On November 16, 1807, New Jersey’s legislature closed one of the most unusual chapters in early American democracy. In a statute styled as a clarification of the state constitution, lawmakers declared that only “free, white, male” citizens could vote in state and county elections. The act ended roughly three decades in which some women—and some free people of color—who met property and residency rules had cast ballots in the only state that, by statute and practice, treated them as part of the electorate.
The change did not arrive as a sudden whim. It followed years of partisan warfare, contested elections, fraud accusations, and a bitter February 1807 referendum over where Essex County would build its courthouse. What New Jersey lost that November was not universal woman suffrage in the modern sense. It was a limited, property-based franchise that had been rare enough to puzzle later generations—and important enough that both Federalists and Democratic-Republicans had courted, mocked, and finally discarded it.
“All inhabitants” worth fifty pounds
New Jersey’s first state constitution was framed by a provincial congress meeting at Burlington, Trenton, and New Brunswick and ordered published on July 3, 1776, after approval on July 2. Paragraph IV set out who could vote:
That all inhabitants of this Colony, of full age, who are worth fifty pounds proclamation money, clear estate in the same, and have resided within the county in which they claim a vote for twelve months immediately preceding the election, shall be entitled to vote for Representatives in Council and Assembly; and also for all other public officers, that shall be elected by the people of the county at large.
The key word was “inhabitants.” Other Revolutionary-era constitutions commonly spoke of “freemen,” “men,” or “white male inhabitants.” New Jersey’s language did not expressly limit voters by sex or race. It did require adulthood, a year’s residence in the county, and clear estate worth fifty pounds in proclamation money—a cash-or-property threshold lower than a freehold land requirement, but still a barrier that kept most people, including most women, out of the polls.
Under the common-law doctrine of coverture, a married woman’s legal identity was absorbed into her husband’s. Married women rarely held property in their own names and therefore rarely met the fifty-pound test. In practice, the women who could vote were chiefly adult widows and unmarried women of means—sometimes called femmes soles—who owned enough estate in their own right. Free Black inhabitants who were not enslaved and who met the same property and residency rules were likewise not barred by the constitution’s text.
For many years, historians treated the 1776 wording as an accident of haste. More recent scholarship has challenged that view. Provincial congresses debated suffrage qualifications in 1775–1776; drafts sometimes used “he”; and petitions pressed for a broader electorate. Whether every framer consciously meant to enfranchise women remains contested among historians. What is not contested is what happened afterward: New Jersey’s legislature repeatedly wrote election laws that treated female voters as real, and women voted.
From ambiguity to “he or she”
Early election statutes of 1777 and 1783 used male pronouns. That did not settle the constitutional meaning. In 1790, after a chaotic first congressional election, the legislature passed election reforms for seven counties that stated no person could vote outside the township “in which he or she doth actually reside.” In February 1797, a statewide election law repeated gendered-inclusive language: voters were to deliver “his or her” ballot.
Those statutes matter because they show the inclusive reading surviving deliberate legislative revision. In November 1800, according to a letter printed in Newark’s Centinel of Freedom, the Assembly considered and rejected as redundant a clause spelling out that inspectors should not refuse the vote of any widow or unmarried woman of full age, or any person of color of full age, who could show the fifty-pound estate. The letter’s author put the Assembly’s view bluntly: the constitution already gave the right “to maids or widows black or white.”
Who voted in practice is harder to count. Surviving poll lists from the period are scarce. Museum of the American Revolution researchers have identified multiple free Black voters on early New Jersey lists (including Ephraim Hagerman and Thomas Blue in Montgomery Township, Somerset County, around 1801), and at least one possible free Black woman voter. Women’s names appear on some surviving lists; how many cast ballots statewide is uncertain. Federalist critic William Griffith, writing against female suffrage around the turn of the century, estimated thousands of eligible women—an opponent’s figure that later writers sometimes repeated too trustingly. Historian Carl E. Prince concluded that women’s votes mattered politically more than numerically, noting that turnout totals did not shift dramatically after 1807. The safest statement is this: some women and some free people of color who met the property rules did vote, especially as party competition intensified after the mid-1790s; most New Jerseyans of either sex still did not.
Parties, “petticoat electors,” and a changing republic
The 1790s brought America’s first national party system—Federalists and Democratic-Republicans—into New Jersey’s counties and townships. Contested races raised turnout. Both sides sought every legal vote they could find, including the votes of eligible women. Republican papers mocked Federalist efforts to bring widows to the polls in Essex County in 1797. Federalist papers later accused Republican Governor Joseph Bloomfield of bringing “that part of his female household entitled to vote.” A December 1800 item in the Centinel of Freedom claimed Alexander Hamilton and Senator Matthias Ogden had so “ingratiated themselves” with Federalist women in Elizabethtown and the lower state that those women resolved to support the Federal ticket.
