The Right to Vote

I'm reading an interesting book, published about ten years ago: The Right to Vote, The Contested History of Democracy in the United States.

Suffrage has been a contentious issue in our history, as I have mentioned in some earlier posts. In fact, of all the members of the Pamlico County Board of Elections, I am the only one who would have been allowed to vote at the beginning of our nation's history. That is, unless I had lived in Massachusetts, where I would have had to belong to the Congregational Church, or unless I did not own enough property.

In many of the former colonies, the vote was granted only to those who owned real estate. Some states, though, allowed the ownership of personal property of a certain value to qualify.

Benjamin Franklin once had a humorous observation about this qualification:

Today a man owns a jackass worth fifty dollars and he is entitled to vote; but before the next election the jackass dies. The man in the meantime has become more experienced, his knowledge of the principles of government, and his acquaintance with mankind, are more extensive, and he is therefore better qualified to make a proper selection of rulers – but the jackass is dead and the man cannot vote. Now gentlemen, pray inform me, in whom is the right of suffrage? In the man or in the jackass?

I think Dr. Franklin would be surprised, pleased and gratified to learn that 220 years after his death, any American citizen older than eighteen years now has the right of suffrage. A big change, though it took two centuries to accomplish.