Why have voting rights been such a struggle throughout American history? Two factors among many stand out. One was inertia. Since medieval times, England had generally limited the franchise to those who owned a certain amount of land or property. Those limits would be altered by the Reform Act 1832, enacted three years after the Richmond convention, but they had been the norm when the Thirteen Colonies broke away. Since it was much easier for white male Americans to own land, however, the founding-era electorate was far larger than its British equivalent and thus more democratically involved. But the idea that the electorate itself was fungible never faded away.
Slavery was the other major factor. At the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Madison told the other delegates that he instinctually thought the president should be directly elected by the people. But he also saw a flaw with this option. Not only did the Northern states enfranchise far more of their citizens than the Southern states, but a large share of the Southern population was enslaved and could not vote. That led Madison to favor the Electoral College, which allowed white Southerners to maintain parity with the North by wielding three-fifths of the electoral power that rightfully belonged to enslaved people. It’s no coincidence that nine of the first 12 presidents were Southern slave owners.
It’s true that neither the original Constitution nor the Bill of Rights explicitly mentions a right to vote. But they also provide no other route to public office. The House is directly elected. So are members of state legislatures. State lawmakers, in turn, elected senators until the Seventeenth Amendment’s ratification in 1913, and also determined how presidential electors would be chosen. The Constitution also bans nonelective forms of governance: Article 1 forbids Congress from establishing an aristocracy, while Article 4 commands the federal government to ensure that the states maintain a “republican form of government.” There could be no prince-bishoprics or hereditary duchies on American soil.
“Once a people begins to interfere with the voting qualification, one can be sure that sooner or later it will abolish it altogether,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, six years after the convention in Richmond. “That is one of the most invariable rules of social behavior. The further the limit of voting rights is extended, the stronger is the need felt to spread them still wider; for after each new concession the forces of democracy are strengthened, and its demands increase its augmented power.” The result, he said, is a snowball effect of sorts that ultimately leads to universal suffrage.