican. The very definition of republicanism is a perfect equality
among all the citizens,” and asked of the south legislators “what is the man in his country who is
neither a slave nor an alien? In mine he is a citizen.”51
More clearly than any other single event, the second Missouri Crisis revealed to both national
party leaders and ambitious political operatives the dangers posed by black citizenship to continued party unity. Southern slaveholders believed free blacks to be a dangerous example, and
articulated arguments that would later be picked up almost verbatim in Judge Taney’s Dred Scott
decision that free blacks were not party to the initial compact, and thus could not be citizens. “It
cannot be believed,” Taney would write, “that the large slaveholding States regarded [free blacks]
as. . . citizens, or would have consented to a Constitution” which compelled them to recognize
them as such.52
Missouri provides the crucial context for understanding the politics of black suffrage in the
New York State constitutional convention of 1821. During the crisis, leaders of the DemocraticRepublicans warned against approving resolutions demanding Missouri recognize the citizenship
of free blacks on the grounds that it would fan the flames of antislavery, “it would spread from
49 J.C.
Spencer, member of the General Assembly, “New-York Legislature, House of Assembly,” Republican Advocate, November 24, 1820.
50 “Mr. Mallary’s Speech on the Constitution of Missouri,” North Star, Danville, VT., February 8, 1821, 3.
51 Spencer, “New-York Legislature,” Republican Advocate, November 24, 1820. Smith, Annals of Congress, Senate,
December 8th, 1820, 16th Congress, 2nd Session, cc.51-77; Morrill, December 11th, 1820, 16th Congress, 2nd
Session, c.112
52 Scott v. Sandford (69 U.S. 393, 417).
24
state to state, until it produced the darling object—a civil war and disolution [sic] of the union.”53
The supporters of the resolutions, according to one Democratic-Republican, were “anxious to
record their names in favour of liberty, and they wish us to record our names in favour of slavery.”54 By vacillating before resolutions asserting the citizenship of free blacks, the party leaders
were accused of “approv[ing], and lend[ig] their aid and support to the most wicked perversions
of the Constitution, and the most cruel attempts of the South, to overreach and bind the North
to the ear of Southern domination.” The leadership had “uniformly thrown their weight into the
scale with the negro holders of the south, for the two fold purpose of sharing the smiles and
patronage of the general government, and obtaining its aid in building up their own party in this
state.”55
This rhetorical linking of black citizenship and antislavery would continue in the convention.
New York presents the strongest case for an electorally motivated disfranchisement. In 1811,
the state Democratic-Republicans proposed a voter identification bill that was limited to free
blacks, requiring them to obtain certificates proving their freedom.56 The votes in the state legislature were on straight party lines, with all Federalists opposing the voter identification and all
Democratic-Republicans in favor. A good indication of the importance of electoral competition
was the effort by the Federalists to delay implementation of the bill until after the next election.
But when the party leadership sought to disfranchise free blacks in the convention of 1821, they
failed despite having a massive majority in the convention.
Both contemporary and accounts published shortly after stressed that the measure was defeated in large part because it was seen as linked to slavery. Francis Preston Blair, a key Democratic journalist before his conversion to antislavery, explained that the measure passed because
“it was but a year before that the State had been agitated by the Missouri question, and advocates
of negro equality were not wanting” in the state who would reject the exclusion of free blacks.57
53 Root,
“New-York Legislature,” Republican Advocate, November 24, 1820.
“New-York Legislature,” Republican Advocate, November 24, 1820.
55 “Address to the Electors of the County of Genessee,” Republican Advocate, April 4, 1821, 2.
56 See Laws of the State of New York passed at the Session of the Legislature held in the year 1801,105-113.The laws
were justified on the charge that Federalist slaveholders were bringing their slaves to the polls.
57 “Mr. Van Buren and the Southern Federal Whigs—Universal Suffrage and Negro Suffrage,” Extra Globe, June 12,
1839, 86.
54 Ulshoeffer,
25
Federalist Peter Jay and others objected to disfranchisement by explicitly linking it to Missouri
and slavery. “No longer ago than last November,” he reminded the delegates, “the legislature of
this state almost unanimously resolved” to oppose any constitution that denied to any citizens the
privileges and immunities of the new state. “Now, sir, is not the right of suffrage a privileged?
