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Saturday, May 31, 2008

Clay in '44?


I've posted before on the possibility that Henry Clay might have been elected president in 1844. In that connection, consider this stunning point by Daniel Walker Howe (emphasis added):
Only four states in the far Northeast allowed black men to vote on the same basis as white men; elsewhere black either had to meet higher qualifications than whites or were disfranchised [sic] altogether. In New York state, some 3,000 black men could meet the $250 property test imposed on them to vote; had they been exempted from it, as white men were, there would have been 10,000 black voters and Henry Clay would have been elected president in 1844.

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