the people,1– a practice which is responsible for much of the degradation that the courts have suffered in many of our states, and which will have to be abandoned before a proper administration of justice can ever be secured.
The limited suffrage.
In bestowing the suffrage, the new constitutions were as conservative as in all other respects. The general state of opinion in America at that time, with regard to universal suffrage, was far more advanced than the general state of opinion in England, but it was less advanced than the opinions of such statesmen as Pitt and Shelburne and the Duke of Richmond. There was a truly English irregularity in the provisions which were made on this subject. In New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and South Carolina, all resident freemen who paid taxes could vote. In North Carolina all such persons could vote for members of the lower house, but in order to vote for senators a freehold of fifty acres was required. In Virginia none could vote save those who possessed such a freehold of fifty acres. To vote for governor or for senators in New York, one must possess a freehold of $250, clear of mortgage, and to vote for assemblymen one must either have a freehold of $50, or pay a yearly rent of $10. The pettiness of these sums was in keeping with the time when two daily coaches sufficed for the traffic between our two greatest commercial cities. In Rhode Island an unincumbered freehold worth $134 was required; but in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania the eldest sons of qualified freemen could vote without payment of taxes. In all the other states the possession of a small amount of property, either real or personal, varying from $33 to $200, was the necessary qualification for voting. Thus slowly and irregularly did the states drift toward universal suffrage; but although the impediments in the way of voting were more serious than they seem to us in these days when the community is more prosperous and money less scarce, they were still not very great, and in the opinion of conservative people they barely sufficed to exclude from the suffrage such shiftless persons as had no visible interest in keeping down the taxes.
Abolition of primogeniture, entails, and manorial privileges.
At the time of the Revolution the succession to property was regulated in New York and the southern states by the English rule of primogeniture. The eldest son took all. In New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and the four New England states, the eldest son took a double share. It was Georgia that led the way in decreeing the equal distribution of intestate property, both real and personal; and between 1784 and 1796 the example was followed by all the other states. At the same time entails were either definitely abolished, or the obstacles to cutting them off were removed. In New York the manorial privileges of the great patroons were swept away. In Maryland the old manorial system had long been dying a natural death through the encroachments of the patriarchal system of slavery. The ownership of all ungranted lands within the limits of the thirteen states passed from the crown not to the Confederacy, but to the several state governments. In Pennsylvania and Maryland such ungranted lands had belonged to the lords proprietary. They were now forfeited to the state. The Penn family was indemnified by Pennsylvania to the amount of half a million dollars; but Maryland made no compensation to the Calverts, inasmuch as their claim was presented by an illegitimate descendant of the last Lord Baltimore.
Steps toward the abolition of slavery and the slave-trade.
The success of the American Revolution made it possible for the different states to take measures for the gradual abolition of slavery and the immediate abolition of the foreign slave-trade. On this great question the state of public opinion in America was more advanced than in England. So great a thinker as Edmund Burke, who devoted much thought to the subject, came to the conclusion that slavery was an incurable evil, and that there was not the slightest hope that the trade in slaves could be stopped. The most that he thought could be done by judicious legislation was to mitigate the horrors which the poor negroes endured on board ship, or to prevent wives from being sold away from their husbands or children from their parents. Such was the outlook to one of the greatest political philosophers of modern times just eighty-two years before the immortal proclamation of President Lincoln! But how vast was the distance between Burke and Bossuet, who had declared about eighty years earlier that "to condemn slavery was to condemn the Holy Ghost!" It was equally vast between Burke and his contemporary Thurlow, who in 1799 poured out the vials of his wrath upon "the altogether miserable and contemptible" proposal to abolish the slave-trade. George III. agreed with his chancellor, and resisted the movement for abolition with all the obstinacy of which his hard and narrow nature was capable. In 1769 the Virginia legislature had enacted that the further importation of negroes, to be sold into slavery, should be prohibited. But George III. commanded the governor to veto this act, and it was vetoed. In Jefferson's first-draft of the Declaration of Independence, this action of the king was made the occasion of a fierce denunciation of slavery, but in deference to the prejudices of South Carolina and Georgia the clause was struck out by Congress. When George III. and his vetoes had been eliminated from the case, it became possible for the states to legislate freely on the subject. In 1776 negro slaves were held in all the thirteen states, but in all except South Carolina and Georgia there was a strong sentiment in favour of emancipation. In North Carolina, which contained a large Quaker population, and in which estates were small and were often cultivated by free labour, the pro-slavery feeling was never so strong as in the southernmost states. In Virginia all the foremost statesmen – Washington, Jefferson, Lee, Randolph, Henry, Madison, and Mason – were opposed to the continuance of slavery; and their opinions were shared by many of the largest planters. For tobacco-culture slavery did not seem so indispensable as for the raising of rice and indigo; and in Virginia the negroes, half-civilized by kindly treatment, were not regarded with horror by their masters, like the ill-treated and ferocious blacks of South Carolina and Georgia. After 1808 the policy and the sentiments of Virginia underwent a marked change. The invention of the cotton-gin, taken in connection with the sudden and prodigious development of manufactures in England, greatly stimulated the growth of cotton in the ever-enlarging area of the Gulf states, and created an immense demand for slave-labour, just at the time when the importation of negroes from Africa came to an end. The breeding of slaves, to be sold to the planters of the Gulf states, then became such a profitable occupation in Virginia as entirely to change the popular feeling about slavery. But until 1808 Virginia sympathized with the anti-slavery sentiment which was growing up in the northern states; and the same was true of Maryland. Emancipation was, however, much more easy to accomplish in the north, because the number of slaves was small, and economic circumstances distinctly favoured free labour. In the work of gradual emancipation the little state of Delaware led the way. In its new constitution of 1776 the further introduction of slaves was prohibited, all restraints upon emancipation having already been removed. In the assembly of Virginia in 1778 a bill prohibiting the further introduction of slaves was moved and carried by Thomas Jefferson, and the same measure was passed in Maryland in 1783, while both these states removed all restraints upon emancipation. North Carolina was not ready to go quite so far, but in 1786 she sought to discourage the slave-trade by putting a duty of £5 per head on all negroes thereafter imported. New Jersey followed the example of Maryland and Virginia. Pennsylvania went farther. In 1780 its assembly enacted that no more slaves should be brought in, and that all children of slaves born after that date should be free. The same provisions were made by New Hampshire in its new constitution of 1783, and by the assemblies of Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1784. New York went farther still, and in 1785 enacted that all children of slaves thereafter born should not only be free, but should be admitted to vote on the same conditions as other freemen. In 1788 Virginia, which contained many free negroes, enacted that any person convicted of kidnapping or selling into slavery any free person should suffer death on the gallows. Summing up all these facts, we see that within two years after the independence of the United States had been acknowledged by England, while the two southernmost states had done nothing to check the growth of slavery, North Carolina had discouraged the importation of slaves; Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey had stopped such importation and removed all restraint upon emancipation; and all the remaining states, except Massachusetts, had made gradual emancipation compulsory. Massachusetts had gone still farther. Before the Revolution the anti-slavery feeling had been stronger there than in any other state, and cases brought into court for the purpose of testing the legality of slavery
In recent years Georgia has been one of the first states to abandon this bad practice.
