History of the United States I / Unit 10 USH1 1363 review, 2 to 3 minutes
The Franchise, Expanded and Contracted
The idea
The anchor states the exchange without softening it. Race replaced property qualifications as the criterion for voting rights, and American democracy had a decidedly racist orientation, a White majority limiting the rights of Black minorities. New Jersey explicitly restricted the vote to White men only. Connecticut passed a law in eighteen fourteen taking the vote away from free Black men. New York, in the same constitution that removed property tests for White men, effectively disenfranchised free Black men in eighteen twenty-two by requiring men of colour to hold property worth over two hundred fifty dollars. Both witnesses confirm and extend this. At the Revolution only two states explicitly limited Black voting rights, and by eighteen thirty-nine almost all did. Pennsylvania prohibited Black voting completely in eighteen thirty-eight. By eighteen fifty-eight free Black men could vote in only four states.
In practice
New Jersey rescinding the vote for propertied unmarried women at the very moment it extended suffrage to all adult white men, which one witness records in a single sentence.
Where people slip
Hold both halves together, because they are one movement and not two. The statutes that made White manhood suffrage universal are the same statutes that made race the qualifying test, and in New Jersey the same act that enfranchised every White man disenfranchised the women who had voted. A course that teaches Jacksonian democracy as expansion is describing what happened to White men. A course that teaches it as contraction is describing what happened to everyone else. The anchor states the trade explicitly, so neither reading requires a witness to license it, and the exam can ask for either. By eighteen forty only Louisiana, Rhode Island and Virginia still kept property tests for White men at all.
Your place on the trail
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