Suffrage Reconstructed: Gender, Race, and Voting Rights in the Civil War Era

by Laura E. Free

The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified on July 9, 1868, identified all legitimate voters as "male." In so doing, it added gender-specific language to the U.S. Constitution for the first time. Suffrage Reconstructed considers how and why the amendment's authors made this decision. Vividly detailing congressional floor bickering and activist campaigning, Laura E. Free takes readers into the pre- and postwar fights over precisely who should have the right to vote. Free demonstrates that all men, black and white, were the ultimate victors of these fights, as gender became the single most important marker of voting rights during Reconstruction. Free argues that the Fourteenth Amendment's language was shaped by three key groups: African American activists who used ideas about manhood to claim black men's right to the ballot, postwar congressmen who sought to justify enfranchising southern black men, and women's rights advocates who began to petition Congress for the ballot for the first time as the Amendment was being drafted. To prevent women's inadvertent enfranchisement, and to incorporate formerly disfranchised black men into the voting polity, the Fourteenth Amendment's congressional authors turned to gender to define the new American voter. Faced with this exclusion some woman suffragists, most notably Elizabeth Cady Stanton, turned to rhetorical racism in order to mount a campaign against sex as a determinant of one's capacity to vote. Stanton's actions caused a rift with Frederick Douglass and a schism in the fledgling woman suffrage movement. By integrating gender analysis and political history, Suffrage Reconstructed offers a new interpretation of the Civil War–era remaking of American democracy, placing African American activists and women's rights advocates at the heart of nineteenth-century American conversations about public policy, civil rights, and the franchise.

Genres: History, Gender

248 pages, Hardcover

First published September 8, 2015

Reviews

[John Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

How did American legislators refuse 50% of the population of the vote when finally moving granting African American men the enfranchisement of voting? This well researched book reviews that decision, including that Susan B. Anthony played into racist politics in an attempt to secure the right to vote of women.

Free fully documented how our nation moved from denying citizens the right to vote using land ownership to color and sex. When voting was permitted by those who owned certain assets, some women in Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey could vote in local elections, although only New Jersey allowed women to vote after the Revolution. But as people moved to cities and less people owned land, land ownership was more difficult to use for voting. Between 1790 and 1950 the five original slaveholding colonies eliminated or vastly decreased the taxation requirements to permit lower income whites to vote. Politics started to open up – newspapers, civic engagement, and the introduction of galleries to allow witness lawmakers making the sausage.

While poorer whites and free African Americans could vote in some states – including Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Georgia, Texas, and Vermont. But these states moved in the wrong direction as years progressed.

There was push back after the War of 1812. Poor veterans held that their service in the war entitled them to vote. Black men who had served were denied a ballot while white men who paid their way out of service were able to vote. Yet, repeatedly voters rejected giving Blacks the right to vote – in 1846 and 1860 in New York, in Connecticut and Wisconsin in 1847, Michigan in 1850, and Iowa in 1957. Black men pushed harder during the Civil War, coming together for annual conventions pushing for their right to vote.

It was interesting how both those advocating for the rights of Blacks and women coined the efforts to secure voting rights. Many used the words of our founding fathers to claim they had the right to vote. Sexism also came out repeatedly. The sexism, even over 100 years old was hard to read.
Even more difficult t understand was how Susan B Anthony joined forces with racist politicians to try to past voting rights. It would be interesting to read more on her controversial work.

[Abbie]

Just couldn’t get into this one. Sort of repetitive.

[Hawkins · Rating 3 out of 5]

So this is how you become and expert, you read a lot of books about the same thing. This was really 3.5 *'s It seemed as though the author was writing from the side of the southern democrats. One issue that I did appreciate is her research about how the language of the 15th amendment, (really the 14th amendment) was presented and sold to the 39th Congress through (founding) father, son and brother legacy of the Constitution. You know brothers in arms...

[MHS Reference Librarian]

Ordered 11/2015