Dorr Liberation Stock, a certificate indicating that a person has helped to finance Thomas Dorr’s appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court of his conviction for treason against the state of Rhode Island because of his role in the Dorr War. The Court ruled against him, and Dorr served two pears in prison.
The lone exception to the trend toward democratization was Rhode Island, which required voters to own real estate valued at $134 or rent property for at least $7 per year. A center of factory production, Rhode Island had a steadily growing population of propertyless wage earners unable to vote. Leaders of the state’s labor movement complained repeatedly about the absence of “free suffrage.” In October 1841, proponents of democratic reform organized a People’s Convention, which drafted a new state constitution. It enfranchised all adult white men while eliminating entirely blacks, who previously could vote if they owned the required amount of property (another illustration of how the expansion of white freedom sometimes went hand in hand with restrictions on the freedom of non-whites). When the reformers ratified their constitution in an extralegal referendum and proceeded to inaugurate Thomas Dorr, a prominent Rhode Island lawyer, as governor, President John Tyler dispatched federal troops to the state. The movement collapsed, and Dorr subsequently served nearly two years in prison for treason. The Dorr War demonstrated the passions aroused by the continuing exclusion of any group of white men from voting. And the legislature soon eliminated the property qualification for native-born men, black as well as white, although it retained it for immigrants until 1888.