Tag: Black Voters

Or, Voting Rights via “Tax” Payments to a Ditch Company

In my research on corporate voting, I’ve been scouring the Laws of the State of Delaware for legislation that defines who has access to the suffrage. Today turned up a find that surprised me: something that may be the first instance of voting rights being extended to Black men and women, in a quasi-public circumstance, by the state government – and done by virtue of property ownership.

The circumstance is a short law, passed in 1853, that defines how landowners adjacent to a marsh should govern the management of that swamp, and a ditch dug to drain it. This is not quite local government – the “owners of lands on Wright’s Marsh” are, collectively, members of a private company (the “Wright’s Marsh Ditch Company”), not citizens of a municipal or county government, or constituents of an independent school district, other places where voting rights sometimes are more expansive than state or federal elections.

But neither is this association fully private. This law is not a corporate charter, and landowners did not need to actively “opt-in” by contributing equity (e.g. buying shares); rather, it’s an organization constituted by the legislature, and designed to oversee infrastructure and property rights – much like other local governments.

In this neither fully public nor fully private situation, we find “negro and mulatto owners” of marsh-adjacent property granted the right to vote on company matters – “by proxy,” by filing a written vote – along with other owners who are similarly treated as less-than-fully-competent by the law (infants and women):

And further said owners at any adjourned or occasional meeting, may do all such acts or things as may or might be done at a stated meeting, and at all the meetings of the said Wright’s Marsh Ditch Company, every white owner of lands within the Companies’ boundaries [Jamison’s Branch Company or Wright’s Marsh Ditch Company], or who pays a tax to said Company, and the guardian of every infant owner may vote ; and every female owner, and every owner residing out of Kent County, and negro and mulatto owners may vote by proxy constituted by a note in writing under their hand. … ”

11 Del. Laws, c. 116, “An ACT for the benefit of the owners of lands on Wright’s Marsh in Kent County,” March 3, 1853, 115

This is notable because until Reconstruction, voting rights in Delaware were restricted to free white men by the state constitution. Further, in the 1850s free Black residents of Delaware faced an ever-increasing number of restrictions on their civic as well as political rights – they were barred from free travel, certain kinds of assembly, firearm ownership, etc. It was an oppressive net that grew tighter as the mid-century approached, and enslavers and their white allies grew more paranoid about the prospect of losing control over a subaltern population. Even after the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified nationally (though notably not by Delaware, until 1901), the franchise remained solely in the hands of white men until the early 20th-century, and hobbled by Jim Crow hurdles, like poll taxes (1).

So it’s surprising to see voting rights extended to Black folks, in any circumstance, however so minor. I’m not sure why it pops up here. Perhaps the legitimacy land-ownership bestowed trumped race in this case? Or maybe the legislators in Dover simply recognized, in this instance, the need to grant agency to the folks who would most likely be in charge of doing the ditch digging, and actually managing this Kent County marsh.

Whatever the case, in a land solidly defined by racial and gender exclusions from the suffrage, the unsteady ground of Wright’s Marsh offered a small exception – and perhaps the first one, ever, too.

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1.) State Delaware Constitution (1831), Art. IV, Sec. 1. “All elections for governor, senators, representatives, sheriffs, and coroners shall be held on the second Tuesday of November, and be by ballot; and in such elections every free white male citizen of the age of twenty-two years or upwards, having resided in the State one year next before the election, and the last month thereof in the county where he offers to vote, and having within two years next before the election paid a county tax, which shall have been assessed at least six months before the election, shall enjoy the right of an elector…” [emphasis added]

See also: Amy M. Hiller, “The Disfranchisement of Delaware Negroes in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Delaware History 13, no. 2 (1968): 124–53.

Ruth Decosse, “To Be Young, Black, and Manumitted: The Case of the Chase Family in Delaware,” Legacies of Enslavement and Dispossession at UD, June 22, 2022, https://sites.udel.edu/udari-legacies/2022/06/23/to-be-young-black-and-manumitted-the-case-of-the-chase-family-in-delaware/.

Krishanna Prince, “Free Black Petitioning in Antebellum Delaware,” Legacies of Enslavement and Dispossession at UD, June 23, 2022, https://sites.udel.edu/udari-legacies/2022/06/23/free-black-petitioning-in-antebellum-delaware/.

Maureen Iplenski, “‘Neither Free Nor Slave’: The Bondage of Free Blacks in the Lewis Family Household,” Legacies of Enslavement and Dispossession at UD, July 7, 2022, https://sites.udel.edu/udari-legacies/2022/06/23/neither-free-nor-slave-the-bondage-of-free-blacks-in-the-lewis-family-household/.

Sarah LaCour, “Legislating Black Bodies: How Judicial Punishment Extended the Violence of Enslavement in Delaware, 1865-77,” Legacies of Enslavement and Dispossession at UD, February 1, 2025, https://sites.udel.edu/udari-legacies/2025/02/10/legislating-black-bodies/.