The American experiment: Who gets to vote? A brief history of the struggle for suffrage in the United States
Let’s start with Abe Lincoln.
President Abraham Lincoln, commemorating the Civil War dead after the Battle of Gettysburg, declared that the Civil War was being fought so “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Yet, contrary to what many of us learned as children in school, for most of our history – from the nation’s founding in the late eighteenth century until at least the 1950s and 1960s — we have not had a system of government that granted power, through voting, to all the people. And even more, that was never the intention of those who wrote the U.S. Constitution. When the authors of the Constitution wrote about “freedom” and “rights” they meant only for a small portion of the United States population.
The right to vote – to have a say in one’s own government – hasn’t been and wasn’t originally meant to be fully inclusive. Until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1922, the right to vote legally excluded the majority of Americans.
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https://www.nwprogressive.org/weblog/2025/05/the-american-experiment-who-gets-to-vote-a-brief-history-of-the-struggle-for-suffrage-in-the-united-states.html