The Radicalism of the American Revolution

by Gordon S. Wood

In the face of widespread enthusiasm for universal manhood suffrage, Kent and the other Federalists desperately sought to maintain a special freehold qualification for the electors of the state senate. Ten years ago, said Kent, such universal suffrage would never have been proposed, but “so rapid has been the career of our vibration” that few now could resist bowing “before the idol of universal suffrage.” In their tortured polemics the Federalists tried to explain why special property qualifications for the senate’s electorate were needed: that the senate had to be differently composed, that the property qualification was “a sort of moral and independent test of character, in the electorate, which we could get at in no other practicable mode,” that it was the only way to protect the state against the onrushing rabble. But when confronted with Republican arguments that such a distinction in the electorate was “an odious remnant of aristocracy” perpetuating a privileged order in a republic where “there is but one estate—the people,” the Federalists backed away and soon settled on the one point they thought their Jeffersonian opponents would accept—the wholesomeness of yeomen farmers and the need to protect their landed property and the “farming interest” from other opposing interests.49