The Right to Vote and the Rise of Democracy, 1787-1828

TLDR: For example, Lampi et al. as discussed by the authors found that during Washington's presidency only 6 percent of Americans could vote, which translates into about 15 percent of the free adult population.

Abstract: A long tradition in American political history associates the presidency of Andrew Jackson with the achievement of universal suffrage and the coming of democracy, at least for adult white males. There is some justification for this view, but only in limited senses; for the most part this interpretation has had a deleterious effect on our understanding of political development in the early republic. In particular it has created the belief that relatively few people possessed the right to vote in the early republic, and that therefore mass participation was postponed to the years after 1815. As recently as September 2008 the distinguished historian Jill Lepore could write in the New Yorker that during Washington's presidency only 6 percent of Americans could vote - which admittedly translates into about 15 percent of the free adult population. Sean Wilentz's prize-winning Rise of American Democracy (2005) recognizes that the suffrage was much more widely spread before 1815, but he still builds his interpretation around the assumption that politics did not involve the public at large until the Age of Jackson. Even Alexander Keyssar's illuminating The Right to Vote (2000) and Daniel Walker Howe's excellent What Hath God Wrought (2007) assume that the practice of politics became more democratic in the 1820s because of recent fundamental changes in electoral rules. Such views are explicitly contradicted by the voting data that Philip Lampi has gathered that are now available on the A New Nation Votes website, which confirm the huge expansion of popular participation within two decades or so of the adoption of the United States Constitution.1This expansion was possible because the right to vote had always been extraordinarily widespread - at least among adult white males - even before the country gained its independence. During the colonial period, the right to vote for the lower house of colonial legislatures had been defined in traditional British terms: Only people who had freehold landed property sufficient to ensure that they were personally independent and had a vested interest in the welfare of their communities could vote. That qualification normally applied to men who were heads of households, since women were almost by definition dependent, but the right could extend to widows who had become responsible for the family property. Some colonies excluded propertied people whose civic commitment they suspected - recent arrivals, members of minority religious sects, and racial groups deemed unacceptable. But those most generally excluded were laborers, tenant farmers, unskilled workers, and indentured servants, all of whom were considered to lack a "stake in society," a permanent interest in the community, and the wherewithal to withstand corruption.2In Britain property qualifications increasingly restricted the number qualified to vote. Whereas over 20 percent of adult males had enjoyed the franchise around 1700, population growth and the increasing concentration of wealth reduced the proportion to 17.2 percent by 1754, continuing down to 12.7 percent in England and Wales by the 1820s.3By contrast, the abundance and availability of land in North America meant that large numbers of colonists satisfied similarly denned requirements. This was especially true where the requirement was expressed in terms of acreage rather than value, as was customarily the case in the southern colonies: It was much easier to acquire (and to measure) 50 acres than land worth £50 either at sale or in annual rents. Six colonies also allowed alternative qualifications to freehold ownership in the form of personal property or payment of taxes, opening the suffrage to owners of urban property, and even to those prosperous farmers who rented their land or held it on some form of leasehold.4Consequently, as early as the 1 720s the suffrage was uniquely wide in the colonies. Virginia reputedly had the most restrictive franchise, with fewer than half the free white males qualified to vote, but a recent calculation raises the figure to two-thirds at midcentury, declining slightly thereafter. …