At last, in the mid-1770s, the American colonists actually rebelled
against their king and mother country. One of the reasons for the Revolution was most Americans’ persistent
belief that they were Englishmen, entitled to all the historical rights of the
king’s subjects.
Among these historical, sacred and hard-won rights was the right to vote for men who would represent them in Parliament. You know, “no taxation without representation,” and so on.
It’s too easy to forget that only a select class of men were entitled to vote. Ladies, forget it. Poor and landless folks, in general, forget it.
Case in point: in 1788-89, only 43,782 gents voted in the election that put George Washington in the office of president of the newly independent American colonies. In other words, less than 2% of the non-slave population of the colonies (roughly 2.4 million free, 600,000 slave) went to the polls.
Frederick North, 2nd Earl of Guilford, was King George’s prime minister. Lord North’s Tory government decided to call an early parliamentary election in the summer of 1774, to catch their political opponents off guard—a regular election would have been required in spring of 1775.
North had undisputed control of his Banbury bailiwick, the site of his venerable family estate. Only 18 Banbury men had the bloodlines and legal standing to vote. The prime minister’s agent “assembled them for supper, with wine and cheese and a bowl of punch, and they duly elected Lord North.”(1)
Sometimes the same old story peeks from the pages of the history books….
(1) Nick Bunker, An
Empire on the Edge (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 322.
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