Out of this prevailing idea grew many of the interpretations and partial enforcements. A legislator, magistrate or judge might be the very opposite of venal, and yet be irresistibly impelled by the force of training and association to take the current view of the unassailable rights and superiority of property. It would be biassed, in fact, ridiculous to say that the privileges and exemptions enjoyed by the rich were altogether the outcome of corruption by bribes. There is a much more subtle and far more effective and dangerous form of corruption. This is corruption of the mind. For innumerable centuries all government had proceeded, perhaps not avowedly, but in reality, upon the settled and consistent principle that the sanctity of property was superior to considerations of human life, and that a man of property could not very well be a criminal and a peril to the community. Under various disguises church, college, newspaper, politician, judge, all were expositors of this principle.
The people were drugged with laudations of property. But these teachings were supplemented by other methods which added to their effectiveness. We have seen how after the Revolution the propertied classes withheld suffrage from those who lacked property. They feared that property would no longer be able to dominate Government. Gradually they were forced to yield to the popular demand and allow manhood suffrage. This seemed to them a new and affrighting force; if votes were to determine the personnel and policy of Government, then the propertyless, being in the majority, would overwhelm them eventually and pass an entirely new code of laws.
In one State after another, the propertied class were driven, after a prolonged struggle, to grant citizens a vote, whether they had property or 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?
CORRUPTION AT THE POLLS.
A systematic corruption of the voters was now begun. The policy of bribing certain legislators to vote for bank, railroad, insurance company and other charters was extended to reach down into ward politics, and to corrupt the voters at the springs of power. With a part of the money made in the frauds of trade or from exactions for land, the propertied interests, operating at first by personal entry into politics and then through the petty politicians of the day, packed caucuses and primaries and bought votes at the polls. This was equally true of both city and rural communities. In many of the rural sections the morals of the people were exceedingly low, despite their church-going habits. The cities contained, as they always do contain, a certain quota of men, products of the industrial system, men of the slums and alleyways, so far gone in destitution or liquor that they no longer had manhood or principle. Along came the election funds of the traders, landholders and bankers to corrupt these men still further by the buying of their votes and the inciting of them to commit the crime of repeating at the polls. Exalted society and the slums began to work together; the money of the one purchased the votes of the other. Year after year this corruption fund increased until in the fall of 1837 the money raised in New York City by the bankers alone amounted to $60,000. Although this sum was meager compared to the enormous corruption funds which were employed in subsequent years, it was a sum which, at that time, could do great execution. Ignorant immigrants were persuaded by offerings of money to vote this way or that and to repeat their votes. Presently the time came when batches of convicts were brought from the prisons to do repeating, and overawe the polls in many precincts.[138]
As for that class of voters who could not be bribed and who voted according to their conceptions of the issues involved, they were influenced in many ways:—by the partisan arguments of newspapers and of political speech-makers. These agencies of influencing the body politic were indirectly controlled by the propertied interests in one form or another. A virtual censorship was exercised by wealth; if a newspaper dared advocate any issue not approved by the vested interests, it at once felt the resentment of that class in the withdrawal of advertisements and of those privileges which banks could use or abuse with such ruinous effect.
POLITICAL SUBSERVIENCY.
Finally, both of the powerful political parties were under the domination of wealth; not, to be sure, openly so, but insidiously. Differences of issue there assuredly were, but these issues did not in any way affect the basic structure of society, or threaten the overthrow of any of the fundamental privileges held by the rich. The political campaigns, except that later contest which decided the eventual fate of chattel slavery, were, in actuality, sham battles. Never were the masses so enthusiastic since the campaign of 1800 when Jefferson was elected, as they were in 1832 when they sided with President Jackson in his fight against the United States Bank. They considered this contest as one between the people, on the one side, and, on the other, the monied aristocracy of the country. The United States Bank was effaced; but the State banks promptly took over that share of the exploitative process so long carried on by the United States Bank and the people, as has already been explained, were no better off than they were before. One set of ruling capitalists had been put down only to make way for another.