Chapter 4

Who Could Take Part: Voting, Slavery, and Indigenous Nations, 1790s to 1820s

By The editors of the Democratic Republican PartyPublished How we check facts

The short answer

There was no single rule. States set voting qualifications, and those rules changed over time: some required property or taxpaying, New Jersey allowed some women and free Black residents to vote until 1807, and New York in 1821 dropped property rules for white men while imposing a $250 freehold requirement on Black men. Enslaved people and most Native people were outside the electorate, and the party's leading presidents were slaveholders.

Historical setting

The Democratic-Republican Party spoke the language of popular government. Jefferson's first inaugural address praised a government "where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law" avalon.law.yale.edu. A reader today can easily hear "every man" as "every person." The record does not support that reading.

The federal Constitution left voting qualifications largely to the states. That means any sentence beginning "In the early republic, voters were..." is almost certainly wrong for some state in some year. This chapter gives dated, state-specific examples instead of one national rule, and it treats three groups separately: free people excluded by property, sex, or race; enslaved people; and Indigenous nations.

Property and taxpaying rules

Many states tied voting to property or taxes in the period the party emerged. Two state constitutions from 1776 show different approaches:

  • New Jersey, 1776. The constitution gave the vote to "all inhabitants of this Colony, of full age, who are worth fifty pounds proclamation money, clear estate in the same," and who had lived in the county for twelve months before the election avalon.law.yale.edu.
  • Pennsylvania, 1776. The constitution gave the vote to "Every freemen of the full age of twenty-one Years" who had lived in the state for a year "and paid public taxes during that time," with an exception for sons of freeholders avalon.law.yale.edu.

Akhil Reed Amar notes that the federal Constitution omitted property qualifications for leading federal offices, "unlike almost every state constitution then on the books" akhilamar.com. Voting rules, however, remained a state matter.

These rules changed during the party's lifetime, and not always toward broader access for everyone. New York is the clearest example. Peter J. Galie, writing in the Albany Law Review, explains that the state's 1777 constitution required property ownership to vote, while the 1821 constitution removed property ownership as a condition for white men and replaced it with residence plus taxpaying, militia service, firefighting, or highway labor albanylawreview.org.

Evidence

New Jersey: women and free Black voters until 1807

New Jersey's 1776 clause said "inhabitants," not "men" avalon.law.yale.edu. The New Jersey State Library's suffrage timeline records that the 1776 constitution "allows women and free blacks to vote under certain conditions," that election laws of 1790 and 1797 used "he" and "she" when referring to voters, and that a revised voting law of 1807 "limits voting to 'free, white males'" libguides.njstatelib.org.

Two qualifications keep this from becoming a simple story. First, the property requirement still applied. Smithsonian Magazine, summarizing work by the National Park Service's Bob Blythe, notes that under coverture married women could not meet the wealth requirement smithsonianmag.com. Second, historians disagree about why the clause was written as it was and why it was repealed. Smithsonian reports historians Judith Apter Klinghoffer and Lois Elkis describing scholars as "puzzled" by the original provision smithsonianmag.com. This site has not reviewed their article directly and does not adopt a single explanation for 1807.

New York: race written into suffrage in 1821

Galie quotes the 1821 New York constitution requiring a "m[e]n of colour" to "be seized and possessed of a freehold estate of the value of two hundred and fifty dollars, over and above all debts and incumbrances charged thereon" before voting. He calls it the first provision in the state's constitutional history to make race part of its constitutional fabric albanylawreview.org. The effect was large: citing Phyllis F. Field and his own earlier work, Galie reports that in 1825 only 298 of nearly 6,000 free adult Black New Yorkers met the requirement albanylawreview.org.

Galie also places the decision in party politics. He writes that Black voters in New York City had become essential support for the fading Federalist Party, quoting a description of them voting against "a Republican organization in deep national alliance with Southern slaveholders" albanylawreview.org. The convention that adopted the rule expanded the vote for white men in the same document. Broader access for one group and narrower access for another happened at once.

Slavery and the party's leaders

The Constitution counted "three fifths of all other Persons," meaning enslaved people, when apportioning House seats, and each state's electoral votes equaled its House and Senate seats archives.gov. Enslaved people had no vote, but their numbers added to the political weight of the states that held them. The chapter on the election of 1800 explains how scholars assess that effect.

The party's three most powerful leaders were slaveholders:

  • Thomas Jefferson. The White House Historical Association states that over his lifetime he owned over 600 enslaved people, the most of any American president whitehousehistory.org.
  • James Madison. Hannah Scruggs, writing in Encyclopedia Virginia, reports that at any given time more than 100 enslaved people lived and worked at Montpelier, and that researchers have identified 300 individuals enslaved there. Madison sold sixteen enslaved people to a cousin in Louisiana in 1834. After his death, his widow's debts led to further transfers and sales encyclopediavirginia.org.
  • James Monroe. Monroe's Highland, part of William and Mary, reports 53 unfree people at Highland under Monroe's ownership and 178 individuals known to have been enslaved by Monroe during his adult life; when he sold the Highland farmland in 1828, many of those enslaved there were sold to the Deep South highland.org.

