not. In New York State unqualified manhood suffrage was adopted in 1822, but in other States it was more difficult to bring about this revolutionary change. The fundamental suffrage law of New Jersey, for instance, remained, for more than sixty years after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, in accordance with an act passed by the Provincial Congress of New Jersey on July 2, 1776, two days before the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, or according to some authorities, on the very day of its adoption. Among other requirements this act (1 Laws, N. J. p. 4.) decreed that the voter must be "worth £50 proclamation money, clear estate within the colony." The fourth section of an act passed by the New Jersey Legislature in June, 1820 (1 Laws N. J. p. 741), expressly reenacted this same property qualification. By about the year 1840, however, nearly all the States had adopted manhood suffrage, so far as it applied to whites. The severest and most dramatic conflict took place in Rhode Island. In 1762 an act had been passed declaring that the possession of £40 was necessary to become qualified as a voter. This law continued in force in Rhode Island for more than eighty years. In the years 1811, 1819, 1824, 1829, 1832 and 1834 the workingmen (or the mechanics, as the official reports styled them), made the most determined efforts to have this property qualification abolished, but the propertied classes, holding the legislative power, declined to make any change. Under such a law it was easy for one-third of the total number of resident male adults to have the exclusive decisions in elections; the largest vote ever polled in Rhode Island, was in the Presidential election of 1840, when 8,662 votes were cast, in a total adult male population of permanent resident citizens of about 24,000. The result of this hostility of the propertied classes was a rising in 1840 of the workingmen in what is slurringly misdescribed in conventional history as "Dorr's Rebellion,"—an event the real history of which has not as yet been told. This movement eventually compelled the introduction in Rhode Island of suffrage without the property qualification.
How did the propertied classes meet this extension of suffrage throughout the United States?