The Look within: Property, Capacity, and Suffrage in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

Wishing to see the trajectory of American history as progressive and democratic, historians have ignored the complexities of suffrage expansion in the nineteenth century - especially the interrelation of exclusion and inclusion. This Note looks at the trajectory of suffrage reform from the late eighteenth century to the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment and argues that reformers were obsessed with the inner qualities of persons. Whereas the eighteenth century had located a person's capacity for political participation externally (in material things, such as property), the nineteenth century found these qualities internally (in innate and heritable traits, such as intelligence). Both enfranchisement and disenfranchisement reflected this change of perspective, this look within.

Keywords: suffrage, property, capacity, enfranchisement, disenfranchisement, voting, state constitutions