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Citizenship

Throughout most of U.S. history, citizenship has been largely the right of white men. It has, therefore, been integral to the definition of masculinity for white men. Participatory citizenship has, of course, expanded since the early nineteenth century to include African Americans, Native Americans, women, and other groups, but this expansion has occurred in conjunction with attempts (often successful) to exclude nonwhites and women.

The Colonial and Revolutionary Eras

In colonial America (as in England), citizenship and voting rights were grounded in property ownership and whiteness, which were inextricably intertwined with constructions of masculinity. Citizenship, voting rights, and (in most cases) property holding were confined to white men and were considered the foundations of manly independence. They were also thought to ensure disinterested political action, by men, in the best interest of society's propertyless dependents— such as women and African-American slaves. Many more men could vote in the American colonies than in England— in both the North and the South, approximately 50 percent of white men met the property requirement. But citizenship and voting remained the privilege of white male property owners—a minority of the population in every colony. As much as 80 percent of the total population—women, slaves, servants, children, and propertyless white men—were excluded from the rights of citizenship.

The republican ideology that informed the American Revolution reaffirmed, at least initially, the interrelationships among citizenship, manhood, whiteness, independence, and property ownership. For Thomas Jefferson, the ideal citizen was a yeoman farmer whose small landholdings assured that he was not politically or economically dependent upon any other individual. After the Revolution, citizenship and the franchise (the right to vote) remained confined to propertyowning white men. While the ability to vote was a public sign of prosperity and manly competence, it also entailed recognizing the manly virtue of others. Men were expected to vote for a candidate based on their knowledge of his character. Male virtue, demonstrated through property ownership and the acknowledgment of voting peers, provided the main qualifications, in theory at least, for political office. Republicanism and deferential politics, then, assumed a hierarchy of manliness: Officeholders presumably possessed superior and more virtuous manliness than other men. In practice, this meant that local elites dominated politics, influencing votes through intimidation, or by supplying alcohol and entertainment on Election Day. Alcohol consumption and other forms of Election Day recreation reasserted the homosocial nature of both political participation and access to the public sphere of civil society.

The Era of the Common Man

Historians have labeled the early nineteenth century the Era of the Common Man in the United States because, although most Americans remained excluded from the political process, the period from 1800 to 1860 did witness an extension of the franchise to include propertyless white men, with a general increase in these men's social and political power. By the 1830s, most states had abolished property-based suffrage (voting) requirements for white men over twenty-one years of age. This extension of voting rights was part of a larger move from strict social hierarchy and deference to a democratized understanding of citizenship.

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