SUFFRAGE, the right to vote for any purpose, but more especially the right of a person to vote in the election of his political representative. Many writers advocate the universal extension of this right, but in Great Britain and most European countries it is limited by a household or other qualification. In the United States it is practically universal for all male and female citizens and nat uralized persons of 21 years and upward.
The history of suffrage has been a record of progress and extension. The most limited form is observed in the first election of the Virginia colony in 1607, and the most extensive today is in Wyo ming. By the charter granted to the Virginia Company the members of a council of settlers, chosen by a higher council resident in England, were privi leged to choose annually a president from their own number. In accordance with this the first right of suffrage that existed in any permanent American col ony was exercised by six members of the council, who, in May, 1607, chose Edward Maria Wingfield as the first president. In 1619 the different towns of Virginia elected by general suffrage, 22 burgesses, who, assembling at Jamestown, consti tuted the first legislative body convened in America. In the following year, a few hundred miles N. the Plymouth fathers gathered on the deck of the Mayflower and exercised a still more extended right of suffrage in the choice of John Carver as the first governor of the colony. These privileges continued, with only a few changes in Virginia, till the Revolution ary War, excepting that 18 years after the election of Carver in Massachusetts, their mass assemblies were deemed too large and a representative government was established.
Though democratic in principle, a few laws passed by the New England colo nists restricted the privilege of suffrage. No person who had not become a free man by taking the oath of allegiance was permitted to vote. No man, according to a law of 1631, was admitted to the free dom of the body politic who was not a member of some of the churches within the limits of the same. No Quaker was permitted to become a freeman. The two latter restrictions, however, were soon removed. The power of the people was greatly increased through the results of the Revolution, yet in several of the orig inal 13 States the right of suffrage was restricted to property holders or rate payers, and otherwise limited for periods extending in some cases through one or more decades of the past century. The tendency was constantly to the wide lim its of manhood suffrage, which was then prevailing rule, but only as regards white citizens, till the 15th Amendment to the National Constitution in March, 1870, extended the same right to colored citizens. The movement toward the ex tension of the right to woman carried on for many years finally resulted in a Con stitutional Amendment providing for it. See WOMAN SUFFRAGE.