Reconsidering Suffrage Reform in the 1829-1830 Virginia Constitutional Convention (Essay‪)‬

JAMES MONROE CONVENED VIRGINIA'S FIRST CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION on a tellingly dour note. "All other republics have failed," he remarked. The landscapes of the once mighty Roman and Grecian republics were now dominated by the "ruins of ancient buildings," and the present inhabitants of those lands languished in "a state of decrepitude and wretchedness." These lamentations of decay in 1829 stood in stark contrast to his characterization of the United States made only twelve years earlier in his inaugural address. There he considered the American form of republican government as "near ... perfection." Change seemed to occur rapidly, however, and his language of declension served to remind the assembly members that they had been charged with the important task of amending the state's constitution in order to "give a new support to our system of free republican government." He called on the convention to reflect on the historic examples of these failed republics, as well as Virginia's own experiences of five decades, in order to determine the reforms appropriate to ensure the preservation of republican rule. Escorted to the presiding chair by his aging fellow statesmen James Madison and John Marshall, former president Monroe issued Cassandra-like warnings that echoed clearly to the more callow delegates in the hall--after fifty years, Virginia's experiment in self-government remained an experiment. (1) Monroe's message was timely as well. By the end of the Jeffersonian era, new political and social visions had undermined the ideological premises of Virginia's agrarian republic. The pastoral image of a polity composed of independent farmers and the corresponding idea that landownership could serve as the basis of republican citizenship came under sharp public scrutiny as Virginians evaluated the suitability of their customs and institutions in a modern world. For four years, beginning with the constitutional convention in October 1829, Virginians engaged in a series of public debates that examined fundamental questions of property ownership, law, and republican government. In addition to revising the state constitution, these debates grappled with key political issues that included the appropriate structure of an independent judiciary, the funding of internal improvement projects, the nature of federal relations, and most famously, in the wake of the 1831 Nat Turner insurrection, the future of slavery. A principal consequence of these debates was the reconceptualization of republican political ideals; the traditional common-law concept of freehold citizenship (based on landowning) was replaced by a more democratic belief that diverse forms of property ownership also possessed political value. Most significantly, property rights in slaves became a key ingredient of Virginia's republican political ideology. In this manner, the Virginia debates reflected a sea change in republican political thought whereby the ownership of slaves replaced the ownership of land as the fundamental property relation signifying the virtues of self-government. This transformation in republican ideology represented a necessary precondition for the subsequent development of democracy in a modern slave-owning society. (2)