and personal initiative. Every man who was able and willing to toil could be the master of his destiny. The resulting popular self-confidence was the dominant fact in the development of the political institutions of the states. The political fruit, so to speak, of the frontier was manhood suffrage and the general democratization of the forms of state government.

MANHOOD SUFFRAGE

The right to vote, or the right of suffrage, is conferred by the state, being usually prescribed in the state constitution, subject to the provision of the Federal Constitution that the right of citizens to vote shall not be denied or abridged on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. This clause of the Federal Constitution seems to imply that the suffrage is one of the normal rights of citizenship, but the states have not generally recognized it as such. In the beginning, as has been shown, the original states conferred the suffrage on grounds of political expediency, jealously withholding it from those deemed incapable of exercising the franchise to the common advantage. This attitude was quaintly expressed in the constitution of Vermont (1777), which stipulated that every freeman might vote "who has a sufficient interest in the community." The evidence of sufficient interest chiefly required in the original states was the possession of a certain amount of property. Jefferson, writing shortly after the Revolution, declared that these requirements were too severe, pointing out that in Virginia they disfranchised the majority of the able-bodied men in the state. Thus dissatisfaction with the qualifications for the suffrage existed at the very beginning of the constitutional history of the states, and dissatisfaction of one sort or another has persisted until the present.

There have been two conflicting tendencies in the development of the qualifications for the suffrage. On the one hand, the belief in the natural nobility of man, or in equal rights, as the phrase ran, leads easily to the conviction that the right to vote should be included among those to which men are by nature entitled. If all men are "equal," particularly if they have an equal right to the pursuit of happiness, and if the electoral franchise is an important means of engaging in such a pursuit, then all men

should have an equal right to vote. The theory of natural rights was supported by more practical considerations, such as the injustice of withholding the vote from landless and even moneyless artisans and craftsmen who nevertheless help support the government by the payment of taxes, directly or indirectly, and defend it by bearing arms. These considerations were reënforced by the conditions of life in most parts of the Union, especially upon the Western frontier. Social democracy on the frontier inevitably gave rise to political democracy, and the same result was facilitated in the older parts of the Union by the competition of parties for popular support. Before the close of the eighteenth century Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee came into the Union with the principle of manhood suffrage practically established, if not explicitly recognized, in their constitutions. The states of the old Northwest and Southwest, entering the Union early in the nineteenth century, often included in their electorates not only all adult white male citizens, native and naturalized, but also aliens, even those who had not declared their intention to become naturalized. The original states were slower to adopt the principle of manhood suffrage, and less inclined to grant the franchise to foreign-born males who had not been admitted to citizenship. Massachusetts, however, extended the suffrage to all poll-taxpaying citizens in 1820; New York broadened the franchise in 1821 and established manhood suffrage for white male citizens in 1826; Virginia did likewise in 1830 and 1850, respectively. Rhode Island was the only state in which resistance to the extension of the suffrage led to violence. There, after the suppression of Dorr's rebellion, the new constitution of 1842 put an end to property qualifications in the election of state officers. With the triumph of the advocates of equal suffrage for adult male citizens of the white race the principle of manhood suffrage, so-called, was regarded as established in the American states.

The negro was not brought within the scope of the principle of manhood suffrage without a more serious struggle. Originally duly qualified negroes were permitted to vote in five of the thirteen states, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina. Subsequently New York, when abolishing the property qualifications for the franchise, provided that the new qualifications should apply to the white

race only, leaving the property qualifications in effect for negroes, and New Jersey and North Carolina deprived the negroes of their votes altogether.1 The only new states which granted the franchise in any form to negroes were Vermont, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Maine, and two of these presently took the vote away again. None of the old states except Rhode Island extended the vote to the negro until after the close of the Civil War. Indeed there was no demand for negro suffrage, and manhood suffrage became universally restricted to whites, outside of New England. In 1867, after the issue of negro suffrage had been raised in connection with the reconstruction of the southern states, the people of Minnesota refused by a close vote to strike the word "white" from the article of the constitution relating to the suffrage, and in the following year the people of New York refused to remove the property qualifications from colored voters. The word "white" still remains in the constitutions of four states, Kansas, Maryland, Ohio, and Oregon, a relic of the ante-bellum discrimination against the negro with respect to the suffrage, and even as lately as 1912 the people of Ohio refused to strike the word out. In 1870, however, equal suffrage for negroes was established throughout the United States by the adoption of the fifteenth amendment to the Federal Constitution.

