The first known elections in New York took place in February 1665, when 17 towns each elected two deputies to an assembly called by the colony’s recently arrived governor.
I say “first known” because records are sparse for the early colonial period, and nonexistent for the native tribes before the colonists’ arrival. We do know that New Netherland was a corporate colony, ultimately controlled by the shareholders of the West India Company in Amsterdam, and its residents had little say in its rule. Its last governor, the imperious Peter Stuyvesant, frequently came into conflict with his settlers and refused their requests. When Quakers and Jews came to settle here, Stuyvesant spent several years trying to force them out, until word came from the company in Amsterdam that he was to allow them freedom of worship, at which point he dropped the matter. To me, his eventual willingness to put up with people he despised because Them’s The Rules is a sign of a true New Yorker. But I digress.
In September 1664 the Duke of York’s forces, led by Richard Nicolls, captured New Netherland from the Dutch, and Nicolls became the first governor of the Province of New York. Among his earliest acts was establishing the county of “Yorkshire on Long Island” (which also included Staten Island and some mainland settlements) and declaring it to be under English law rather than Dutch. As part of the process of establishing the new legal system, Nicolls directed each of the towns to send two deputies “chosen by the major part of the freemen” to a meeting to be held at Hempstead on the last day of February 1664-5. (Gotta love those old style dates from when we didn’t know when New Year’s was yet.)
The surviving colonial records include the names of the deputies elected and the towns they represented. There was one town on the mainland, Westchester. (Some have misinterpreted this entry as being for representatives of Westchester County, which didn’t exist yet. The Town of Westchester, for which the county is named, is now the Westchester Square neighborhood in the Bronx.) The other 16 towns were on Long Island, spanning its entire length from Brooklyn to East Hampton. There was a clear demographic divide: towns in western Long Island were primarily Dutch settlements, while the eastern portions of the island had been settled by the English, even under Dutch rule.
The English colonists on Long Island were, like their neighbors in New England, primarily Puritans and other Protestant Dissenters. They had sided with Parliament in the English Civil War - against the Duke of York’s father, Charles I - and strongly valued representative government and the right to vote. Some towns on Long Island had even sent representatives to the legislatures of New England colonies, notwithstanding their “official” status as part of New Netherland. (Jurisdiction was weak in those days and borders were fluid.) They sent their deputies to Hempstead with proposals for how the new colony of New York should be governed: similarly to New England, with the elected assembly having the main legislative power and strong autonomy for the individual towns to manage their own affairs by direct democracy.
They would be gravely disappointed. The elected representatives at the Hempstead Convention were presented with “The Duke’s Laws”, a detailed legal code for the management of the colony, as a fait accompli. These laws centralized all power with the governor. The elected town governments, a constable and board of eight overseers, had strictly local powers, and almost all of their decisions could be appealed to or vetoed by the governor’s appointees. Town meetings were omitted almost entirely from the code, their main role becoming to elect the overseers - who would be much easier to control. The governor and executive council also acted as the highest appellate court and the legislature. Ultimately even the governor was answerable to the Duke across the ocean. Having been forced to accept this as the law of the land, the Hempstead Convention would spent a few days litigating boundary disputes among the towns before adjourning. It would be almost two decades before another assembly would be elected.
I won’t go into all the context of 17th century English politics, but suffice it to say that the Duke of York was hostile to elected government both in England and in America. It was only out of necessity that he allowed Governor Thomas Dongan to call the next assembly in September 1683 - this came after a period when the Dutch briefly retook Manhattan, and some of the Long Island towns stopped paying taxes and attempted to leave New York and join Connecticut. Unlike the Hempstead Convention, the assemblies under Dongan were elected from throughout the colony, and had the power to pass laws subject to the approval of the governor and council. Effectively the assembly and council acted as a bicameral legislature, like the Houses of Commons and Lords in England - with the caveat that the Duke still had an ultimate veto. The first session of the assembly passed fifteen acts, including a “Charter of Liberties” calling for elected assemblies at least every three years and providing for numerous rights and constitutional guarantees. (This would be the only act of the first session to be vetoed by the Duke.) Other laws divided the state into counties and reorganized the colony’s judiciary and tax system. A few sections of the Duke’s Laws were amended; others were superseded by the new assembly’s enactments.
