Replication Data for: Partisan Polarization on Black Suffrage, 1785-1868

This article offers a new perspective on the history of American democratization, tracing the evolution of conflict over black suffrage from the heatedly contested disenfranchisements of the early Republic to the sustained efforts to secure equal voting rights in the pre-Civil War era. It draws on new data on state politics, as well as extensive case studies, to substantially expand our descriptive understanding of the ideological and partisan connotations of African American political rights, providing the first systematic empirical account of the development of partisans’ positions before the Civil War. In contrast to existing literature, it identifies a previously undocumented transformation in how legislator positions on black suffrage polarized along party lines. It also offers a new interpretation for this racial realignment. It presents evidence that the thousands of individual legislators who voted on the issue were responding less to the potential electoral consequences of black voting than to competing efforts of party leaders and social movements to frame the denial of free black suffrage as necessary for national unity, a necessary accommodation to racist white public opinion, or as complicity in human slavery and a violation of republican equality. Integrating the earlier period of disenfranchisement and antislavery activism recasts standard party-driven accounts of the extension of voting rights during Reconstruction as the culmination of a long process of biracial social movement organizing, enriching our understanding of how both electoral and programmatic concerns contribute to suffrage reforms. Its account of partisan polarization over race provides us with a deeper grasp of how white supremacy was established and contested in American history, and of the process by which conflict over the boundaries and meaning of citizenship has at times become a central cleavage in American politics.