The State That Allowed Women and Black People to Vote in 1776

During the tumultuous days that saw the United States sever ties to Great Britain, the task of forming a new nation did not fall solely to the Founding Fathers.

“Imagine the world of 1776; things are moving really quickly,” says Tyler Putman, senior manager of gallery interpretation at the Museum of the American Revolution. In May, ahead of declaring independence, the Continental Congress delegates “provide instructions to each of their member states that they need to essentially form new governments within each state,” Putnam explains.

The New Jersey Provincial Congress swiftly answered the call. By July 2, 1776, it had finalized a new constitution that enabled suffrage for “all Inhabitants of this Colony of full Age, who are worth Fifty Pounds proclamation Money,” owned property and lived within their voting county for 12 months prior to an election.

There was nothing unusual or unique about this language. Many states required would-be voters to own property, something married women and enslaved people were not legally entitled to back then. Specific mentions of a voter’s gender or race were also absent from other state constitutions.

Yet, over the next 31 years, New Jersey not only served as one of the few states that allowed free African Americans to vote, it also became the only member of the union to grant the same opportunity to single women with enough money to meet the threshold.

During the American Revolution, the concept of women’s suffrage was unconventional but not entirely outlandish. After all, women were heartily contributing to the war effort through boycotts, fundraising and work on the front lines, and the Revolutionary mantra of “no taxation without representation” arguably applied to everyone. Still, non-white men were largely denied suffrage across the country, prompting future historians to wonder whether New Jersey legislators intended to foster such a permissive voting culture.

The ambiguity over women’s voting rights in New Jersey began clearing up in the aftermath of a controversial 1789 congressional election. Along with clamping down on prolonged voting periods and instituting secret ballots, the state’s 1790 electoral reform law stated, “no Person shall be entitled to vote in any other Township or Precinct, than that in which he or she doth actually reside at the Time of the Election.” Through one pronoun, women were explicitly mentioned in the state’s voting laws for the first time.

Limitations remained, however. The reforms applied to only seven of New Jersey’s 13 counties, and the property-ownership provision was still in effect. It wasn’t until 1797 that another law expanded the reforms to all 13 counties and expunged the mention of property, creating a loophole for married women to join their single sisters and widows at the ballot box.

Meanwhile, citizens in the other states watched these progressive voting laws unfold without serious attempts to follow suit. Historians continue to puzzle over just what made New Jersey such fertile ground for this experiment, though Putnam says it might have stemmed from a combination of the state’s large Quaker population and the diverse ideas percolating between the major cities of New York and Philadelphia.

“Why New Jersey? It might have something to do with its long history of radicalism, its position between those two urban centers and the influence of gender equality-minded religious practices,” Putnam says.

Around the time that New Jersey’s voting laws reached their most inclusive level in the early years of the United States, the pendulum for voting access began swinging toward the other extreme. A major factor behind this shift toward exclusion was the rise of America’s first major political parties, which drove greater voter turnout and fueled partisan publications that further intensified interparty animosity.

For example, the 1797 congressional election in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, pitted Democratic-Republican John Condit against Federalist William Crane. After Federalists reportedly found 75 women at the last minute to support their candidate, the Democratic-Republican-aligned Centinel followed with a poem that derided this “prank” of flushing widows from their homes to polling locations.

Women were subjected to criticism by Federalists, too. Depending on the motives of the author, women could be portrayed as “petticoat electors,” suggesting they were too old-fashioned and feeble-minded to think for themselves, or “Wollstonecraftians,” implying they adhered to the radical views of English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.

Along with these efforts to demean women voters in print, legislators from both parties attempted to squash suffrage rights altogether. However, a Federalist referendum for a new constitutional convention aimed at narrowing voting qualifications was defeated in 1799, and a Republican bill intended to do the same failed to pass in 1802.

Just how much of an impact were women and voters of color making in elections of this era? According to poll lists uncovered by the Museum of the American Revolution, women comprised a modest but not insignificant portion of voters from 1797 to 1807, casting 208 ballots over 18 elections to account for 7.7 percent of the total vote. Researchers have confirmed only a small number of Black men voting during that same time period, while definitive proof of a Black female voter has yet to be found.

Biases aside, critics of New Jersey’s inclusive suffrage had legitimate ammunition given the lack of enforcement of voting requirements and reports of enslaved people having cast ballots. Further complicating the issue was the 1804 passage of a gradual abolition law, which theoretically promised more Black people access to the ballot box in a state that still harbored a significant slaveholding population.

The tipping point came after a hotly contested (and ultimately overturned) 1807 election over the location of a new Essex County courthouse, with proponents of the two primary locales, Newark and Elizabethtown, both reportedly stuffing the ballot box to an egregious degree.

“That election becomes a flashpoint for accusations of voter suppression [and] accusations of voter fraud,” Putnam explains. Allegations of fraud included that Philadelphians, some dressed as women, crossed the Delaware River into New Jersey and voted multiple times. “That divisive election gives the New Jersey legislature the excuse it’s kind of been waiting for to make a new change,” Putnam adds.

In November 1807, the legislature enacted another supplement to its voting laws. Following a preamble which noted how “doubts have been raised...in regard to the admission of aliens, females, and persons of color, or negroes to vote in elections,” the statute declared that “no person shall vote in any state or county election for officers in the government of the United States, or of this state unless such person be a free, white, male citizen of this state.”

Thus ended New Jersey’s early era of inclusive voting. It took another six decades and the resolution of Civil War before the 15th Amendment prohibited voter discrimination on the basis of race. Yet, Jim Crow laws and other forms of voter suppression continued to disenfranchise Black Americans for many more years. Meanwhile, it wasn’t until 1920 that the 19th Amendment revived women’s suffrage in the Garden State once more.