Summary
Contents
How have African Americans voted over time? What types of candidates and issues have been effective in drawing people to vote? These are just two of the questions that The African American Electorate: A Statistical History attempts to answer by bringing together all of the extant, fugitive, and recently discovered registration data on African American voters from Colonial America to the present. This pioneering work also traces the history of the laws dealing with enfranchisement and disenfranchisement of African Americans and provides the election return data for African American candidates in national and subnational elections over this same time span. Combining insightful narrative, tabular data, and original maps, The African American Electorate offers students and researchers the opportunity, for the first time, to explore the relationship between voters and political candidates, identify critical variables, and situate African Americans’ voting behavior and political phenomena in the context of America’s political history.
Chapter 6: The African American Electorate in Antebellum and Civil War America, 1788–1867
Chapter 6: The African American Electorate in Antebellum and Civil War America, 1788–1867
The 1787 Constitution enabled the transition from a confederation of states organized under the Articles of Confederation and operating through the Continental Congress to a federalist system of government. In the Continental Congress only representatives of states could vote, ...