Guess Who Favored a Federal Expansion in Suffrage (Hint: This is a Trick Question)

Here I must acknowledge a debt to Alexander Keyssar's The Right to Vote, a history the right to vote and its restrictions throughout our country's history.  On page 23 he discusses the right to vote as it came up during the Constitutional Convention.  Gouverneur Morris proposed to limit the vote to freeholders.  In this he met strong opposition from many delegates who said that non-freeholders were allowed to vote in many state elections and would be angered at being denied a vote in federal elections.  The proposal was defeated and instead the rule was set that whoever could vote in the least restrictive elections in a state could also vote for the House of Representatives.  In other words, the federal government would restrict the vote no further than the states.  At the same time, Keyssar points out, no one proposed a suffrage broader than the states.

Keyssar attributes this outcome to the absence of some of the revolution's most democratic leaders such as Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Paine.  We can make short work of Jefferson and Henry.  Both men were southern slave holders.  They feared federal power in general, and a federal expansion of the vote in particular lest it give greater power to black people (slave or free).  So much for the Virginians.  Samuel Adams would have had no such fear, but he shared the basic Anti-Federalist viewpoint that all expansion of federal power was inherently oppressive.  He thus seems like an unlikely candidate to press for a federal broadening of the suffrage.  That leaves Thomas Paine as one of those rare leaders of the day who was both a nationalist and a democrat, favoring both a stronger and a more democratic federal government.  He also came out against the Constitution.  (Cannot find link, alas!)  However, his main objections were to a single executive and a six-year Senate.  If he had any objections to the Constitution leaving in place existing restrictions on the vote, he did not say so.

The only other real democratic nationalist of the day was present at the Convention.  I refer, of course, to Benjamin Franklin.  Franklin opposed the restriction of the vote to freeholders and appears to have been the only one at the Convention to recognize that non-property holders nonetheless had legitimate interests and needed the means to protect them.  But not even Franklin who, in addition to being a democratic nationalist, showed a utopian tendency lacking in any other delegate, never proposed a federally-mandated expansion in suffrage.

Reading over Bernard Bailyn's collection of some 2000 pages of debate on ratification,* not once does anyone propose anything so radical as a federal expansion in the right to vote, although the issue was a hotly contested one at the state level.  Yet, although I have not seen any evidence that anyone proposed anything so radical in public debate, at least one person appears to have privately favored such a thing -- ALEXANDER HAMILTON!

The next post will explore how so odd a result could have come about.

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*The largest compilation of debate on the Constitution runs to some 50,000 pages, making Bailyn's collection a mere 4% of what is extant.  However, the same talking points get repeated often enough to give the impression that it accurately shows the mainstream views at the time, and a few oddball ones as well.