Voting Rights
Voting rights were limited under the Fundamental Orders. All Caucasian males at least twenty-one years of age could become a freeman, or a voter, if he met certain property qualifications. In order to vote, the citizen must have owned real estate assessed at a yearly rental value of 40 shillings ($7.00) or owned taxable property assessed at 40 pounds ($134). Since cattle were the only personal property assessable at this time, voting rights were practically restricted to land owners. African-Americans could not constitutionally vote in Connecticut until 1865, when a decision from the Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors secured their right to vote. Women could not vote until the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was passed in 1920.
Read more about this topic: History Of The Connecticut Constitution
Famous quotes containing the words voting and/or rights:
“It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.”
—Tom Stoppard (b. 1937)
“Unless democracy is to commit suicide by consenting to its own destruction, it will have to find some formidable answer to those who come to it saying: “I demand from you in the name of your principles the rights which I shall deny to you later in the name of my principles.””
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)