To the wage
earner this outburst of democratic fervor offered an opportunity to try
out his recently acquired franchise. Of the then industrial States,
Massachusetts granted suffrage to the workingmen in 1820 and New York in
1822. In Pennsylvania the constitution of 1790 had extended the right of
suffrage to those who paid any kind of a state or county tax, however
small.
The wage earners' Jacksonianism struck a note all its own. If the
farmer and country merchant, who had passed through the abstract stage
of political aspiration with the Jeffersonian democratic movement, were
now, with Jackson, reaching out for the material advantages which
political power might yield, the wage earners, being as yet novices in
politics, naturally were more strongly impressed with that aspect of the
democratic upheaval which emphasized the rights of man in general and
social equality in particular. If the middle class Jacksonian was
probably thinking first of reducing the debt on his farm or perchance of
getting a political office, and only as an after-thought proceeding to
look for a justification in the Declaration of Independence, as yet the
wage earner was starting with the abstract notion of equal citizenship
as contained in the Declaration, and only then proceeding to search for
the remedies which would square reality with the idea.
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