Suffrage For Me But Not For Thee

I fully support your right to vote for what they let you vote for...

phot by Pixabay

I think everyone learned in school that blacks, including recently freed slaves, received the right to vote with passage of the 15th amendment in 1870.  And we learned in school that women received the right to vote in 1919 with the passage of the 19^th amendment.   That’s basic history.  But basic history can leave out a lot of significant information.  Many people know all the names and dates, but comprehend little of how they got there.  In school, I was one of those people, and I still wonder about a lot of “how it got that way.”

So, freed black men got a guaranteed right to vote fifty years before white woman.  How do you suppose that played at the time?  Both Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B Anthony campaigned to get women included in the 15th amendment. Fredrick Douglass responded that white women had suffered far less than black slaves, so the 15th amendment should be only about blacks. He had a point. But, what about black WOMEN? Don’t presume that black women were content with their freedom and mindless of their right to vote.  Here’s a quote from Sojourner Truth: "There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before. So I am for keeping the thing going while things are stirring; because if we wait till it is still, it will take a great while to get it going again." ~ Sojourner Truth

Here’s a little more history that you perhaps did not pick up in high school history class.  Prior to the 13^th, 14^th and 15^th amendments, all of which were passed specifically as relates to the outcome of the civil war, the federal government had little to say about who could vote.  It didn’t even have much to say about who is a citizen. Imagine that for a moment. The federal government had no record of its citizens.  That’s largely because people were considered citizens of their state rather than citizens of the USA.  It’s much that way in Europe.  France is a member of the European Union, but a Frenchman will not say that he is a citizen of the European Union, he will say his is citizen of France.

Should France, Italy, Germany, Spain and the other twenty-three European countries all have the same election laws? Try telling France that it must abide by German election law, and see what happens.  It was like that in the USA, until the civil war.  In winning the war, and after the assassination of Lincoln, the federal government, essentially under full Republican control, instituted laws and amendments that previously would never have been tolerated by the states. Slavery had to be stopped, and I don’t know if there was any other way to stop it short of civil war.  But the downside is that the federal government shot way beyond any previous constitutional limitations on its size and scope.

Before this, though, and as with France and Germany, citizenship and voting considerations were the province of the states, and states were free to allow blacks to vote, or women, or anyone else.  Or not.  But some did.  It’s a long, varied list, so I’ll just give you links that you can consider at your leisure.

Woman suffrage:

 https://www.thoughtco.com/womens-suffrage-timeline-by-state-3530520 .

General suffrage:

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_voting_rights_in_the_United_States

I used to think, as I believe many people do, that no black men could vote until the fifteenth amendment in 1870 and that no women could vote until the nineteenth amendment in 1920.

You can see that the issue of voting rights is nowhere as ‘black and white’ as we may have thought.  But at least we all know what a ‘natural born’ citizen is, right?  No such luck.  A person can be born in the USA but not be a ‘natural born’ citizen, just as a person can be born outside the borders yet still be a ‘natural born’ citizen. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/natural_born_citizen

My family visited Colonial Williamsburg awhile back. The museum has an auditorium where two very knowledgeable historians portrayed James Madison and Thomas Jefferson debating issues of the constitution.  These historians were so knowledgeable that they could ad lib specifics of the men and their times.  As part of the presentation they had everyone stand up.  Then, they named disqualifications for voting.  They said, if you are a woman, sit down.  Then black men.  But that wasn’t the end of it.  White men who owned no property had to sit down.  I can’t recall all the disqualifications, but by the end, only about five percent of the audience was still standing.  I was not one of them.

We all have voting rights now.  Well, not all.  A person must be eighteen years old, down from the previous age limit of twenty one.  The twenty sixth amendment, passed in 1971, established the age at eighteen.  And one must be a US citizen. But, for some elections in some states, a person need only swear to their citizenship but need provide no proof.

Well, now that we’ve all got the right to vote, what do we do with it? Nearly the only choice we have is to vote for democrats and republicans and to vote issues presented to us by the two parties. Pardon me if I’m not impressed.  All this effort to get every citizen the vote, and look at the limited choices in who and what to vote for.

I do not measure my rights and freedom in terms of who and what I can vote for.  I measure my rights and freedom in terms of the degree to which I can live my life how I choose, unencumbered by politics, politicians and political parties.

Let’s consider that interesting word, ‘freedom’.  I refer to it a lot. Does being able to vote for who controls you constitute freedom?  I think not.

Now that we know a bit more about how we got universal suffrage, my next post will consider how we use it.

---

Thoughts? Feel free to comment.