And can you deny it to a citizen of Pennsylvania who comes here and complies with your laws,
merely because he is not six feet high, or he is of a dark complexion?” New York State, he argued,
“has taken high ground against slavery, and all its degrading consequences and accompaniments.
There are gentlemen on this floor, who, to their immortal honour, have defended the cause of
this oppressed people in congress, and I trust you will not desert now them.”58 So long as black
suffrage was seen as a consequence and accompaniment of slavery, there was a sizeable basis of
support for it.
The party leadership regrouped, however, and warned their constituents that black suffrage
did not concern slavery, but that it would be a provocation to the South. “We have always considered the question of black rights and privileges a very dangerous one in this country,” wrote
the principle organ of the party, “where a large portion of the union held slaves and could not get
rid of them.”59 And repeating the language of the southern representatives during the Missouri
Crisis, the party leaders asked whether “the blacks ever a party to the original compact in this
state? They were not. . . . This, we repeat it, is a dangerous question. Men have been found base
enough to agitate it, with a view to the division of the union. . . . There are men in our convention,
whose motives are unimpeachable; but there are some who would take delight in saying to the
southern states—‘Look here: we will make you uneasy in your dwellings, and revenge your political influence, by showing to your blacks that we can make them free, and give them the entire
rights and privileges of their masters.’ ”60 A revised measure that required free blacks to own
$250 freehold property to vote, and exempted those who did not from taxation, was ultimately
passed.
With the advent of a full-fledged abolition movement, southern demands that black citizen58 Jay,
Reports of the Proceedings and Debates of the Convention, 184.
Convention,” National Advocate, New York, NY., September 24, 1821.
60 “Reconsideration,” National Advocate, New York, NY., October 2, 1821.
59 “The
26
ship be curtailed increased. The legislatures of numerous southern states reacted with a thinly
veiled threat of war if abolitionist campaigning was not suppressed, and an extensive review
of black suffrage rights, equated with abolitionism, was part of a brief prepared by southern
Democrats against the northern Whigs, where it was treated as a deliberate provocation: “you
cannot fail to have perceived the striking fact, that wherever in the North the Whigs have the
ascendency, there Abolition is strongest, but wherever the Democrats govern, there the rights of
the South, and the compromises of the Constitution are sacredly regarded.”61 The intense policy demander that was the southern slaveholding elite was intensifying its demands in response
to abolitionist campaigns, most dramatically its mailing, national, and state-level petition campaigns.
In every convention after 1821, the claim that black suffrage would mean disunion would
be among the most important rationales offered by Democrats for disfranchisement. In debates
on black suffrage in Pennsylvania in 1838, a Democratic delegate argued that the constitution
mandated a measure of black disfranchisement as a corollary to its protection of slavery: “[W]e
are under a most solemn compact not to interfere in the domestic affairs of the people of the
south—not to take any measure to release the blacks from bondage. As long as the constitution
of the United States remained in force, we were bound rather to guard the rights of the south,
than to do any thing to impair them.”62 He is not talking about slavery in the South, but about
black voting rights in Pennsylvania; his argument is that these are fundamentally linked. Another
delegate asked whether “the right of the negroes to vote was to be put in the scale against the
union of these states,” while another claimed black suffrage would “violate a sacred pledge given
by this state to her sister states, at the adoption of the constitution of the United States; and which,
while it is a triumph, and a sanction given to the anti-American doctrines of the abolitionists, may
result finally in the overthrow of the union.”63
This theme is raised again in New York in 1846 by a delegate who “believed it would be
61 C.C.
Clay et al., “Southern Address,” Extra Globe, August 26, 1840, 170; See “Communication by the Governor,”
in Journals of the Senate and House of Commons of the General Assembly of the State of North Carolina, Session
of 1835 (Raleigh: Philo White, 1836), 102.
