The Fight to Vote 1 "The Consent of the Governed" AT THE start of America''s drive toward democracy, many thought about representation and how to give power to the people. Surprisingly few thought about the vote. On June 11, 1776, Philadelphia pulsed with revolution. In quick succession the Continental Congress appointed three committees to prepare for the expected final break with Great Britain. One panel would explore foreign alliances; another would set terms for a confederation of the newly independent states; and the Committee of Five would write the Declaration of Independence. As that document grew in importance over the years, its authors described how it was drafted. The story got better with each retelling. John Adams claimed he had chosen the thirty-three-year-old Thomas Jefferson, just as he had tapped George Washington to lead the Continental Army.

"You should do it," he remembered insisting. "Oh! no," Jefferson replied. "Why will you not? You ought do it." "I will not." "Why?" "Reasons enough." "What can be your reasons?" "Reason first--You are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second--I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular.--You are much otherwise.

Reason third--You can write ten times better than I can." Years later Jefferson would serenely deny such a conversation, claiming it was clear all along that he would write the Declaration. In any case, that Jefferson''s hand held the quill would have echoing consequences. Adams, after all, was a fussily conservative thinker, fearful of what he called the "leveling" tendencies of democracy. The Virginian did more than draft a bill of complaints against the British Crown. His draft began with a statement of principle that became an enduring American creed. Working on a portable desk made to order by a local carpenter and attended by a fourteen-year-old slave boy, Bob Hemmings, Jefferson consulted the "declaration of rights" drafted for the new Virginia constitution. The Pennsylvania Gazette had printed it in full that week.

That document, written by George Mason, began by declaring that "all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety." It went on to proclaim that "all power is vested in, and consequently derived from, the people; that magistrates are their trustees and servants and at all times amenable to them." Jefferson pared, pruned, and reshaped the words into the ringing preamble of America''s Declaration. "We hold these truths to be self-evident"--the last phrase Benjamin Franklin''s felicitous edit--"that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Jefferson''s opening salvo evoked the philosophy of natural rights. Historians recently have been scrutinizing the parchment again and have concluded that the passage ended not with a period but a comma, thus driving forward to the next point: --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. The "consent of the governed"--consent that must be won from "all men," "created equal." It was an idea both revolutionary and "intended to be an expression of the American mind," as Jefferson put it.

This ideal was far from reality at the time it was pronounced in 1776. Young America was anything but a democracy. But the fight to give life to those words was under way, even as Jefferson wrote. That creed would rebuke civic inequality from the beginning. Abolitionists declaimed the preamble in mass meetings in the 1830s. The first women''s rights convention, at Seneca Falls, New York, traced its language. Abraham Lincoln, decrying the spread of slavery in 1854, called that passage "the sheet anchor of American republicanism." He paraphrased it at Gettysburg.

Franklin Roosevelt borrowed it to decry "economic royalists" during the Depression. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. cited it as "the true meaning of [our] creed." Mostly these later Americans focused on its articulation of equality. Less clear, and the basis of two centuries of battle, is the connection between equal citizenship and a government that relies on and is responsible to the people. The power of that idea would impel a movement toward democracy that would take two centuries. "No Will of Their Own" At the time of the Revolution, America was a traditional, stratified society.

A small cluster of wealthy men led the revolt: plantation owners like Washington, attorneys like Adams, and merchants like John Hancock. Americans paid deference. The sense of social hierarchy--and the idea that political power should flow from that rank--was palpable. The colonists inherited political ideas lauding Great Britain''s "balanced" system. That approach split power between the king ("the one"), the nobles ("the few," found in the House of Lords), and the people ("the many," represented in the House of Commons). Such a system of checks, balances, and limits would protect liberty--the right, above all else, to be left alone by a potentially tyrannical government. In England representation was visibly uneven in the eighteenth century. "Rotten boroughs" in the countryside elected members of Parliament from just one family''s estate.

Old Sarum, a verdant but unpopulated mound in rural Salisbury, sent two men to Parliament. In effect some buildings had the right to vote, but not all people. Meanwhile the new industrial cities Manchester and Birmingham went without direct representation. The satirical painter William Hogarth parodied the state of British elections. Colorful images of bribery, drunkenness, and lechery--and a mayor passed out from eating too many oysters--spill across the canvas. When the colonial agitators and pamphleteers of 1776 spoke of "consent of the governed," they echoed the language of the British philosopher John Locke and his notion of the social contract: the idea that rulers and people must forge an agreement for government to be legitimate and that the people had the right to overthrow an unjust state. The colonists weren''t thinking about turning out incumbent officeholders, as we might today, but the much more disruptive task of overthrowing a regime. At first these arguments mostly referred not to individuals and the government but to the colonies and the mother country.

Conflict first flared over the Stamp Act of 1765. The British had insisted that the colonists be satisfied with "virtual" representation in Parliament, just as most Englishmen were. Now the American colonists demanded direct representation in the halls of power. Repeated calls for representation and equal rights--calls directed by colonial Whig leaders toward England--in turn led some within the colonies to ask uncomfortable questions. Religious minorities such as Baptists and Catholics, debtors, and backwoods farmers began to direct similar demands at the governments closer to home. Yet this debate about representation, these first forays toward the ideas of democracy, rarely revolved around voting itself. In the colonies as in England, only white men with a defined amount of property could vote. The restriction dated to the Middle Ages.

A British law enacted in 1430 limited voting to only those with a freehold estate producing an annual income of 40 shillings--enough to "furnish all the necessaries of life, and render the freeholder, if he pleased, an independent man." Colonists solemnly rehashed the arguments for voting limits: only men with a stake in society could be trusted with the franchise. Not just African slaves but indentured servants, tenant farmers, women, children, indebted artisans--many found themselves dependent on someone else. William Blackstone was an English jurist whose influential lectures landed in Boston and Philadelphia bookstores just a few years before the Revolution. The property limit on voting, Blackstone explained, seeks "to exclude such persons as are in so mean a situation that they are esteemed to.