The Suffrage

Historians since the late nineteenth century have been arguing over the relative democracy and oligarchy in America, and have been concerned about the class implications of suffrage requirements. For a long time the standard work on suffrage during the colonial period was Albert E. McKinley, The Suffrage Franchise in the Thirteen English Colonies in America (Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Press 1905). That work has been replaced by Robert J. Dinkin’s Voting in Provincial America· A Study of Elections in the Thirteen Colonies (Westport Greenwood Press, 1977). Chilton Williamson, in American Suffrage from Property to Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960) brings the story into the nineteenth century. All these books pay attention to Connecticut. Works focused exclusively on Connecticut:

Baldwin, Simeon E. "The Early History of the Ballot in Connecticut" Papers of the American Historical Association 4(1886):407-22. This work begins with the Massachusetts background and discusses the ballot how it was submitted, the matter of secrecy, etc. Baldwin goes on to the Stand-up Law of 1801 and the tendency of the standing order to manipulate the mechanics of balloting in order to maintain political stability and their jobs.

Dinkin, Robert J. "Elections in Colonial Connecticut" CHS Bulletin 37(January, 1972)1. Check the index for annotation of this work.

Fowler, David H. "Connecticut's Freemen: The First Forty Years." William and Mary Quarterly. 3rd series 15(July, 1958)3:312 "Probably most Connecticut men who were not servants could vote as freemen if they wanted to .... And while church membership had something to do with a man's chance of getting elected to colonial office, it seems to have had little relationship to his becoming a freeman." (p. 333) See Fowler's excellent-though now a bit dated-historiographic note on pp. 312-13. Dinkin does not alter this picture significantly. See pp. 17-18 of the Dinkin article above.

Williamson, Chilton. "The Connecticut Property Test and the East Guilford Voter." CHS Bulletin 19(0ctober, 1954)4:101-04. "The political history of this state at the beginning of the nineteenth century cannot be understood except in terms of the efforts of the Jeffersonian Republican party not only to sweep away all vestiges of an established church, but also to reform suffrage qualifications which had remained unchanged since the Revolution." (p. 101) If actually enforced, the legal suffrage requirements would have disqualified 70 out of 201 adult male residents. (p. 103)