62 Meredith, in John Agg, Proceedings and Debates of the Convention of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (Packer,
Barrett, and Parks: Harrisburg, 1838), vol.9, p.353
63 Brown, Proceedings (1838), vol.9, p.392; Sturdevant, Proceedings, vol.9, 392
27
against the manifest spirit of the Federal Constitution, to privilege the negro with any direct voice
in our political affairs, and that it would be dangerous to our welfare, and to the union of the
States.”64 In Wisconsin in the 1840s, party leader Moses Strong argued against black suffrage and
insisted that the territory not send a message to the South “that Wisconsin is favorably disposed
to the abolition movement.”65 When Republican judges began registering free blacks in Ohio,
on the grounds that they were trying to apply a vague standard of ‘white,’ an enforcement bill
against them was described by supporters as “a Union-saving law.”66
The party leadership, national and state, actively involved sought to ensure that disfranchisement would be secured and the policy demands of southern coalition partners realized. The
Pennsylvania Senator, leading party figure, and future president James Buchanan was sending
dispatches to the legislature urging them to suppress abolitionism and linking this to the concurrent debates over the suffrage in the convention.67 A close associate of John Calhoun went to
the state to organize a petition campaign against amalgamation, and with local party leaders gave
reports to Buchanan and Roger Taney.
The Democratic Party actively enforced party discipline on the issue of black suffrage. Future
Liberty Party vice-presidential candidate Thomas Earle was kicked out of the Democratic Party
for his strong defense of black suffrage in the Pennsylvania convention of 1838. The same fate
met Thomas Morris, a radical Jacksonian Democrat from Ohio, who had been expelled from
the party and defeated in his bid to remain in the Senate on account of his anti-slavery and
pro-suffrage position. A Wisconsin coalition of Democrats and Whigs pledged to “universal
suffrage without invidious distinctions on account of religion, birth, or color” foundered when
the Democrats withdrew, having been “warned they would be drummed out of the party if they
persisted in their mutiny.”68 When a member of a committee that reported a disfranchising article
in the 1846 convention was made a revenue official in New York, the Whig Tribune asked “had
64 Cornell,
Report. . . New York 1846, 1047
J. McManus, Political Abolitionism in Wisconsin, 1840-1861 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press,
1998), 21.
66 “Judge Ranney Cornered Again,” Sandusky Register, October 6, 1859
67 Nicholas Wood, “‘A Sacrifice on the Altar of Slavery’: Doughface Politics and Black Disenfranchisement in
Pennsylvania, 1837âĂŞ1838,” Journal of the Early Republic, 31(2011): 86-7.
68 McManus, Political Abolitionism in Wisconsin, 25.
65 Michael
28
he left out the word ‘white,’. . . would he have gotten that berth from a President who was against
Mexico to restore negro slavery where it had been abolished?”69
The southern legislatures and party elite who insisted on disfranchisement—and an array of
other policies meant to buttress slavery including the invasion of Mexico—were a crucial group
in the national coalition, and party leaders were especially responsive to them, and ambitious
politicians sought to curry their favor. In the process, it is quite likely that they intensified existing commitments to racial hierarchy among their northern and southern constituents, further
consolidating opposition among free blacks. That there was an electoral incentive, however, does
not mean that this was the motivating factor.
4.4
A BOLITIONISM AND R ACIAL D ISTINCTIONS
While Democrats stressed the importance of placing the Union above all other concerns, the abolitionist movement reinvigorated the rhetorical claim that racial distinctions were the “degrading
consequence and accompaniment” of slavery. By denying an equal suffrage, northern state constitutions “involve[] the principle of chattel slavery. For by the same assumption of power by
which the constitution takes away the inalienable rights of the colored man to participate in the
formation of a government to protect his inalienable rights, it could forbid him the right of participating in the benefits of the school fund, the right of marrying anyone lighter in complexion than
himself, to be out after eight o’clock, to be eligible to any of the learned professions, to own land,
to own himself.”70 The disfranchisements of the previous 60 years were attributed to the growing
slave power, which had “changed the whole policy of the Government from an enfranchising to
an enslavery, from a propagandism of free labor to a propagandism of slavery.’ ”71 The attack on
black disfranchisement, along with other ‘black laws’ in northern states, was intended to upend
the ideological and cultural infrastructure necessary for slavery. As Rufus King, the Wisconsin
abolitionist wrote, “there is no more effectual mode of upholding slavery than for men in the free
69 New
York Weekly Tribune, October 10, 1846; see Emil Olbrich, The Development of Sentiment on Negro Suffrage
to 1860 (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1912), 76.
