Early American People To Fight For Universal Suffrage Struggle

The Right to vote has been called the First Liberty by American people. Now, voting right is enjoyed by each and every American, while it was enjoyed by a minority of people in early American history. American people had been struggling to achieve the goal of equal voting right for all and it has been a long, bitter, and too often, bloody struggle. Those self ?evident truths proclaimed in 1776 that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable right were not so self ?evident in 1787. and the stirring three opening words of the constitution ?We the people ?were not intended and never did apply to every citizen. When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence He estimated that more than half of the white men in Virginia who paid taxes and served in the militia were not permitted to vote. At that time, in fact, neither were in other states. So many persons were deprived of voting right by the voting qualifications that formed in North America in colonial era. American people had broken the barriers of the voting qualifications through the bitter struggle against disfranchisement. Some voting qualifications were abolished or widened before the Civil War. The universal electoral system was established and based on the rule of one man one vote. The author of this thesis wants to show the development, the causes and the characters of the struggle to achieve the universal suffrage by putting it in the special political background of American history. There are two kinds of theory that affected American early period voting ?? right. They are limited voting right and Natrual Right theory. The voting right thoughts origined from Europe, then circulated and de- veloped in North America. The persons who insisted on the limited voting right are Europen political commentator James Harrington, American Colonist John Winthrop, American goverment leader John Admas, James Kent ect. . They thought the voting right should be limited to freeholders. Universal suffrage would bring chaos. The theory was produced mainly because of the freeholders?behalf England tradition and the prejudice to the poor. The England equalitrian and the American revolutionist Thomas Paine Thomas Jefferson ect., who stick to Natural Right. In their eyes, the voting right is Natural Right. It would not be true equality until1 the universial suffrage came into being. It抯 unfair that the voting right was only limited to the freeholders. The chaos wasn抰 from universal suffrage but from the unequality of the right apportion. The Natural Right theory derived from the common people who were fighting for their rights. On the other hand, many intelligent leaders stood by it for the safty of society. There was no voting qualifications in the early colonial period. Almost ev- ery resident could have the right to vote. But the voting qualifications including ethnic, moral, religious, age, property and sex became more and more strict with the development of the colonial politics and economics from the middle colonial period. At last, the voting right became the franchise of the Christian white men of property. This is mainly because that: I. The riligious fanatic and the po ??...