In the very next sentence you state Jefferson was responsible for disenfranchising women and African Americans.
Enfranchise and disenfranchise are not the same thing.
They are opposites."
Not if you're a Democrat. 😂
The original laws of most states in, say, 1800 required voters to be property owners.
In some states that also enfranchised well-off property owning women and freed-blacks to vote.
Such voters were likely to support the party of the Constitution, the Federalists.
The genius of Jeffersonians was to campaign for universal suffrage, for any man "free, white and 21".
These added millions of Big City immigrants, who did not own property, to Democrat voter rolls and began the Democrats' alliance of Big City immigrants (i.e., Tammany Hall) with globalized Big Business (i.e., King Cotton) and poor rural whites.
And, genius of political geniuses, the very same laws which added more poor men, "free, white and 21" also revoked the franchise from property owning women and freed-blacks.
In military terms, that's called "shaping the battlefield", to improve your side's chances of victory.
I don't know what the political term for it is, maybe Donald Trump would call it rigging or stealing elections?
Whatever it's called, Democrats have long been masters of it and Republicans, generally, have no clue what's hitting them.
Here is one description of Tammany Hall in New York City:
- "Tammany Hall, also known as the Society of St. Tammany, the Sons of St. Tammany, or the Columbian Order, was an American political organization founded in 1786 and incorporated on May 12, 1789, as the Tammany Society.
It became the main local political machine of the Democratic Party and played a major role in controlling New York City and New York State politics, and helped immigrants, most notably the Irish, rise in American politics into the 1960s. "