Expanding Democracy in two minutes
- In 1800 nearly every state limited voting to men with property or taxes, believing property gave a stake in society. In many states, legislatures rather than voters chose presidential electors.
- New western states needed settlers and dropped land requirements. Militiamen and wage workers demanded a vote, and New York widened white men's voting in 1821.
- In 1824 Jackson won the most electoral votes but no majority, so the House elected John Quincy Adams. Adams named Henry Clay secretary of state, and Jackson's supporters alleged a "corrupt bargain."
- Martin Van Buren built the party organization behind Jackson, who won in 1828 as turnout more than doubled. By 1840 about 2.4 million men voted, four in five of those eligible.
- Jackson's spoils system rewarded supporters with jobs. The Anti-Masons held the first national nominating convention in 1831, and by 1832 voters chose electors everywhere but South Carolina.
- New Jersey ended women's voting in 1807, and free Black men lost the vote or faced new barriers in Connecticut (1818), New York (1821) and Pennsylvania (1838).
- On the exam: expect causation (why suffrage expanded) and continuity and change, because the vote widened for white men but narrowed for Black men; link it to later suffrage amendments.
Topic 4.7 key terms
- Common man
The ordinary farmers, artisans and laborers Jackson's supporters claimed to speak for. Historians call the 1820s–30s the age of the common man because more of these men could vote and campaigns courted them.
- Jacksonian democracy
The politics of the 1820s and 1830s built on Jackson's appeal to ordinary white men: more voters, mass parties, and a president who claimed to speak for the people, not the elite. Historians still debate how democratic it really was.
- Suffrage
The right to vote. In 1800 most states tied it to owning property. By the 1840s most had given it to all adult white men.
- Participatory democracy
A system in which more ordinary citizens take part in politics by voting, joining parties and campaigning. The U.S. moved this way between 1800 and 1848 as suffrage widened and political parties grew.
- Property qualification
A rule that a man had to own a set amount of land or wealth to vote. In 1800 nearly every state had one, and most also limited voting to free white men. Voters who met it are called freeholders when the property is land.
- Stake in society
The belief in Adams's day that only men who owned property had enough independence, and enough at risk in the community, to vote responsibly. A poor or dependent man, the argument went, would simply vote as his employer or landlord wished.
- Presidential electors
The men each state chose to cast its votes for president under Article II of the Constitution. In 1800 most state legislatures picked them directly, so voters in those states had no say in the presidential vote.
- Wage labor
Work done for pay, by the day or the week, instead of on a farm or in a shop you own. The market revolution created growing numbers of wage workers, and under the old property rules many of them could not vote.
- Religious tests
Rules that barred non-Protestants or non-Christians from voting or holding office. By 1800 few states used them for voting, but some kept them for office: Maryland barred Jews until 1826, and New Hampshire kept a Protestant rule until 1877.
- Dorr Rebellion
The 1841–42 struggle in Rhode Island over voting rights. Reformers wrote a People's Constitution and elected Thomas Dorr governor, while the old charter government also claimed power. Dorr's attempt to seize the Providence arsenal failed.
- Universal white male suffrage
The right of all adult white men to vote, whether or not they owned property. Most states adopted it between 1810 and 1840.
- King Caucus
A meeting of a party's members of Congress that picked the party's candidate for president. Critics said insiders were choosing for the voters. After 1824 it collapsed, and party conventions replaced it in the 1830s.
- Democratic-Republican Party
The party of Jefferson and Madison. After the Federalists faded, it was the only national party left, so in 1824 all four candidates ran under its name and fought each other.
- Twelfth Amendment
Ratified in 1804. Electors vote separately for president and vice president. If no candidate wins a majority of electoral votes, the House picks from the top three, and each state delegation gets one vote. 1824 is the only election decided this way.
- Corrupt bargain
The Jacksonians' charge that Clay swung the 1825 House vote to Adams in exchange for the State Department. Nobody ever proved a deal, but the charge fed Jackson's 1828 campaign and the demand that voters, not insiders, choose presidents.
- Two-party system
Two large national parties competing in every election. Once voters chose presidential electors in most states, campaigns had to be national, and only big, permanent parties could run them.
- Democratic Party
The party that grew around Andrew Jackson in the late 1820s, organized by Martin Van Buren: Southern planters joined with Northern and Western farmers and city workers. Its opponents became the Whigs in the 1830s.
- Popular campaigning
Campaigning aimed at ordinary voters: parades, rallies, songs, and free food and drink. It drew more people into politics. It also meant more personal attacks and fewer arguments about issues.
- Free people of color
The period's term for free Black Americans. Even where slavery was ending, laws often gave them fewer rights than free white people, including the vote.
- Disfranchisement
Taking away the right to vote. Between 1799 and 1838 most states outside New England barred or restricted free Black men from voting, and New Jersey ended women's voting in 1807.
