Whether affected by hanging-chads, butterfly ballots, or razor-thin vote counts, every vote matters because it allows one to exercise citizenship. But what did “every vote matters,” voting, and citizenship mean in the early history of the United States?
Unlike today’s federal laws, which are designed to protect voters and voting rights, in past times individual states determined who could vote and, in a sense, determined who was a citizen. During the Early Republic, many states legislated voting rights and citizenship as the purview of white, property-owning men. By the 1830s, however, as the United States expanded its territory and witnessed the arrival of millions of immigrants and the creation of a new two-party system, most states enfranchised all white men.
Women and Black Americans were generally written out of state voting rights legislation, leading to a suffrage movement that galvanized many of the nation’s most aggressive activists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, organizers of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, to clamor for women’s right to vote. These women’s struggles bore fruit with the ratification of the 19th Amendment, albeit decades after the founders of the movement had passed away.
