Between Freedom and Bondage: Race, Party, and Voting Rights in the Antebellum North (review)

Historians have long known that the voting rights of free blacks were limited, in the antebellum period, to a handful of New England states. Less than 10 percent of adult black males living even in the free states were eligible voters in 1860. Less well known is the contraction of those voting rights from the era of the American Revolution to that of the Jacksonian period. When the federal constitution was ratified in 1789, free blacks held the same legal right to vote as whites in every state except Virginia and Georgia. As of 1792, free blacks could vote in twelve of fifteen states, and not until 1803 did a northern state restrict the franchise to whites. By 1840, free blacks could vote on equal terms with whites in only four of twenty-six states. Despite a movement in favor of black suffrage in the 1840s and 1850s, blacks effectively held the franchise in only five of thirty-six states by the time the Civil War had ended.

Malone seeks to explain why blacks' voting rights declined in the early republic and, to a lesser extent, why they remained intact or were revived in a few states. The author attributes three factors to explaining the timing of the change (or lack thereof ) in these voting rights: "the changing economic structure of race relations, . . . the changing partisan structure of racial affiliation, . . . [and] the changing discursive structure of racial coalitions" (6). He focuses on four states—New York (where African Americans were effectively disfranchised in the late Jeffersonian period), Pennsylvania (where they were disfranchised during the height of the Jacksonian era), Rhode Island (the only state where blacks lost and then re-gained the right to vote before the Civil War), and Massachusetts (where African Americans retained suffrage rights throughout the years in question).

Malone's analysis demonstrates most clearly the role of partisanship in all four of the states studied. In New York, blacks had supported the Federalists and thus the Jeffersonian Republican faction most closely allied with fellow partisans in Virginia spearheaded a movement for disfranchisement. As a result of constitutional changes in 1821, the property qualification for voting was eliminated for whites but increased to a nearly prohibitive $250 in valuation for African Americans. In Pennsylvania, Democrats responded to the rise of a potent Whig opposition party and the closeness of elections in certain locales, where voting by blacks may have contributed to the outcome, by including disfranchisement in the state's 1838 constitution. In Rhode Island, blacks had been disfranchised by statute in 1822, but because hey helped to defend the government after being spurned by the rebellious Dorrites in the 1842 uprising, blacks gained enough support from Whigs to be re-enfranchised in the new state constitution. In Masssachusetts, originally an overwhelmingly Federalist and then later a predominantly Whig state, neither Jeffersonian Republicans nor Democrats made any serious effort to disfranchise blacks. Although the author does not emphasize it, the requirement of a majority of the votes cast (instead of just a plurality thereof ) to win gubernatorial, congressional, and legislative elections in the Bay State, as in other New England states, probably discouraged would-be disfranchisers in either party from possibly alienating white racial liberals, who might have reacted by casting protest votes for the Liberty party.

Partisanship and the closeness of elections were not, however, the only relevant factors. Malone argues that when voting rights were still predicated on property holdings, as during the Revolutionary War and immediate postwar era, white elites tended to display a paternalistic attitude toward blacks with civic aspirations. Those blacks who managed to attain property (especially those who had been or were still servants of wealthy whites) were considered qualified by virtue of having overcome what was perceived as an inferior background. As property qualifications were eliminated, however, an ascriptive form of racism replaced the paternalistic variety, and skin color became the clear-cut...