70 “New Constitution, Colored Suffrage,” the Waukesha American Freeman, February 23, 1848.
71 John Mercer Langston, address to state legislature, January 21, 1857. Quoted in William Cheek, John Mercer
Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829-65 (University of Illinois Press, 1996), 323.
29
states to treat blacks as an inferior race.”72
And often to the chagrin of Whig party leaders, the abolitionists began organizing petition,
mailing, and educational campaigns against not only slavery but against this infrastructure of
white supremacy. While not firmly within the Whig party, abolitionists placed pressure on Whig
politicians both through direct appeals and by the threat of organizing third parties that would
draw disproportionately from Whig supporters. And they achieved remarkable success, especially for a party that did have a strong southern wing. While the party never adopted black
suffrage as its national policy, as the Republican Party would, a sizeable bloc of northern Whig
legislators had endorsed black voting rights as early as the 1840s.
Beginning in the 1830s, abolitionists began sending thousands of petitions to northern legislatures across the country. While the petition campaign was uneven, black suffrage was often
the single most petitioned issue for a legislative session. The campaign sent a clear signal to ambitious politicians that there was a significant constituency for a pro-suffrage stance. Similarly,
the emergence of the Liberty Party in the early 1840s indicated that there was a segment of the
electorate willing to go much further in opposition to slavery than anything that had heretofore
been attempted politically. While the Liberty Party did not ever poll high enough to be a viable
contender for government, it did threaten to make inroads with a Whig constituency. And in
order to maintain their coalitional bases many Whig politicians sought to shore up support by
embracing black suffrage, which was a central demand of the Liberty Party campaigns.
Some state party leaders did embrace black
73
And they were widely, and rightly, accused
of doing so in order to ensure that the growing abolitionist movement would be a Whig constituency.74 But more common was a pattern in which party leaders were highly cautious and
usually opposed to any strong commitment of the party on the issue. And they had good reason.
72 McManus,
Political Abolitionism, 23.
accused the Governor of dangerously seeking to appeal to the abolition movement: “we must say
it presents a strange contrast to the Governor’s former acts and opinions, and renders him liable to the charge
of playing the demagogue most unscrupulously to secure to himself and his party, hereafter, the votes of the
abolitionists.” “Governor’s Message,” Norwich Aurora, Norwich CT., May 8, 1844.
74 “[Whigs] have always opposed a convention, and all they want of it now is to use it as a sort of scoop net to draw
abolitionism and anti-rentism, and all the other isms of the day into their boat. . . . The echo of that former executive
has been heard on this floor, talking turkey to the abolitionists on the subject of negro suffrage.” “A Convention,
Speech of the Hon. G.D. Beers,” Albany Argus, May 20, 1845.
73 Democrats
30
Whenever abolitionists succeeded in getting a constitutional amendment put before the people,
it was roundly rejected. Table 3 lists the results for the ante- and post-bellum referenda on black
suffrage.75 Only once before the Civil War did it achieve a majority, in Wisconsin in 1849, but
this was set aside for low turnout.
[Table 3 about here.]
Horace Greeley, who had helped push the Whigs in New York on black suffrage in 1846,
continued to support it a decade later but believed that it was a political disaster: “We did what we
could for Equal Suffrage in 1846 with feeble hopes of success, but with a perfect consciousness
that we incurred general obloquy and injured our political associates by doing so.”76 And yet as
noted by Phyllis Field, “from 1855 to 1860 proposals to change the [New York] constitution’s
black suffrage provision were introduced in every legislature—and actually passed both houses
in three different sessions. By 1860 a proposal to amend the state constitution was [again] on
the ballot. Only a sustained, dedicated effort could have achieved such a result. . . . Of dozens of
amendments proposed in the 1846-1860 period, only one other made it [through the byzantine
requirements] to the balloting stage.”77
Across northern states, the same dynamic was evident: key constituencies were pressing for
it, but the leadership was cautious about being associated with the measure given its unpopularity.