REACTION AGAINST MANHOOD SUFFRAGE

Despite the extension of the franchise to negroes, the principle of manhood suffrage has never completely triumphed in the United States. It did not triumph in 1870, as is shown not only by the debate in Congress at the time of the submission of the fifteenth amendment to the states, but also by the wording of the amendment itself. There has always been another principle tending to produce the exclusion of certain classes from the franchise. This is the principle of fitness. It is argued that the electoral franchise is not one of the natural rights asserted by the Fathers, but that on the contrary, as has been shown, it was originally conceived as a privilege to be conferred only on those capable of putting it to good use. The vote was intended to be

1 North Carolina deprived the free negro of the vote in 1835, New Jersey in 1844. Kentucky in 1799, Tennessee in 1834.

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used, not primarily or mainly to foster the interests of the particular class entrusted therewith, but to protect the rights and promote the welfare of the whole people. No person therefore may claim a "right" to vote, unless he can show that his claim is founded upon considerations pertaining to the general welfare rather than to his own private advantage. The test of fitness for the suffrage, it is urged, is the ability of the individual to voice public opinion, or some shade of opinion needful to bring the opinion of the electorate into harmony with public opinion, rather than a merely personal or private opinion. In the practice of the American states, to be sure, the adult male came to be generally deemed the fittest person to represent the interests of other classes of the people and to voice the opinion of the people as a whole, but this rule of policy, it is contended by the opponents of the doctrine of the natural right to vote, should not be twisted into a principle of universal and indiscriminate application, regardless of the different degrees of fitness possessed by the different classes of adult males.

The chief cause of difficulty in the application of the doctrine of manhood suffrage has been the negro, and the purpose of the white man, particularly in the South, to exclude the colored man from a voice in government has been expressed in the doctrine of the superior fitness of the white race. Negro suffrage was imposed upon eleven states of the South by the reconstruction act of March 3, 1867, and was maintained there with ever-diminishing effectiveness by force of arms. By the time of the final withdrawal of the federal troops from the southern states in 1877, negro suffrage, where it threatened the political supremacy of the white race, had been generally suppressed by moral suasion, fraud, intimidation, or violence. These methods, however, were unsatisfactory. Beginning in Mississippi in 1890, the white people of the South have adopted the policy of disfranchising the negroes by means of constitutional restrictions upon the suffrage, nominally applying to all citizens alike, but actually discriminating against the negro.

In Mississippi the method was as follows. The requirement of residence was raised to two years in the state and one in the election district; disqualification for crime was extended to the following offenses, bribery, burglary, theft, arson, obtaining money or

goods under false pretenses, perjury, forgery, embezzlement, and bigamy; the payment of all taxes was made a prerequisite to the vote, and a uniform poll-tax of two dollars was established, with the proviso that the board of supervisors of any county might increase it to three dollars and that no criminal proceedings to enforce payment should be allowed.1 In addition the prospective voter is required to be able to read any section of the constitution or give a reasonable explanation of the same when read to him, and in general to possess a satisfactory understanding of the duties of citizenship. Since the judges of the reasonableness of the required explanations and of the satisfactoriness of the understanding are the white election officers, even the negro who fulfills all the other requirements for the suffrage cannot hope to qualify against the wishes of the whites.

The chief difficulty in the elimination of the negro vote has been to disfranchise the negro without at the same time either disfranchising whites or violating the provision of the fifteenth amendment of the Federal Constitution forbidding racial discrimination. In Mississippi this is evidently intended to be accomplished by avoiding discrimination in the letter of the law and seeking it in the enforcement. Other southern states have sought to escape the dangers of that policy by the invention of the so-called "grandfather" clause. Thus, in Alabama by the constitution of 1901 it was provided that after January 1, 1903,

1 This policy is frankly explained in the following passage from a recent opinion of the Attorney-General of Mississippi: "The ostensible purpose in framing this section of the constitution (i.e., sect. 241, relating to the suffrage) was to disfranchise as many negroes as possible, and the injunctions delivered by the section, when well unravelled, make it apparent that the negro as a race would come more clearly within its requirements than any other. In the first place the negro is known in our midst as a nomadic tribe, and as a rule on account of their shiftlessness none of them will hardly reside in an election precinct more than a year, but drift from plantation to plantation and landlord to landlord; and in that way very few, if any, on account of residence as required by this section are qualified voters. Very few, if any, in Mississippi have any taxes except a poll, and with no thought of government and in many instances with no disposition as well as inability to pay this tax, they are as a rule delinquents and are for that reason disqualified. The crimes of burglary, bribery, theft, arson, obtaining money or goods under false pretences, perjury, forgery, embezzlement, or bigamy, I might say are indigenous to the negro's nature and in that way thus so many more are deprived of exercising the right of franchise." (Opinion of Attorney-General S. S. Hudson on what constitutes qualified elector, published by the State Board of Election Commissioners, Jackson, Miss., n. d.)