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To: AnalogReigns

You got me checking out about voting in Massachusetts during the Revolutionary times.

"Most of the states decree that only white males are eligible to vote, and most limit the vote to those white males who own a certain amount of property. (In other words, if you are a renter you can't vote.) Since only a small minority of white males own enough property to qualify, the vast majority of the population is denied the vote. By some estimates, less than 5% of the population are eligible to vote in the election of 1800.

AND

"1777-1807: Women lose the right to vote in all states.

The states of New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New Jersey which had previously allowed women to vote rescind those rights."

It's amazing that in many places only land owners could vote. Some allowed anyone to vote if they paid any kind of tax in the previous year.

If you look back on our history and try to be objective (impossible) it seems that the war boiled down to the nouveau riche pirates, shippers and businessmen against the old money Loyalists. People like Paul Revere and the other patriots we hear about in Lexington were moneyed landowners, acclaimed silversmiths, and tavern owners - not oppressed, starving dirt farmers.


80 posted on 07/04/2006 11:24:24 AM PDT by ladyjane
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To: ladyjane
America was not noted (at the time) for it's starving dirt farmers. Rather, it was known as the best poor man's country on Earth.

My relatives in the Maryland 400 were pretty typical of their times ~ and it wasn't at the top, and it wasn't at the bottom.

My relatives/ancestors in the various regiments raised in NY lived well before the war, but in the end the Brits stole all their farm equipment. Took them 20 years to get reimbursed for that. They lost 70% of their family members as well. Still, these guys were walking around with their own firearms, owned horses, could freely hunt the land everywhere to the West (beyond the Allegheny), and were far from starving to death.

In winning the American Revolution the former Colonists moved rapidly into the Ohio Valley and around the Great Lakes ~ their descendants still aren't poor dirt farmers.

84 posted on 07/04/2006 12:45:33 PM PDT by muawiyah (-)
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