ABSTRACT
As opposed to limiting partisan competition, franchise expansion was sometimes pursued as an expression of that competition. This was the most often-found route to property qualification removal among the thirteen original states. The historically weaker political party achieved a critical yet narrow victory over its long-dominant rival and then moved to entrench its hold on power. Those excluded from electoral politics provided a welcome and available constituency, likely to support the organization that approved its enfranchisement. Removal of the property qualification was thus the product of the political search for needed supplemental votes by those with a tenuous but recently won claim to office. By extension, any group among the disenfranchised not anticipated to provide enhanced electoral support would be exempted from democratizing reform. In Maryland (1802), known for bitter political rivalries, the Republicans for the first time won a plurality in the lower chamber and threatened to undermine elite selection to the upper chamber election unless that more conservative body agreed to replace the property qualification with a general taxpayer franchise, securing nearly unchallenged party ascendency for more than a decade. In New Jersey (1807), beset by electoral chaos, corruption, and fraud, triumphant Jeffersonians moved to stabilize and regularize voting practices, but explicitly on terms favorable to their partisan advantage, excluding women and blacks but overriding the property qualification. In Connecticut (1818), long a Federalist bastion, Republican forces secured an unprecedented victory with the help of unexpected allies following a costly blunder by the dominant Congregational Church, which reneged upon promised state support for Episcopal schools. The newly empowered party quickly moved to expand the franchise to all taxpayers, and the Federalists never again swept statewide office. In New York (1821/26), electoral politics was consumed by the bitter factional dispute between forces loyal to De Witt Clinton and those loyal to Martin Van Buren. Winning control of the 1821 state constitutional convention, Van Buren sensed strategic opportunity and replaced the property qualification (for whites only) with a general taxpaying requirement and promptly drove Clinton from office; Clinton then adopted the same strategy and returned to the governorship. In North Carolina (1857), complete property qualification removal occurred quite late, only after David Reid found the issue salient and effective in his entrepreneurial campaign for governor; franchise expansion then proved useful for solidifying a Democratic partisan realignment joining western farmers to planter interests.