The pattern in Connecticut during the 1840s and 1850s highlights this basic tension. In order to
be approved, an amendment had to be passed in two consecutive legislatures, and then approved
in a popular referendum. On several occasions when the amendment came up for the second
time, final legislative passage before the referendum, moderate Whigs switched their votes and
let the measure die. And yet activists would once again organize a petition campaign, and state
75 County
and town level information has not been compiled on all of the state referenda. For Wisconsin and Connecticut, these were compiled using state records. For New York and Iowa, see Lee Benson and Joel Silbey,
Electoral and Demographic Data for New York, 1830-1875, Field Politics of Race, and Robert R. Dykstra, White
Attitudes Toweard Black Civil Equality in the Nineteenth Century: Iowa’s Equal Rights Referenda of 1857, 1868,
and 1880. (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa, Department of History, 2005; Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university
Consortium for Political and Social Research, 2005). doi:10.3886/ICPSR04284
76 Phyllis F. Field, The Politics of Race in New York: The Struggle for Black Suffrage in the Civil War Era (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1982), 80.
77 Field, Politics of Race, 80-1.
31
legislators would introduce an amendment the following year. They continued to push even as
they continued to lose, either in the legislature or more assuredly in the referendum.
With the emergence of the Republican Party in the 1850s, even in Ohio where conservatives
wrested control of the party from more radically inclined legislators, a large segment, if not a
majority in each state, of party legislators had come out in favor. Cadwell, a member of the
fusion legislature in Ohio thanked God “that the time has come in Ohio when it is no longer a
disgrace to avow the sentiment that the negro is the white man’s equal, and entitled to the same
political and social privileges.” The Democratic newspapers printed his statement with glee,
reminding their readers that “Cadwell is one of the lights of the Ohio State Journal and its party.
Think of that when these Black Republicans deny that they mean favor of negro voting and negro
equality socially and politicallyâòe. The Republican organization [meaning the leadership] may
rebel against it, but if they do they are already doomed and damned.”78 While admittedly a biased
source, there was considerable truth in the Democratic Daily Ohio Statesman’s observation that
sooner or later “the Republican party must adopt negro voting as the leading article in its creed or
else fall to pieces. The petitions which are presented to the Legislature in favor of this measure,
are in number frequent, and imperative in tone.”79
A Republican organizer addressing a crowd after a speech by Abraham Lincoln opined that
“one of three gentlemen will be our standard bearer: William H. Seward, Salmon Chase, or the
gallant son of Kentucky, who was reared in Illinois, and whom you have heard tonight.”80 Seward
and Chase were desired by the abolitionists, and by the more radically inclined of the Republican
coalition, precisely because of their longstanding commitments on black equality. Chase was
praised for his refusal to appeal to a broader white audience through racist denigrations of blacks,
as many Republicans were doing during the party’s growth. Abolitionist William Henry Brisbane
supported Chase because he believed he differed from other Republicans in being “too elevated to
use the poor negro for a mere stepping stone to office”: “It is better to be defeated with Chase. . . as
78 “Negro
Voting, Negro Equality,” Daily Ohio Statesman, February 9, 1857.
Voting,” Daily Ohio Statesman, October 11, 1856.
80 Thomas G. Mitchell, Antislavery Politics in Antebellum and Civil War America (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers), 142.
79 “Negro
32
our standard bearer, than to succeed in the election of one who bears no standard at all.”81
5
C ONCLUSION
Drawing on the data sources outlined above leads one to a different set of conclusions than
are standard in the literature. Rather than opposition to black suffrage having always been an
issue associated with the Democratic and Jeffersonian parties, we are able to see a pronounced
change in how this issue mapped onto party conflict. The adoption of black disfranchisement
by Democrats cannot be explained solely by reference to state-level electoral considerations, but
rather requires an attention to what they believed to be at stake in the broader question of black
citizenship. The same is true for the Republican Party, a large segment—if not a majority—of
which adopted support for black suffrage well before the urgency of the post-war period. Much
of the antebellum activity on black suffrage occurred in states where the number of free blacks
in the state was so small as to be electorally insignificant. Rather than primarily an electorally
motivated effort to secure or to insulate the party from black voters, leaders in both parties were
responding to the insistent demands of well-organized or pivotal groups within their coalitions.
