Democracy in Early 1800 America!

In class, we created posters that depicted how democracy was during the 1800s in America. We based the posters off of our essential question for this lesson, which was: How should we define democracy? How democratic was the United States during the early 1800s? To find out the answers to these questions, we looked at a painting of an election. A flaw that this picture shows is that there was no way to  tell if someone had voted more than once, so they had to take someone's word if they had voted before. Instead of privately casting your vote, you would yell it out and everyone would know who you voted for. Besides black men,men from all walksof life had the ability to vote and no vote counts more because of that persons role in society. The next set of sources that we analyzed were voting charts. It showed how certain requirements for voting changed over time. In 1790, 10 states required that you owned property, but by 1855 barely any states had this requirement. During the same time period, over 20 states joined the union. Something else that changed drastically during this time period is how presidents were elected. In 1816, all states elected their presidents by their legislature, but in 1836, all states except South Carolina elected their president by the people. This shows how the United States were becoming more democratic and giving more people a say in their goverment, instead of just the people in charge. The last reference that we looked at was on the Dorr war, run by Thomas Dorr. He recognized some of the unjust and outdated laws against voting and launched a campaign against them. An example of a law that didn't make sense was in Rhode Island, voting was restricted to men who owned land and their eldest son. Dorr formed a convention to make a new constitution without these laws, but was arrested for treason. Eventually, he was pardoned of this and a new constitution was made. It is clear to see in the early 1800s, democracy in America was full of flaws. But, over the course of only about 30 years, the countries in America began to change their ways to make things more fair for their citizens, and become and democracy that allowed people from all walks of life to vote. Although women and and blacks being aloud to vote was still a long way off, America moved in the right direction during this time period. 

My groups poster on Democracy