In 1806, 30 years after he inspired the taxed-but-not-represented colonial subjects of King George III to rise up against “tyrannical monarchy”—with a promise that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again”—Thomas Paine was barred from voting in the last American midterm election of his revolutionary life.
A partisan election inspector at a polling station in New Rochelle, New York, denied the franchise to the aging pamphleteer. The inspector, a Tory dead-ender who opposed Paine’s radical views, claimed that the author of Common Sense and The American Crisis was not a proper citizen of the country where, in the view of no less a revolutionary icon than Samuel Adams, Paine’s words had “unquestionably awakened the public mind and led the people loudly to call for a Declaration of our National Independence.”
It’s easy to understand why the inspector, who occupied his position as the face of the local establishment, would resort to peddling lies about the young nation’s agitator-in-chief. After all, Paine’s advocacy for democratic reforms—and the economic and social justice that might extend from them—threatened the elites not just of the old United Kingdom but of the new United States.
The denial of Paine’s right to participate in the politics of the nation he helped call into being was in keeping with the practice of a time when the right to vote was far from sacrosanct. Late-18th- and early-19th-century elites policed the franchise with an eye toward averting robust democracy. We know about Paine’s disenfranchisement because he had once been accepted by those elites, and even after his views on property and religion led to his exclusion from the circles of power, he still wielded a pen mighty enough to amplify his objections to Tory abuses.
Others were not so fortunate. Widespread disenfranchisement based on race, gender, economic position, viewpoints, and immigration status was the norm in America’s formative years. White male property owners—roughly 6 percent of the population at the nation’s founding—empowered themselves and mostly disempowered everyone else.
The same Constitution that determined that an enslaved Black person would count as only three-fifths of a human being for the purpose of congressional apportionment also blocked anyone who was not “a natural-born citizen” from serving as president or vice president. And in the first decades of the American experiment, President John Adams and his governing Federalist Party approved legislation that made it dramatically harder for immigrants to become citizens, because working-class newcomers tended to oppose the Federalists.
Other rights we’ve since come to take for granted were denied to Americans in the first years of the new republic. Newspaper editors were arrested and jailed for publishing dissenting views. And a member of Congress, Matthew Lyon of Vermont, spent months behind bars after suggesting, among other criticisms, that Adams had “an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp.”