The implications for the study of American political development are two-fold. Accounts
of voting politics tend to echo Schattschneider’s claim that “the newly enfranchised had about
as much to do with the extension of the suffrage as the consuming public has had to do with
the expanding market for toothpaste. The parties, assisted by some excited minorities, were the
entrepreneurs, took the initiative, and got the law of the franchise liberalized.” But voting rights
have always been implicated in profoundly held beliefs about the character—and boundaries—of
the political community, and parties that are responsive to the ideological and cultural commitments of their coalitions might have seek to alter voting qualifications that is only poorly ex81 To be clear,
Brisbane is not attacking Republicans for adopting black suffrage for electoral reasons. He is attacking
those Republicans who have rejected black suffrage and were insisting the party was a white man’s party. James
D. Bilota, Race and the Rise of the Republican Party (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), 341. Brisbane was a Baptist
minister from South Carolina, who had been convinced of the immorality of slavery in part by the mailing campaign of the abolitionists in the 1830s. He settled in Wisconsin, where he manumitted his slaves. William Henry
Brisbane, Dr. Brisbane’s Address, delivered at the Anti-Slavery convention assembled in Hamilton, Ohio, July 3rd
1840, to which is added the constitution of the Butler County Anti-Slavery Society (Cincinnati, OH, 1840); and
The Constitution of the United States versus Slavery (Philadelphia: Office of the American Citizen, 1846).
33
plained by electoral calculation. Schattschneider’s “excited minorities” have played a far greater
role than is usually appreciated, pushing reluctant and often status quo oriented parties toward
fundamental change.
The second implication concerns the common focus of analysis in American political development—
and American politics generally—on national level processes. Such a focus is surely warranted,
but it does create the danger of failing to recognize how any given process unfolds until it percolates to the national level. In the case of black suffrage in the 19th century, it might leave
researchers tuning-in in 1868, a full 30 years after a sustained effort to remove racial distinctions
in law had begun. An exclusive focus on the national level creates the possibility of biased understandings of the determinants of political development, inaccurate cataloguing of the issues on
the political agenda, or even fundamental misconceptions of the character of public policy, constitutionalism, and rights traditions.82 Recent work is expanding our ability to integrate national
and state level analyses, and hopefully this project will contribute to that end.
82 Emily
Zackin, Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).
34
Figure 1: Antebellum Changes in Voting Qualifications, Race and Class
35
Figure 2: Distribution of Legislator Ideal Points in 1800, Four State Legislatures
36
Figure 3: Party Position Change on Black Suffrage
37
Figure 4: Party Position Change on Class Suffrage
38
Figure 5: The Relationship Between Class and Racial Democracy
39
Figure 6: Predicted Marginal Effect of Party and Slavery, 1785-1821
40
Figure 7: Predicted Marginal Effect of Party and Slavery in the North, 1785-1821
41
Figure 8: Predicted Marginal Effect of Free Black Community, 1822-1856
42
Figure 9: Predicted Marginal Effect of Manufacturing Employment, 1822-1856
43
Figure 10: Predicted Marginal Effect of Liberty Party Vote, 1844-1856
44
Figure 11: Predicted Marginal Effect of Free Black Community on Republican Voting in the
North, 1856-70
45
Table 1: S TATE DATA D ESCRIPTIONS
State
Assemblies that voted Other Assemblies
on Black Suffrage
in Pooled Matrix
New York
1785, 1821, 1846,
1786-1801, 1811-1819, 1838,
Conv. of 1846,
1839, 1841, 1843, 1844, 1856
1859, 1860
Pennsylvania
Conv. of 1837-38
House: 1828-29, 1831-32;
Senate: 1833, 1838-39, 1840
Ohio
Conv. of 1802
1803, 1804, 1807, 1808, 1809,
Conv. of 1850-51
1810, 1845, 1847-48, 1848-49,
Wisconsin
Terr. Ass of 1846,
1840-41, 1842, 1843, 1848
Conv. of 1846,
Conv. of 1848, 1849
Connecticut
1838, 1844, 1846,
1837, 1839, 1840, 1842, 1843,
1855, 1858
1845, 1847, 1848, 1849, 1850,
1851, 1852, 1853, 1854, 1859
New Jersey
1802, 1807, 1850
1800, 1801, 1803, 1806, 1808,
1809, 1811, 1845, 1846, 1847,
1848, 1851.
Maryland
1801
1796, 1797, 1798, 1799, 1801,
1802, 1803, 1804, 1805.