Press language hardened around caricature. Women voters were labeled “petticoat electors.” Some writers linked them to Mary Wollstonecraft and European radicalism—“Wollstonecraftians”—as if female ballots imported French disorder. Griffith’s Eumenes essays argued that women were unfit by nature, habit, education, and social condition to vote with credit. The insults were not merely cultural. They were tools: each party used stereotypes of female dependence to cast the other as manipulative and corrupt.
National politics fed the same anxieties. New Jersey’s electors backed John Adams in 1796 and 1800; after Jefferson’s national victory, Democratic-Republicans gained ground in the state. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, Federalist naturalization restrictions, and revolutionary upheavals in France, Haiti, and Ireland all sharpened fears of “aliens” and foreign influence. Meanwhile, New Jersey remained a slave state. It banned the importation of enslaved people in 1786 but did not pass gradual abolition until 1804—last among northern states. By 1800, the state counted more than twelve thousand enslaved people alongside a growing free Black population. Antislavery politics and regional party splits among Democratic-Republicans made questions of race and citizenship newly explosive just as election contests grew uglier.
Between 1783 and 1808, according to Museum of the American Revolution tallies drawn from legislative petitions, New Jersey lawmakers received dozens of complaints alleging either voter fraud or voter suppression. Petitioners claimed married women, enslaved people, nonresidents, and the unpropertied had voted illegally; others charged that men disguised themselves as women to vote repeatedly, or that inspectors dragged voters to the polls. How many charges were true, exaggerated, or partisan theater is contested. What is clear is that the fifty-pound rule was unevenly enforced, township polling expanded after 1797, and confidence in election integrity frayed.
The Essex County courthouse fight
The breaking point came in February 1807. Essex County held a referendum on whether to locate a new courthouse in Newark or Elizabethtown (Elizabeth). The fight pitted factions within the Democratic-Republican Party against each other. Both sides, contemporary and later accounts agree, broke the rules. Newark prevailed, 7,666 to 6,181. Turnout relative to the county’s legally eligible electorate was reported at an astonishing 279 percent. Newspapers demanded action. The Legislative Council overturned the result and moved toward sweeping election reform.
Later nineteenth-century chronicles alleged teenage girls voting multiple times, married women voting illegally, men in women’s clothing stuffing the boxes, and other scenes of carnival corruption. Some of those colorful details come from memoirs written long after the fact and should be treated cautiously. The core facts do not depend on them: the referendum was widely regarded as massively fraudulent; women were publicly blamed alongside other marginalized voters; and legislators seized the crisis to rewrite the suffrage rules.
November 16, 1807: closing the electorate
The statute of November 16, 1807—formally a supplement to the February 22, 1797, election act—opened with a preamble about “doubts” and “great diversities in practice” regarding “aliens, females, and persons of color, or negroes,” and about how to measure estate qualifications. Clearing those doubts, it said, was “highly necessary to the safety, quiet, good order and dignity of the state,” and was offered as a declaration of “the true sense and meaning of the constitution.”
Section 1 then provided that no person could vote in state or county elections for state or federal officers unless that person were a free, white, male citizen of New Jersey, twenty-one or older, worth fifty pounds proclamation money clear estate, and resident in the county for twelve months. Historians including Jan Ellen Lewis note that a further provision effectively treated taxpaying white men as meeting the estate test—so the law narrowed the electorate by sex, race, and citizenship while easing the property barrier for white male taxpayers. Museum of the American Revolution summaries describe the same bargain: strip the vote from women, people of color, and many immigrants, while expanding practical access for white men who paid taxes.
The act passed with broad, bipartisan support and little recorded public defense of the women and free Black voters it excluded. Earlier attempts to curtail female suffrage—including Federalist agitation around a constitutional revision in the late 1790s and a 1802 proposal to limit voting to free white males—had failed. In 1807, after Essex, the coalition held. Sponsor rhetoric claimed the 1776 framers could not have meant “inhabitants” to include women or people of color—an interpretive claim that contradicted thirty years of statutes, practice, and the Assembly’s own 1800 reading.
Legal scholars have long noted the awkwardness: a statute purporting merely to “clarify” a constitution while reversing its inclusive application. The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia calls the maneuver an act of “questionable legality” for overturning a constitutional provision by ordinary legislation. New Jersey did not restore constitutional clarity on the point until much later, and not in women’s favor.
