The right of suffrage, being the creature of the organic law,
may be modified or withdrawn by the sovereign authority
which conferred it, without inflicting any punishment on
those who are disqualified.

-- Anderson v. Baker ( OCTOBER 1865)

AFTER 1850, CONFLICT OVER THE RIGHT TO VOTE heightened dramati-
cally. For the next seventy years, the issue was often on center stage, and al-
ways backstage, in American political life. Heated public debates surrounded
the post--Civil War enfranchisement of African Americans, as well as their
disfranchisement a generation later. Advocates of women's suffrage fought
battle after battle in the states and in Washington. Workers, immigrants, tran-
sients, Native Americans, paupers, and the illiterate often found themselves
contending with rules that would, or did, bar them from the polls. ¹

The diverse forces and dynamics that had promoted an expansion of the
franchise before the 1850s remained active. The demands of war and the
pressure to enfranchise soldiers and ex-soldiers prompted various efforts to
broaden the right to vote; political parties jockeyed even more incessantly
to shape the electorate to their advantage; thinly populated states sought to

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