- In this video and the one that follows,
I'm going to give you a brief overview
of citizenship rights in early America.
Who was considered a citizen?
Did having citizenship mean that you had the right to vote?
How did citizenship and voting rights change over time?
So let's go back to the beginning,
when the U.S. Constitution took effect in 1789.
Shortly thereafter,
Congress passed the first
Federal Naturalization Act of 1790.
Remember that naturalization
is the process by which someone becomes a citizen.
That act said,
that any free white person of good character
could be a U.S. citizen.
They had to live in the United States for two years,
later they changed it to five years,
and in the state where they applied for citizenship,
for at least one year,
and then take an oath to support the Constitution.
Who did that include and who did it exclude?
Any white man who wasn't an indentured servant,
meaning someone who had sold
a number of years of their labor
for passage to the United States,
or convicted of a crime,
was eligible to become a citizen
and therefore enjoy all of the protections
listed in the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Single or widowed white women
could become citizens on their own.
Married white women and the children of naturalized citizens
also inherited citizenship from their husbands and fathers.
This was an era when women and children
were considered the property of the male head of household,
so their identity as citizens was tied to his.
But enjoying all the protections
listed in the Constitution and Bill of Rights
didn't necessarily mean having the right to vote,
because the right to vote
was not listed in the Constitution.
Having U.S. citizenship
didn't automatically mean that you could vote.
States control elections,
not the Federal Government,
and most states at this time
had property requirements for voting.
That means that to vote,
a white man had to have a certain amount of money or land.
This was based on the idea
that only people who owned a stake in the community
should be able to vote,
so this limited the vote to wealthier white men.
White women couldn't vote,
even though they could be citizens.
The Naturalization Act of 1790
excluded a lot of people who lived in the United States
from being eligible for citizenship.
Indigenous people were not eligible to become citizens.
People of African descent,
both those who were enslaved and those who were free,
were not eligible to become citizens,
although some states did permit free black men
to own property and vote
if they met those property requirements.
That shows us another example of how voting rights
and citizenship were not necessarily intertwined.
However, over the course of the next 40 years or so,
whiteness became more and more synonymous
with voting rights in the United States.
By the 1830s,
almost all states had removed
their property requirements for voting
and instead permitted any free white man
over the age of 21 to vote.
And as state legislatures rewrote these laws,
the states that had permitted property to black men to vote,
now outlawed them from doing so.
Now it's worth noting that at that time,
a larger percentage of the population could vote
in the United States than in anywhere else in the world,
but voting became strictly the domain of white men.
That's a quick overview of the first few decades
of citizenship and voting rights in early America.
In the next video,
we'll talk about how those rights evolved
from the 1840s through the 1870s.