ABSTRACT
American democracy in the age of Jefferson invented the idea of framing critical issues and fostering public deliberation. New Jersey was the first north-eastern state to restrict the definition of political eligibility to adult white males only. In the pre-revolutionary era, colonial legislatures rarely troubled to specifically exclude women from voting but there is depressingly scant evidence of women acting to take advantage of the law's failure to exclude them. According to the state constitution of 1776, women heads of household, who paid tax on £ 50 worth of property could vote. The number of free African Americans possessing property sufficient to qualify for the vote was also rather small, and they could never have exercised great leverage in New Jersey politics. A generation after the American Revolution a new definition of democratic inclusion based in part on racial exclusion gradually expanded to most of the United States.