Aftermath: a longer exclusion
After 1807, New Jersey women who had voted as property holders could not. Free Black men and women who had met the old rules were likewise shut out. When New Jersey adopted a new constitution in 1844, it wrote exclusion more explicitly into the state’s fundamental law. Across the early nineteenth-century United States, the story was often similar: white male suffrage widened even as women and free Black Americans lost ground.
Nineteenth-century reformers remembered New Jersey’s experiment. In 1867, Lucy Stone told the New Jersey legislature that women had been “scapegoated” for the Elizabethtown-area frauds. At the 1876 Centennial in Philadelphia, the American Woman Suffrage Association marked a century since New Jersey’s early female suffrage and protested its loss. New Jersey voters defeated a state woman-suffrage referendum in 1915. The state’s legislature ratified the Nineteenth Amendment on February 9, 1920; nationwide women’s voting rights followed later that year. More than a century had passed since November 1807.
Why it still matters
New Jersey’s early franchise was never modern equal suffrage. It was a property qualification with open language, applied in a slaveholding northern state, amid patronage politics and weak election administration. Even so, it remains the clearest case in the founding era of women casting legal ballots for public office under a state constitution. The 1807 repeal shows how quickly an inclusive reading can be redefined as a mistake—especially when parties need a scapegoat for fraud they themselves helped create.
The documentary trail is uneven. We do not have a full census of female or Black voters before 1807. We cannot measure precisely how often married women or enslaved people voted illegally, as opponents charged. Historians still debate how intentional the 1776 “inhabitants” clause was, and how far partisan deal-making—versus genuine reform impulse—explains the 1807 statute. The statute’s text, the 1776 constitution’s text, the 1790 and 1797 “he or she” laws, the Essex courthouse crisis, and the subsequent century of exclusion are not in serious dispute.
On paper, New Jersey called the 1807 law a return to the framers’ meaning. In practice, it was the day the state told property-owning women—and free people of color who had shared the earlier franchise—that the ballot box was no longer theirs.
Sources / Further reading
Primary texts and near-primary compilations
- Constitution of New Jersey (1776), para. IV. Avalon Project, Yale Law School: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/nj15.asp
- New Jersey State Archives, Documentary Treasures: 1776 State Constitution: https://www.nj.gov/state/archives/documentary-treasures-nj-state-constitutions-1776.shtml
- “Voter Qualification Law” (Nov. 16, 1807), Teaching American History (text and introduction): https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/voter-qualification-law/
- New Jersey Disfranchisement Statute (1807), excerpt and citation to Bloomfield compilation (1811), U.S. Law and Race Initiative OER: https://teachinglegalhistory.unl.edu/s/oer/item/1016
- Digitized 1807 supplement (NJ State Library Digital Collections): https://dspace.njstatelib.org/items/114ae687-5a05-4ed9-83cb-30c702f8559e
Museums, encyclopedias, and state historical resources
- Museum of the American Revolution, When Women Lost the Vote (esp. “How Did Women Lose the Vote? The Backlash”): https://www.amrevmuseum.org/virtualexhibits/when-women-lost-the-vote-a-revolutionary-story/pages/how-did-women-lose-the-vote-the-backlash
- Museum of the American Revolution, “No Racial Requirement”: https://www.amrevmuseum.org/virtualexhibits/when-women-lost-the-vote-a-revolutionary-story/pages/no-racial-requirement-2
- New Jersey Historical Commission, “The Petticoat Politicians of 1776” (It Happened Here PDF): https://nj.gov/state/historical/assets/pdf/it-happened-here/ihhnj-er-petticoat-politicians.pdf
- Tamara Gaskell, “Women’s Suffrage,” Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia: https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/woman-suffrage/
Scholarly treatments
- Judith Apter Klinghoffer and Lois Elkis, “‘The Petticoat Electors’: Women’s Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776–1807,” Journal of the Early Republic 12, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 159–193.
- Jan Ellen Lewis, “Rethinking Women’s Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776–1807,” Rutgers Law Review 63, no. 3 (2011): 1017–1035: https://www.rutgerslawreview.com/wp-content/uploads/archive/vol63/Issue3/Lewis.pdf
- Irwin N. Gertzog, “Female Suffrage in New Jersey, 1790–1807,” Women & Politics 10 (1990): 47–58.
- Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
- Campbell Curry-Ledbetter, “Women’s Suffrage in New Jersey 1776–1807: A Political Weapon,” Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law (2020 PDF): https://www.law.georgetown.edu/gender-journal/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2020/08/Womens-Suffrage-in-New-Jersey-1776-1807_A-Political-Weapon.pdf