directly contrary to the principle that in a true republic there is but one estate-the people.' Kent was thus driven to fall back on the argument that property qualifications were needed to protect the farmers.' But that made farmers into a mere interest, and why should farming, as an interest,
get more protection than any other? Manning the barriers against democracy was a losing cause
as early as the 1780s and by 1800 was a lost one. By 1790 five states permitted all males (in
some of them only white males) the vote for some or all offices, provided they paid tax. These
states, and others, increasingly recognized residency, rather than land-ownership, as the
qualification for attachment' to the state, and most set the period as two years (some, one). It struck Europeans as amazing that, after arriving, penniless, from a country where they could never have a vote at all, even if their ancestors had lived there a thousand years, and however rich they grew, they could get off a ship in New York, cross the Hudson to New Jersey, and exercise a vote the following year-in five they would be voting for the president. New Jersey was particularly free and easy. From 1776 it had given the vote to allworth' 50 pounds after a year's
residence and election officials even permitted women to vote if they thus qualified (until 1809).
The wartime inflation made the old property qualification pretty meaningless anyway, and states
like North Carolina and New Hampshire, with poll-taxes and taxpayer qualifications, adopted
near-universal male suffrage as a matter of course. By 1783 the eligible electorate in the states
ran from 60 to 90 percent, with most states edging towards the l00 percent mark. New states, like
Kentucky, automatically embraced universal white male adult suffrage when they were admitted,
if not before. But while states rapidly enfranchised white males, they usually disenfranchised
free blacks at the same time. Rhode Island, true to its tradition of being odd man out, alone
resisted the democratic flood. Its qualification of a $134 freehold-the dollar had been fixed by
law in 1792-was enforced increasingly fiercely and half the male citizens were disenfranchised.
A remarkable letter has survived which gives an indication of how the arrival of democracy
was seen by one highly intelligent American. It was written in 18o6 to the Italian nationalist
Philip Mazzei by Benjamin Latrobe, an Englishman who had settled in Philadelphia ten years
before and had become America's first professional architect. He wrote:
After the adoption of the federal constitution, the extension of the right of Suffrage in all
the states to the majority of all the adult male citizens ... has spread actual and practical
democracy and political equality over the whole union ... The want of learning and
science in the majority is one of those things which strike foreigners who visit us very
forcibly. Our representatives to all our Legislative bodies, National as well as of the
States, are elected by the majority unlearned. For instance from Philadelphia and its
environs we sent to Congress not one man of letters. One of them indeed is a lawyer but
of no eminence, another a good Mathematician but, when elected, he was a Clerk in a
bank. The others are plain farmers. From the next county is sent a Blacksmith, and from
just over the river a Butcher. Our state legislature does not contain one individual of
superior talents. The fact is, that superior talents actually excite distrust.
But Latrobe was not discouraged. America was about getting on,' and he was getting on very well. He admitted thatto a cultivated mind, to a man of letters, to a lover of the arts [America
might] present a very unpleasant picture.' But the solid and general advantages are undeniable.' There is no doubt whatsoever,' he concluded, that [democracy] produces the greatest sum of human happiness that perhaps any nation ever enjoyed.' Since the arrival of democracy made thetyranny of the majority,' feared by Jefferson,
Madison, and others, a real threat, who was to protect minorities-or indeed the ordinary citizen