The same representatives gathered for the second session of the first assembly in October 1684. In 1685 King Charles II died and the Duke of York inherited the throne as James II. Under English law of the time, a demise of the crown required a dissolution of the assembly, so a second election was held in 1685.
Since then New York has always had an elected legislature, with two exceptions. The first was a period of instability from 1686 to 1691 when, in rapid succession, King James dismissed the assemblies in all of his royal colonies; he then merged all the colonies from New Jersey to Maine into one Dominion of New England, ruled by Governor Edmund Andros and his council from Boston; news came from England that King James had been dethroned and the colonists overthrew Andros; Jacob Leisler proclaimed himself governor of New York in the ensuing power vacuum; and finally the governor appointed by the new monarchs, William and Mary, arrived in New York and Leisler was arrested and hanged for treason. The assembly of 1691 declared that the previous laws of the colony were no longer in force. Because of this, the statute rolls in the state archives begin in 1691, and not with the laws passed by earlier assemblies.
The other interruption, of course, was the American Revolution. The colonial assembly never met after the outbreak of war in 1775. During the hostilities the British Army would occupy Manhattan and place it under martial law, while other parts of the state were initially under the jurisdiction of a series of provisional governments associated with the Continental Congress. One of these would enact the first constitution of the State of New York in 1777 and the first elections for the governor and state legislature were held later that year.
There are no records of the vote totals in the early colonial elections, or whether there were any opposing candidates for office. It’s quite likely that no records were ever made. While the 1665 election was probably conducted informally by town meetings, the 1683 election followed similar formalities to parliamentary elections, with the governor issuing writs of election to returning officers (sheriffs, mayors, and other local officials) to conduct elections locally. A few sheriffs were appointed for outlying areas of the colony simply for the purpose of calling the 1683 election, since there weren’t any suitable officials there to act as returning officers otherwise.
The basic process for elections in 17th century England and its colonies began with the returning officer convening the voters, officially announcing the election to them, and calling for candidates to be nominated. If there were no more candidates than seats to be filled, the unopposed candidates would be immediately declared elected without any voting. Next the candidates would address the gathered voters and there would be a show of hands or voice vote. If there was a clear winner, the returning officer could report a candidate as elected “by the view.” Only if the informal vote was close, or a candidate requested it, would the election be decided “by the poll” with individual votes counted. Notably, there were no ballots. All voting was oral and the poll clerks wrote down the names of each voter next to the candidates they voted for. In any case, these records were only preserved in case of a challenge to the vote. The official election return only included the names of the winning candidates.
The returning officer had a great deal of discretion, which naturally led to abuses and irregularities. He could choose the date and place of the election, and adjourn the polls over multiple days and locations if eligible voters hadn’t appeared yet. Sometimes the polls were kept open for more than a week. Candidates could call for “scrutiny”: a recount in which the eligibility of individual voters could be challenged and only the valid votes counted. After the close of the election, it could be challenged in the legislature itself, leading to a detailed body of case law over when an election return was valid and when it had to be vacated and a new election called. One case that stuck out to me was the Westminster election of 1661, in which no voters appeared at the polls and the returning officer awarded the election “by the view” - and this was ruled to be valid!
A greater concern from a modern perspective was the lack of secrecy - voters could be pressured or punished for voting the wrong way. In New York the 1777 constitution introduced the secret ballot on an experimental basis; it would become permanent, and the other states adopted secret ballots at around the same time. At first the ballots were simply blank pieces of paper, on which voters wrote in the names of candidates and offices. In the days before organized campaigns or political parties, this was error-prone: in the first election of 1777, hastily held during wartime, New Yorkers elected George Clinton as both governor and lieutenant governor. (Naturally he declined the lower office, and the state had its first special election in 1778 to fill the post.) During the 19th century political parties would print their own ballots with all their endorsed candidates listed. These “tickets” were on brightly colored paper so poll watchers could easily tell which slate a person had voted for - defeating the purpose of the secret ballot.
What we now consider an essential component of democracy manifested in Australia in 1856: a ballot with a list of names of all candidates for office, so each voter could simply check one. The “Australian ballot” would spread to the rest of the Anglosphere by the end of the 19th century. This in turn led to new issues of ballot access and primary elections, which are still a big part of the election machinery today.