Government under the party also acted on slavery in both directions. The Miller Center records that in 1807 Congress passed, at Jefferson's request, a law banning the importation of enslaved people after January 1, 1808 millercenter.org. The domestic slave trade continued, as the Monroe and Madison records above show. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 admitted Missouri as a slave state while barring slavery north of 36 degrees 30 minutes in the rest of the Louisiana Territory archives.gov.

Indigenous nations and the origins of removal

The Constitution's apportionment clause excluded "Indians not taxed" from the population count archives.gov. Native nations were not part of the electorate the party courted, and their lands were a central object of federal policy.

The roots of removal policy appear well before the Indian Removal Act of 1830. In a letter to William Henry Harrison, governor of Indiana Territory, dated February 27, 1803, Jefferson described a plan to expand government trading houses and to welcome influential individuals running into debt, because "when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay," they would become willing to "lop th[em off] by a cession of lands" tjrs.monticello.org. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation publishes this extract from the press copy in the Library of Congress tjrs.monticello.org.

The Miller Center's Monroe chronology records Cherokee leaders arriving in Washington in January 1824 to oppose removal from Georgia, and records Monroe accepting the policy of Indian removal west of the Mississippi before he left office in 1825 millercenter.org. Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act on May 28, 1830. The Library of Congress describes it as authorizing the president to grant land west of the Mississippi in exchange for Indian lands within existing state borders, and records that during the forced removal of the Cherokee in 1838 and 1839, about 4,000 people died guides.loc.gov. That act belongs to the Jacksonian era, after the Democratic-Republican coalition had broken apart, but its policy origins run through the earlier administrations.

What the evidence does not show

It does not show a single national electorate. Any claim that "only white male property owners could vote" or that "all white men could vote" is wrong for some state at some date.

It does not show that the 1807 New Jersey law was the work of one party acting alone, or that its motive is settled. The sources checked for this chapter disagree on emphasis.

It does not show that enslaved people, women, or Native nations were passive. The sources here document the rules imposed on them. Their own political actions, petitions, resistance, and diplomacy are a larger subject than this chapter can cover and will be treated in future source-checked articles.

It does not show that the party's language of liberty was insincere or that it was fully realized. Both readings flatten the record. Statements of liberty and rules of exclusion existed side by side, often in the same documents and the same lives.

Sources

  1. Constitution of New Jersey, 1776, Avalon Project, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School. avalon.law.yale.edu (locator: Section IV). Accessed 2026-10-28.
  2. Constitution of Pennsylvania, September 28, 1776, Avalon Project, Yale Law School. avalon.law.yale.edu (locator: Plan or Frame of Government, Sect. 6). Accessed 2026-10-28.
  3. Akhil Reed Amar, "Actually, the Electoral College Was a Pro-Slavery Ploy," New York Times, April 6, 2019, as archived on the author's site. akhilamar.com (locator: p. 2, para. 1). Accessed 2026-10-28.
  4. Peter J. Galie, "The 1821 Constitutional Convention and the Constitutionalization of Racial Discrimination in New York," Albany Law Review 87, no. 4 (2023 to 2024): 1147. albanylawreview.org (locator: pp. 1147 to 1148, 1154 to 1155). Accessed 2026-10-28.
  5. New Jersey State Library, "New Jersey Suffrage Timeline," Votes for Women research guide. libguides.njstatelib.org (locator: entries for 1776, 1790, 1797, 1807). Accessed 2026-10-28.
  6. Kat Eschner, "For a Few Decades in the 18th Century, Women and African-Americans Could Vote in New Jersey," Smithsonian Magazine, November 16, 2017. smithsonianmag.com (locator: full article). Accessed 2026-10-28.
  7. National Archives, "The Constitution of the United States: A Transcription." archives.gov (locator: Art. I, Sec. 2; Art. II, Sec. 1). Accessed 2026-10-28.
  8. White House Historical Association, "Thomas Jefferson," biography. whitehousehistory.org (locator: section on slavery). Accessed 2026-10-28.
  9. Hannah Scruggs, "The Enslaved Community at Montpelier," Encyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanities, 2021. encyclopediavirginia.org (locator: full entry). Accessed 2026-10-28.
  10. James Monroe's Highland, William and Mary, "Highland and Slavery." highland.org (locator: full page). Accessed 2026-10-28.
  11. Miller Center, University of Virginia, "Thomas Jefferson: Key Events." millercenter.org (locator: March 2, 1807; January 1, 1808). Accessed 2026-10-28.
  12. National Archives, "Missouri Compromise (1820)," Milestone Documents. archives.gov (locator: summary). Accessed 2026-10-28.
  13. Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Jefferson Quotes and Family Letters, "Extract from Thomas Jefferson to William Henry Harrison, 27 Feb. 1803." tjrs.monticello.org (locator: extract; source note PrC (DLC), PTJ 39:590). Accessed 2026-10-28.
  14. Miller Center, University of Virginia, "James Monroe: Key Events." millercenter.org (locator: entries for 1824 and 1825). Accessed 2026-10-28.
  15. Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801, Avalon Project, Yale Law School. avalon.law.yale.edu (locator: paragraph 2). Accessed 2026-10-28.
  16. Library of Congress, "Indian Removal Act: Primary Documents in American History," research guide. guides.loc.gov (locator: introduction). Accessed 2026-10-28.

Last checked against its sources on October 28, 2026. Report a correction.