Although no new states entered the Union between the admission of Missouri in 1821 and the admission of Arkansas in 1836, the four years of the Adams presidency witnessed an upsurge of voter participation in presidential elections. In 1824, some 365,000 popular votes were cast; in 1828, the number tripled, exceeding a million people. Although the nation's population had grown from 10.9 million people in 1824 to 12.2 million in 1828 -- a jump of not quite 12 percent -- the new electorate reflected much more than an increase in population.

Within the four year span, this dramatic surge in voter participation -- in 1824, one in thirty people voted, and in 1828, one in eleven voted -- accompanied the emergence of a new, more democratic definition of republican citizenship. Prior to the 1820s, the concept of citizenship was linked to property ownership, which granted political rights to men who headed households. This notion reinforced the patriarchal model that saw responsible citizens as fathers, husbands, and independent proprietors.

Between 1824 and 1828, almost all the remaining property qualifications for white males were eliminated, quadrupling the size of the eligible electorate. And all states except South Carolina adopted the system of direct election of presidential electors, thus making the presidency a truly popular office.


Sociopolitical Changes

Beginning in 1790 with Vermont, state after state moved away from the Founding Fathers' patriarchal republic toward mass democracy by eliminating property and tax qualifications for suffrage. These changes also reflected other shifts in the character of the social order: No longer did the average white American male show the same reverence for parental authority as in days past. The French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville, traveling through America in the 1830s, noted that paternal power was largely absent in the typical American family. He probably exaggerated the issue, but it is likely that he saw far less respect for authority in America than in Europe.

Other examples indicate the extent of the change away from the property-based patriarchy to a more democratic and wide-open society: Most states had abolished primogeniture laws, which passed property wholly from the father to the eldest son. The level of alcohol consumption per capita rose from three gallons in 1790 to five gallons by 1830. The number of pregnancies outside of marriage reached 30 percent in the 1820s, suggesting a significant decline in parental authority in the household. Literacy among adult white males had increased to nearly 100 percent in New England and to 70 to 80 percent among white males elsewhere in the mid-Atlantic states -- a move upward from 85 percent and 60 percent in 1790. An explosion of print material available to the reading public accompanied this jump in literacy (the number of newspapers had increased from 90 in 1790 to 370 in 1830). New democratic churches -- unencumbered by a trained clergy or a traditional authority structure -- swept over the land. The new Baptist and Methodist religious sects, which placed power in the hands of a lay clergy, numbered 5,200 churches, compared to 1,522 Congregational and Episcopal Churches in 1820. The dynamic transportation revolution associated with steamboats and the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 made Americans more geographically mobile than ever before.


Shifts in the Political Scene

These changes in the social order underlaid and contributed to the appearance of a new party system. Briefly told, with the emergence of Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren on the political scene in the 1820s, a new way of viewing politics settled upon the nation. Thousands of Americans responded to Jackson's new republican order, one which was based less on the virtuous, property-owning citizen and more on the principle of majoritarian democracy. For him, the will of the people, as expressed directly with their ballots, would provide an unselfish and incorruptible political mandate. Jackson's chief lieutenant, Martin Van Buren, translated Jackson's concept of majoritarian democracy into a disciplined and well-organized national party machine. Van Buren's efforts succeeded in electing Jackson in 1828 and again in 1832. In the process, a new political party, the Democratic Party, emerged.

In essence, the new laws of suffrage, the shift from classical republicanism to majoritarian democracy, and the new party discipline drove the surge in voter participation. Once the National Republicans -- the party name adopted by John Quincy Adams in 1828 -- learned the lesson of party discipline as the anti-Jacksonian Whig Party in the 1830s, the percentage of the electorate voting jumped dramatically. Eighty percent of the nation's electorate voted in the presidential election of 1840.

Within this new party system, there was not room, however, for free African Americans, women, or Native Americans. Indeed, free property-owning blacks lost their suffrage rights by 1820 in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Maryland, Tennessee, and North Carolina -- all states in which they had previously voted as propertied males. A similar story can be told for women. The rush to tear down the barriers to white male suffrage was accompanied by laws that disfranchised women in the few places where they had been allowed to vote prior to 1807 -- New Jersey being the prime example. By 1828, no state in the Union allowed women to vote. In other words, the move away from class distinctions for white male suffrage was accompanied by hardened sexual and racial boundaries that prevailed well into the twentieth century.