But the most significant difference between those colonial and early state elections and the ones we have today is who can vote. The 1683 charter of liberties extends the vote to “freeholders and free citizens” which excluded most of the population in colonial New York. Freeholders, i.e. landowners, were the only rural voters, and most of the mainland of the colony belonged to vast “manors” or “patroonships” with a single aristocratic owner. Those who were enslaved or indentured were obviously excluded, but the many tenant farmers were as well. The franchise was most widespread in the New England-style towns, mostly on Long Island, where property was divided among many small holders - but not too small, as minimum property ownership requirements were instituted in 1695.
Free citizens were those who had been granted the status of “freedom of the city” by a city government. This included numerous privileges, including the right to vote in city elections or to engage in a trade independently. In Europe, these rights were closely guarded by the trade guilds that controlled the city governments, a remnant of which still exist in the form of the Livery Companies of London. There were only two cities in New York (NYC and Albany) and no organized trade guilds, but admission to freedom of the city still required paying a substantial fee and the personal approval of the city council.
As dramatic as the American Revolution was in many respects, it was still fundamentally conservative in terms of expanding the franchise. Most states retained their property qualifications for voting in their new constitutions. In New York tenants of property above a certain value were allowed to vote for members of the assembly, but not for state senators or the governor, and there was also a higher property requirement to vote for those higher offices. (As for us city dwellers, those with freedom of the city before the Revolution retained voting rights for the assembly. Later generations could only qualify as freeholders or tenants.)
This was the state of the franchise when the Constitution entered force in 1789. The framers decided to maintain states’ existing voting qualifications - the curious phrasing of “electors of the most numerous branch of the State legislature” being a reference to at least New York and North Carolina having different franchises for their legislatures’ two houses. This is also a reason for the electoral college that nobody ever seems to realize: it would have been impossible to hold a national popular vote when the qualifications to vote varied dramatically between states, and the framers didn’t want to force the issue by setting a national franchise. The idea of doing away with property qualifications and extending the vote to every citizen, or even every white male citizen, was extraordinarily radical and probably never considered seriously at the constitutional convention.
Property qualifications to vote were eliminated gradually, state by state, over the first half of the 19th century. The main driving force behind expanding the vote was the wave of populist sentiment under the banner of Jacksonian Democracy. Personally, I find it hard to praise Andrew Jackson at all - the Trail of Tears alone earned him a special place in hell - and I find the politics of John Quincy Adams and Daniel Webster much more palatable. But I can’t deny that Jackson’s opponents wanted to keep this country under the control of a moneyed aristocracy, while the Jacksonians pushed for a mass participatory democracy - a flawed one, restricted by race and sex, but still with a wider franchise than almost every other country on earth at the time.
We all know about the later expansions of the franchise by race, sex, and age - they resulted from constitutional amendments and a major act of Congress, and came after dramatic events in the nation’s history. The end of limiting the vote based on wealth isn’t as well known. I think this is because it wasn’t a sudden dramatic nationwide change, and it happened during a period in American history that usually gets glossed over in our classes and textbooks, and (perhaps the biggest reason) it doesn’t play into any of the currently popular identity politics categories. Maybe it should be better known. That’s what the title of this blog is, after all.
I write this in the closing weeks of another tiring campaign season, as New York prepares to vote yet again. Politics have become unrecognizable since that first election three and a half centuries ago. The people we elect are no longer pleading with the agents of a distant aristocrat for some scraps of self-rule, but rulers in their own right.
Looking over my ballot, I don’t see a lot of choice. Thanks to the electoral college, my presidential vote won’t matter unless something very strange and unexpected happens. Some of the downballot races are uncontested and the others might as well be. There’s a symbolic pro-abortion, pro-LGBT amendment to the state constitution that will probably be ineffectual in actually protecting abortion and LGBT rights, since it’s not the state government they’re under threat from. Probably the most interesting items are the proposed city charter amendments stemming from a power struggle between our allegedly crooked mayor and the city council, just because I genuinely don’t know how the votes will go.
Still, I consider it a civic duty. This is something people died for, and it’s only a few minutes out of my day, so I might as well take part.
