Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

by Kate Masur

Black men’s right to vote was also on the Liberty Party’s agenda across the free states. Most contemporaries uncoupled the vote—which they viewed as a “political” right—from such basic “civil” rights as the right to move freely from place to place, enter into contracts, and enjoy equal protection of the laws. Some called access to the vote and office-holding a “privilege,” to emphasize that these prerogatives were available only to a certain elevated subset of people. The relatively expansive definition of citizenship that northerners had developed since the 1820s was compatible with this rather restrictive vision of the vote. White northerners regularly argued that all free, native-born people were citizens (except perhaps paupers, vagrants, and criminals), but most also insisted that only certain citizens—namely, white men—were entitled to vote. Neither Black activists nor, increasingly, women activists were willing to settle for this understanding of the franchise. Black and white women had become increasingly involved in public life in the 1820s and 1830s, working on a variety of causes including abolitionism, poor relief, prison reform, temperance, and protection for Native Americans. By the mid-1840s, women activists increasingly attacked sex-based inequality in public policy. They made some progress in persuading state legislatures to repeal married women’s property laws—laws that required women to forfeit control over their property to their husbands when they marr...