- Rotation in office
Jackson's principle that federal jobs should change hands regularly so no class of permanent officeholders could form. Supporters called it democratic reform.
- Spoils system
Giving government jobs to a winning party's supporters. It rewarded party work and built strong parties; critics called it corruption.
- Anti-Masonic Party
A third party born in western New York after William Morgan vanished in 1826, attacking the Masons as a secret, antidemocratic elite; the first party to hold a national convention.
- National nominating convention
A gathering of party delegates from every state to choose presidential candidates, first held by the Anti-Masons in 1831. It replaced King Caucus and gave more of a party's members a voice.
- Workingmen's parties
Third parties of artisans and laborers (Philadelphia 1828, New York 1829) that ran carpenters and shoemakers for office and pushed for public schools and shorter hours. Philadelphia's elected 20 of its 54 candidates in 1829; in New York a carpenter, Ebenezer Ford, won an Assembly seat.
- Tyranny of the majority
Tocqueville's fear that in a democracy the majority can crush everyone else's views, less by law than by pressure to go along. He thought Americans held back opinions the crowd disliked.
- Voter turnout
The share of eligible voters who actually vote. It rose from about 27% in 1824 to about 80% in 1840, as parties campaigned hard and the states dropped property tests.
Transcript
Quotes are from the historical record and name their source. Lines marked Dramatized are reconstructions.
The People's Day
March 4, 1829
Key terms: Common man, Jacksonian democracy, Suffrage, Participatory democracy
March 4, 1829. Ten to twenty thousand people wait outside the Capitol.
Andrew Jackson walked here. He takes the oath, then bows to the crowd.
Francis Scott Key
It is beautiful, it is sublime!
Then he rode to the President's House, and everyone followed. Calhoun had feared the crowd would break down the rooms at Gadsby's Hotel, so the party moved. Nobody worried about the President's House.
Men in mud-heavy boots stood on satin chairs to see him. Glass broke. Ladies fainted. Somewhere in here is the President.
Then the staff carried tubs of punch out into the garden. The crowd followed the punch, many through the windows. Jackson slipped away to his hotel.
Margaret Bayard Smith
But it was the People's day, and the People's President and the People would rule.
The people on the chairs left almost no letters. We see them through their critics' eyes.
In 1800, many of the men in that room could not have voted. By 1840, nearly every white man could. The door swung open. Who got in, and who found it shut?
A Stake in Society
1776–1807
Key terms: Property qualification, Suffrage, Stake in society, Presidential electors
Go back to 1800. Who votes?
Mostly, men who owned land. In Virginia they voted out loud, in front of their neighbors.
The Constitution left voting rules to the states. Nearly all of them drew a line at property or taxes.
The rule had a real argument behind it. John Adams, writing in 1776:
John Adams
Very few Men, who have no Property, have any Judgment of their own.
A man with nothing, he thought, would vote as some man of property told him.
He also warned what would follow.
John Adams
There will be no End of it. ... Women will demand a Vote. ... Every Man, who has not a Farthing, will demand an equal Voice.
He turned out to be half right.
Many never voted for president at all. In ten of sixteen states, the legislature picked the electors.
The line was mostly about money. In New Jersey, widows and single women with property voted. In several states, so did free Black men who met the rules.
Most men without property waited outside: servants, sailors, sons, hired hands.
Every White Man
1800 – 1843
Key terms: Wage labor, Religious tests, Dorr Rebellion, Universal white male suffrage
New states needed settlers. States like Indiana, Illinois, Alabama and Missouri let every adult white man vote. No land required. In a new state, the vote was part of the sales pitch.
Back East, militiamen who'd marched in the War of 1812 wanted the vote, too.
So did the market revolution's wage workers, who owned nothing but their labor.
Old states rewrote their rules. New York's Chancellor James Kent objected:
Chancellor James Kent
…we propose to annihilate, at one stroke, all those property distinctions and to bow before the idol of universal suffrage.
He lost. By 1826, almost any white man in New York could vote.
Rhode Island still ran on its royal charter of 1663. Most white men there couldn't vote. A young lawyer, Thomas Dorr, and other reformers answered with the Revolution's own argument.
Thomas Wilson Dorr
If it were unjust for our forefathers to be taxed without representation, it is equally unjust for their descendents to be so taxed by their brethren.
By 1842, Rhode Island had two governors. Dorr's men attacked the state arsenal. The cannon wouldn't fire.
The rebellion collapsed, but a new constitution opened the vote. Dorr's People's Convention had voted 46 to 18 to keep Black men out. The new constitution let them vote.
By the 1840s, nearly every white man could vote.
King Caucus
1824 – February 1825
Key terms: King Caucus, Democratic-Republican Party, Twelfth Amendment, Corrupt bargain
In 1824, one party had to pick a president.
The old way was King Caucus: the party's congressmen picked the nominee for everybody else. Only 66 of Congress's 261 members showed up.
The gallery was fuller than the floor.
