1976/04/01 by B. Katherine Brown · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Business, Management and Accounting · Arts and Humanities · #American Constitutional Law and Politics #American History and Culture #American Sports and Literature
paper · doi:10.2307/1922163
openalex publication_date 1976/04/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
SINCE the mid-I95os historians have engaged in a spirited debate over the extent of political democracy in Massachusetts before i69i. This J debate has been concerned with the differences between local and provincial suffrage qualifications, and with changes in both over time; with differences of size between the potential electorate (the free adult males), the formally qualified electorate (the freemen), and the number of men who actually voted; with the significance of the religious qualification; with the problem of illegal voting; with difficulties in interpreting the language of records and laws; and with questions arising from the bias, incompleteness, and ambiguity of sources. The reason for exploring these issues is to determine by intelligent interpretation of the evidence whether the polity of the Bay Colony can be appropriately characterized as democratic or oligarchic. One outcome of the discussion has been a great increase of our detailed knowledge of political policies and practices in early Massachusetts; another has been a shift of emphasis in the definition of the term political democracy. Earlier historians generally focused on the number who could vote or hold office, and pointed to the existence of large unenfranchised classes of people as a sign of oligarchy or lack of democracy. More recently, some scholars have doubted that the right to vote or hold office, even if widespread, signified a democratic polity. For them, such elements of the political culture as elitism, a spirit of deference, or the continuity or discontinuity of leadership provide the real keys to the question. Although these subjects should not be 'neglected, the fact remains that the definition of a polity as democratic depends fundamentally on the extent of the franchise. It is with the franchise, therefore, that we should be centrally concerned. Contributions to the debate have been so numerous and scattered that the course of the controversy can be traced only with difficulty. This article attempts to rectify that situation by giving a short chronological survey of the recent historiography of the seventeenth-century Massachusetts franchise and by presenting new evidence that may help to clarify several important points relating to the extent of the suffrage, the meaning of the franchise laws, and