ABSTRACT
The American Revolution often resulted in institutionalized control by provincial elites, now freed of British dominion, and these elites retained supremacy for decades. Yet they were not immune from mounting challenges, especially from newly developing areas in the state. Moderates within the ruling group sometimes promoted property qualification repeal as a conscious strategy to weaken the opposition and divide its leadership, on the fundamental condition that the political risk could be minimized. Not an expression of populism, franchise reform in these cases instead was intended to reinforce the social order and the party that embodied it. In Delaware (1792), where revolutionary antagonisms persisted far into the peace, a Federalist majority saw value in pragmatic containment, adopting partial franchise inclusion designed to reinforce political linkages to rural yeomen and urban artisans. In South Carolina (1810), franchise expansion was an important element in the construction of a slavery-based white man’s Democratic coalition, which worked to cohere political factions through the nullification crisis and beyond. In Massachusetts (1821), moderate Federalists deemed repeal of the property qualification a useful concession to limit Republican inroads; the move became acceptable only after radical voices from Maine were severed away and upon the certainty that a taxpayer franchise would still sufficiently insure that the growing mass of industrial workers remained excluded. In Virginia (1821/50), plantation aristocrats reluctantly accepted minimum franchise concessions in the hope of maintaining one-party rule. Two decades later, they acquiesced to full property qualification repeal as a useful expression of democratic unity among Southern white men hostile to Northern abolitionism.