The caucus chose William Crawford. Three other Democratic-Republicans ran anyway: Jackson, Adams and Clay.
Jackson won the most votes, popular and electoral. But not a majority.
So the House chose from the top three. Clay came fourth, so he was out. He was also Speaker of the House.
On January 9, Clay asked Adams for a private talk.
Adams's diary calls it 'a long conversation explanatory of the past and prospective of the future.' Clay said he preferred Adams. No job is mentioned.
Adams won on the first ballot, with exactly the thirteen states he needed. Within days, Adams offered Clay Secretary of State.
Andrew Jackson
So you see the Judas of the West has closed the contract and will receive the thirty pieces of silver.
A corrupt bargain?
Jackson's side called it a corrupt bargain. Nobody has ever proved a deal.
They didn't need proof. The man with the most votes had lost, and his voters remembered.
Hickory
1825 – October 1828
Key terms: Two-party system, Democratic Party, Popular campaigning
Tennessee nominated Jackson for 1828 in October 1825. Three years early.
His organizer was Martin Van Buren of New York, the Little Magician.
Martin Van Buren
We must always have party distinctions…
He wanted an old alliance back:
Martin Van Buren
the planters of the South and the plain Republicans of the north.
Strong parties, he argued, would keep North and South from splitting over slavery. For about twenty years, they did.
Jackson's nickname was Old Hickory, so Hickory Clubs raised hickory poles, with parades, barbecues and free drinks. Politics became a show, and the show was free.
Jackson's side said Adams had put a gambling table in the President's House. It was a billiard table. He'd paid for it himself.
Adams's side printed the Coffin Handbill: six coffins for six militiamen Jackson had ordered shot. They were Tennessee soldiers, court-martialed for desertion and shot at Mobile in 1815.
Then they went after Rachel Jackson. Her first divorce wasn't final when she married Andrew in 1791.
They married again in 1794. In 1828, the papers called her a bigamist.
Election Day
November 3, 1828 (and 1807–1838)
Key terms: Free people of color, Disfranchisement
Canandaigua, New York. Monday, November 3, 1828. The first of three election days.
This year, for the first time, New York's voters choose the state's presidential electors themselves. The whole county's here. Not all of it can vote.
The states that opened the vote to poor white men were closing it to Black men. New Jersey, 1807. Connecticut, 1818. New York, 1821. Tennessee and North Carolina, 1835.
New Jersey's 1807 law ended women's voting, and Black men's, in one phrase:
A free, white, male citizen of this state.
In 1838, Pennsylvania wrote one word into its constitution: “white.” Voters approved it by about twelve hundred votes.
Robert Purvis
We appeal to you from the decision of the “Reform Convention,” which has stripped us of a right peaceably enjoyed during forty-seven years under the Constitution of this commonwealth.
To the Victor
1828–1832
Key terms: Rotation in office, Spoils system, Anti-Masonic Party, National nominating convention, Workingmen's parties
More than a million men voted for president in 1828. Turnout had more than doubled. Jackson won, 178 electoral votes to 83.
Rachel Jackson died at home on December 22, 1828, weeks after the election. Jackson blamed his enemies for the rest of his life.
Andrew Jackson
My heart is nearly broke. I try to summon up my usual fortitude but it is vain.
“A being so gentle and so virtuous, slander might wound but could not dishonor.”
Margaret Bayard Smith reported that broken glass and china came to several thousand dollars.
Jackson said long service bred indifference, and any capable citizen could do the work.
Andrew Jackson
No one man has any more intrinsic right to official station than another.
He removed about one in ten federal officeholders, many of them postmasters. His loyal supporters got the jobs.
Senator William Marcy of New York put it plainly:
William L. Marcy
To the victor belong the spoils of the enemy.
Critics called it corruption. It also built parties, because jobs rewarded campaign work.
In 1831, the Anti-Masonic Party held the first national nominating convention. It nominated William Wirt, a former Mason.
The big parties copied it within a year.
By 1832, voters chose presidential electors in every state but one: South Carolina.
A Kind of Tumult
1831–1840
Key terms: Tyranny of the majority, Voter turnout, Universal white male suffrage
In May 1831, a young French magistrate named Alexis de Tocqueville came to study American prisons. The prison report came first. Democracy in America came next.
Alexis de Tocqueville
No sooner do you set foot upon the American soil than you are stunned by a kind of tumult.
By 1840, 2.4 million men voted for president, four in five of those eligible. Historians still argue whether Jackson opened the door or just walked through it.
Western states wanted settlers. Wage workers and militiamen wanted a say. Parties wanted voters.
Turnout soared. Conventions replaced the caucus. Two national parties fought for every vote.
Women. Nearly all Black men. Native nations. And about two million enslaved people.
Black men won the vote on paper in 1870. Women, in 1920. Native Americans were made citizens in 1924.
On the same square, in June 1873, a judge told a jury to find Susan B. Anthony guilty of voting. She refused to pay the fine.