I recently finished reading Lincoln, the biography of Abraham Lincoln by David Herbert Donald. It’s pretty good. I’m not very interested in military strategy, so my eyes occasionally glazed over during long stretches on how the President managed the Civil War. I am peculiarly interested in voting and elections, though, and one statement Lincoln made in a letter to a newspaper in 1836 stood out to me:
I go for all sharing the privileges of the government, who assist in bearing its burdens. Consequently I go for admitting all whites to the right of suffrage, who pay taxes or bear arms, (by no means excluding females.)
I like this because it demonstrates an important fact about voting and elections in the United States: The only American tradition is reform. So much has changed in voting rights that this statement is nearly incomprehensible today. Let’s run through it to see what was going on here.
First, “bear arms.” At the time Lincoln was writing, the term “bear arms” meant, “serve in the militia.” Interest groups have successfully convinced people today that you bear arms every time you bring your assault rifle to the local Walmart, but Lincoln was not asserting that carrying deadly weapons automatically confers the right to vote. Serving in the militia was the ordinary way regular people engaged in military service at the time; Lincoln himself joined the Illinois militia in 1832 to help fight the Black Hawk War. This part of the statement essentially says that if someone serves in the military, they should be able to vote.
Second, Lincoln’s parenthetical on “females.” This statement was used by suffragists later on to claim Lincoln’s support for women’s suffrage, but Lincoln’s biographer concludes that Lincoln was just joking. Women in Illinois at the time did not own property or pay taxes (except through their husbands or fathers). There also is no evidence of Lincoln ever promoting women’s suffrage at any other point in his career. The idea of women voting apparently struck Abraham Lincoln as silly enough to evoke laughter.
Given that this statement does not support women’s suffrage, it seems like a pretty restrictive notion of who gets to vote. That would be consistent with the popular perception on suffrage: That it used to be extremely limited, and that it expanded over time. However, in context, Lincoln was actually arguing for expanding suffrage to a group that is almost universally excluded today: non-citizens.
There are three groups that are frequently excluded entirely from voting in the United States by law today: those disenfranchised due to a criminal conviction, people under the age of 18, and non-citizens. I have advocated for expanded voting rights across all three groups, and the reactions are telling. Most people are either supportive or ambivalent about expanding voting rights to citizens who have completed criminal sentences (they’re more skeptical that people should be able to vote while they are still in prison). Most people react with great skepticism to any reduction in the voting age, though they often come around, especially for reducing the voting age only modestly to 16 instead of 18. When confronted with the possibility of non-citizens voting, however, people go berserk. The idea is almost nonsensical to most people. We are frequently taught that voting is a privilege of citizenship, and xenophobic rhetoric about non-citizen immigrants has so permeated popular consciousness that the idea of non-citizens having the legal right to vote would strike many today as downright scary.
In 1836 and before, however, most states allowed non-citizens to vote in all elections: local, state and federal. Illinois was an exception, as it was an early adopter of a citizenship requirement for voting, something promoted by early anti-immigration political movements. Immigrants paid taxes. Immigrants served in the militia. Lincoln was asserting that these things entitled them to the right to vote. As long as they were white, I mean.
This is what makes this statement by Lincoln so remarkable. He takes for granted that non-white people do not have the right to vote, excluding them even though they plainly did “bear the burdens” of the government. He takes women’s lack of suffrage so for granted that it becomes a joke. And yet these harsh restrictions come in the context of a statement in favor of voting rights for non-citizens, the group whose exclusion from suffrage is most likely to be taken for granted by a modern audience.
This is a valuable lesson, in no small part because objection to changes in voting and elections policies of all sorts often take the form of an appeal to tradition. The United States has endured a lot longer than many other democracies, so why should we change what is clearly working? The answer is because what is working is frequent change. Reform itself is the American tradition.
