=Abolition of Property Qualifications.=—­By many minor victories rather than by any spectacular triumphs did the advocates of manhood suffrage carry the day.  Slight gains were made even during the Revolution or shortly afterward.  In Pennsylvania, the mechanics, by taking an active part in the contest over the Constitution of 1776, were able to force the qualification down to the payment of a small tax.  Vermont came into the union in 1792 without any property restrictions.  In the same year Delaware gave the vote to all men who paid taxes.  Maryland, reckoned one of the most conservative of states, embarked on the experiment of manhood suffrage in 1809; and nine years later, Connecticut, equally conservative, decided that all taxpayers were worthy of the ballot.

Five states, Massachusetts, New York, Virginia, Rhode Island, and North Carolina, remained obdurate while these changes were going on around them; finally they had to yield themselves.  The last struggle in Massachusetts took place in the constitutional convention of 1820.  There Webster, in the prime of his manhood, and John Adams, in the closing years of his old age, alike protested against such radical innovations as manhood suffrage.  Their protests were futile.  The property test was abolished and a small tax-paying qualification was substituted.  New York surrendered the next year and, after trying some minor restrictions for five years, went completely over to white manhood suffrage in 1826.  Rhode Island clung to her freehold qualification through thirty years of agitation.  Then Dorr’s Rebellion, almost culminating in bloodshed, brought about a reform in 1843 which introduced a slight tax-paying qualification as an alternative to the freehold.  Virginia and North Carolina were still unconvinced.  The former refused to abandon ownership of land as the test for political rights until 1850 and the latter until 1856.  Although religious discriminations and property qualifications for office holders were sometimes retained after the establishment of manhood suffrage, they were usually abolished along with the monopoly of government enjoyed by property owners and taxpayers.

[Illustration:  THOMAS DORR AROUSING HIS FOLLOWERS]

At the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the white male industrial workers and the mechanics of the Northern cities, at least, could lay aside the petition for the ballot and enjoy with the free farmer a voice in the government of their common country.  “Universal democracy,” sighed Carlyle, who was widely read in the United States, “whatever we may think of it has declared itself the inevitable fact of the days in which we live; and he who has any chance to instruct or lead in these days must begin by admitting that ...  Where no government is wanted, save that of the parish constable, as in America with its boundless soil, every man being able to find work and recompense for himself, democracy may subsist; not elsewhere.”  Amid the grave misgivings of the first generation of statesmen, America was committed to the great adventure, in the populous towns of the East as well as in the forests and fields of the West.