North Carolina Conv. of 1835
1828, 1829, 1830, 1831, 1832,
1833, 1834, 1836, 1838, 1840.
Tennessee
Conv. of 1834
1831, 1833, 1837-38, 1843-44.
Total Number of Individual Votes on Black Suffrage:
Roll Calls
Bridges
6,785
92
1,123
38
1,959
22
951
6
409
27
2,284
23
567
9
709
18
1,281
11
3,777
The basic table arrangement is adapted from Shor, Berry, McCarty, “A Bridge to Somewhere,” 424. Votes on black
suffrage were defined as those on inserting or deleting the word ‘white’ from the voter qualifications. In the later
antebellum period, a strategy of party managers was to support putting the question to a referendum. These are included,
although the results do not change considerably if they are not. The justification is that these were widely seen as endorsing
a position, and in many cases (e.g., Connecticut) they were explicitly recommending a change to the constitution, with the
referendum a necessary means for changing the constitution outside a convention.
46
47
N
R-Squared
Fixed Effects
Dem *
% Free Black
Dem *
% Empl. Manuf.
Dem *
% Lib. Vote
GOP *
% Free Black
GOP *
% Empl. Manuf
Constant
Liberty Vote
% Empl. Manuf.
% Enslaved
% Free Black
Republican
Third Party
Democratic
VARIABLES
0.05
(0.05)
-0.08***
(0.02)
0.46
(0.39)
1,087
0.2884
State
Year
-0.53
(0.46)
395
0.1030
State
Year
0.09
(0.04)
-0.04***
(0.01)
0.04***
(0.01)
C OLUMN (2)
1822-56
-0.52***
(0.18)
1.68***
(0.33)
0.02
(0.05)
0.03
(0.04)
-0.019**
(0.009)
C OLUMN (1)
1785-1821
0.09
(0.22)
-0.09
(0.77)
-1.05***
(0.28)
615
0.4113
State
Year
0.03
(0.02)
0.12***
(0.02)
0.001
(0.09)
-0.06*
(0.03)
-0.08**
(0.03)
0.03
(0.06)
C OLUMN (3)
1844-56 (North)
-0.58*
(0.34)
1.33**
(0.62)
-1.54***
(0.34)
239
0.3551
State
Year
0.05***
(0.03)
0.15***
(0.03)
0.07
(0.06)
C OLUMN (4)
1844-56 (Whigs)
1.14***
(0.46)
108
0.1499
State
Year
0.0001
(0.02)
0.05*
(0.02)
-0.28***
(0.11)
C OLUMN (5)
1856-60 (GOP)
Table 2: P ROBIT OF L EGISLATOR VOTE : S UPPORT FOR B LACK S UFFRAGE
-0.21**
(0.11)
0.04**
(0.02)
-0.35
(0.28)
557
0.3573
State
Year
-0.04**
(0.02)
1.76***
(0.27)
-0.04
(0.09)
C OLUMN (6)
1856-70 (North)
Table 3: R ESULTS IN B LACK S UFFRAGE R EFERENDA
States
New York (1846)
New York (1860)
Connecticut (1847)
Michigan (1850)
Wisconsin (1846)
Wisconsin (1849)
Iowa (1857)
Colorado Terr. (1865)
Connecticut (1865)
Wisconsin (1865)
Minnesota (1865)
Minnesota (1867)
Minnesota (1868)
Kansas (1867)
Ohio (1867)
Missouri (1868)
Iowa (1868)
New York (1869)
For Black Suffrage
A NTEBELLUM
25.2%
40.6%
21.5%
28.6%
33.1%
56.4%
14.7%
P OSTBELLUM
10.6%
44.6%
46.0%
45.2%
48.8%
56.8%
34.9%
45.9%
42.7%
56.5%
46.9%
Against Black Suffrage
74.87%
59.4%
78.5%
71.4%
66.9%
43.6%
85.3%
89.4%
55.4%
54.0%
54.8%
51.2%
43.2%
65.1%
54.1%
57.3%
43.5%
53.1%
For postbellum results see Field, Politics of Race, 199. The Wisconsin referendum of 1849 had a
very low turnout, and was invalidated for not having a majority of the votes cast in the broader election.
The state supreme court would later decide that the measure had passed, after a subsequent referendum
in 1865 failed.
48