ABSTRACT
The right to vote came early in American history. It was conferred on white adult males by state legislatures that gradually removed freehold and property requirements for voting. This change was more or less complete by 1830, about forty years after the Constitution’s ratification. That transformation, commonly called the “rise of universal white manhood suffrage,” counts as one of the world’s great bloodless revolutions. Only in Rhode Island was there serious conflict, in the early 1840s, when a brief civil war—the “Dorr war”—erupted over land-holding and race. Such a remarkable political shift led, in fact, to the first great “field study” in the history of social science. Recognizing the rapid emergence of universal white manhood suffrage as a major political innovation, the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville journeyed to America in the early 1830s to describe and analyze what he took to be a viable alternative to the French Revolution. Today we still read his landmark work, Democracy in America.
