One of the ill effects of a century of sectional controversy over the status of the negro is that every privilege to which his name is attached is at once seized upon by both sides as something abnormal. “Negro suffrage,” for instance, probably seems to most people a modern, novel and unusual practice, which requires some kind of special justification. The truth is that, though there were plently of restrictions upon the suffrage from the earliest colonial times to the present day, those founded on race came in late, slowly, and in some communities not at all. The original American idea of the suffrage was that it was to be exercised only by the better class of the community, in Massachusetts and in Connecticut by members of the Congregational Church; in other colonies, by people owning real estate or paying a property tax or both. Most of the colonies were constantly being increased by a class of white people who came over as indentured servants with an obligation to serve for a term of years, and were ineligible for the suffrage. But those people served out their terms, acquired property, founded families, and came into the restricted political community. The free negroes as they came along were put on just the same footing, if they had the energy, thrift and fortune to get together the necessary property.

To this general principle, previous to the Revolution, there were two half exceptions and two complete ones. North Carolina from 1715 to 1734 and Virginia from 1723 to 1733 restricted the suffrage, but the British government objected on the ground that “it cannot be right to strip all persons of a black complexion from those rights which are so justly valuable to any free man.” South Carolina, where the negroes became more numerous than the whites, took away the suffrage in 1716 and never restored it,—an example followed by Georgia in 1761. Those two states repeated the disqualification in their revolutionary constitutions, but it was fifteen years before any others of the Southern States thought it necessary. During the Revolution some thousand of negroes were enlisted in the Continental and State armies; those of them who were slaves were set free, and it was not a time when people were disposed to take away a privilege hedged about with such difficulties that probably not one-third of the adult white men could vote.