Yes, absolutely. In fact, women, blacks, and natives could and did have the right to vote in some states prior to the year 1800.

The original constitution of the state of New Jersey stated that “all inhabitants of this Colony, of full age, who are worth fifty pounds proclamation money, clear estate in the same, and have resided within the county in which they claim a vote for twelve months immediately preceding the election, shall be entitled to vote for Representatives in Council and Assembly; and also for all other public officers, that shall be elected by the people of the county at large.”

The general scholarly consensus is that this was specifically intended to allow anyone, including woman, blacks, and natives, to vote. In 1797 the inclusion of women was made explicit, as voting laws were changed to replace instances of “he” with “he or she.”

Under NJ law, the property requirement functionally limited the right to vote to single and widowed women, as married women were not allowed to own property, and to free blacks. Large numbers of property-owning single and widowed women did in fact vote on early elections, and small numbers of property-owning free blacks did as well. In fact, the voting of women was sufficiently prominent that it was taken away to gain political advantage. Women had a strong tendency to vote Federalist, and the Democratic-Republican Party stripped women of the right to vote to increase their power. It appears that natives legally could vote, if they owned sufficient property, but none of my sources attest to it happening in practice.

Similarly, New Hampshire’s, New York’s, and Massachusetts’s original constitutions allowed blacks and natives to vote (assuming they met certain requirements) and in New Hampshire women were allowed to vote as well. While women could not vote in Massachusetts, they could hold office.

The Articles of Confederation stated “[t]he free inhabitants of each of these States, paupers, vagabonds, and fugitives from justice, excepted, shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several States.” The fact that this included blacks and natives was explicit because delegates from South Carolina moved to add the word “white” between “free” and “citizens” in this article when the Articles of Confederation were being debated. The measure was voted down, with the delegations of eight states voting against and the delegations of two voting for. This measure made clear that Blacks exercising the rights of citizens was both allowed and contentious in the early republic.

Sources:

Burstyn, Joan N., ed. Past and promise: lives of New Jersey women. Syracuse University Press, 1996.

Galie, Peter J., and Christopher Bopst. The New York State Constitution. Oxford University Press on Demand, 2012.

Klinghoffer, Judith Apter, and Lois Elkis. ""The Petticoat Electors": Women's Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776-1807." Journal of the Early Republic 12.2 (1992): 159-193.

Scott v. Samford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857) (Curtis, dissenting)

Williams, Robert F. The New Jersey State Constitution: A Reference Guide. Rutgers University Press, 1997.

(1 / 3)

I think the other answer may be overstating the case, or the intent of those early laws, which have been debated by academics. I think it's also overstating the case that it's the "general scholarly consensus" that New Jersey's intention from the start was to enfranchise women. This is refuted by the Klinghoffer and Elkis article cited in that response. They write that most historians "have treated female suffrage as the result of a careless constitutional construction" and the "story of New Jersey suffrage laws and practices between 1776-1807 has been subjected both to marginalization and distortion".

While Klinghoffer and Elkis's argument is generally accepted now, their argument isn't entirely that New Jersey meant to enfranchise women beginning in 1776, but that some parts of New Jersey did interpret it this way. They argue women did participate in politics between 1776-1807, and overtly tried to defend this right, but that there was immediate and forceful backlash against this participation. The state constitution was only interpreted in some voting districts to enfranchise women, until at least 1790 and probably not until the passage of the 1797 law. But this participation was rescinded with the 1807 law, and women were disenfranchised in that state until 1913.

As reprinted in Charles H. Wesley's article "Negro Suffrage in the Period of Constitution-Making, 1787-1865", the 1807 law in New Jersey back-tracked on the 1790 and 1797 laws, refuting that the New Jersey constitution had ever been meant to grant suffrage to women at all. Throughout the 1776-1807 period, the state constitution was never universally interpreted that way, and many places never allowed for such enfranchisement, particularly the Democratic-Republican strongholds, since wealthy women who would be enfranchised by the text of the constitution tended to support the Federalists. The text of the 1807 law that explicitly rescinded women's suffrage (emphasis mine):

"Whereas doubts have been raised and great diversities in practice obtained throughout the state in regard to the admission of aliens, females and persons of color, or Negroes to vote in elections, as also in regard to the mode of ascertaining the qualifications of voters in respect to estate-and whereas, it is highly necessary to the safety, quiet, good order and dignity of the state, to clear up the said doubts by an act of the representatives of the people, declaratory of the true sense and meaning of the Constitution, and to ensure its just execution in these particulars, according to the intent of the framers thereof," it was stated that no one should vote "unless such person be a free, white male citizen."

In other words, even in the time that women and people of color could exercise a right to vote in New Jersey between 1776-1807, there was great variability in this, and in many places, it never happened. The people who passed that state constitution didn't do anything to make sure its provisions enforced suffrage for non-white males. As Klinghoffer and Elkis point out, in the areas of New Jersey where the local election officials were allowing women to vote, women certainly did exercise that freedom, but this interpretation of the state constitution was only a majority view for a very short time, and apparently controversial from the very beginning.

As a recent profile on the subject in the New York Times states, a landholding woman's right to vote was how the law was supposed to work "in theory". The evidence that it actually happened is "scant". That profile is of a study being conducted by researchers at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, who have preliminarily determined that roughly 7.7 percent of the total population of white voting-aged women were able to vote in the state around 1800, when those rights were most clearly assured. They have not found any evidence yet that any free black women ever voted in the state.

Outside of New Jersey, these early "equal rights" provisions in Northern states were more symbolic than practical, and once they threatened to actually be put into practice, these states almost immediately back-tracked. This was especially true in regards to the suffrage of black people. All the states at the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and all but Massachusetts (and non-state Vermont) at the time of the signing of the U.S. Constitution in 1787 were slave states. The free black population was tiny. And just as the movement toward abolition in the North achieved their goal of the various schemes of "gradual emancipation", black suffrage was taken away. Black suffrage was OK in theory, but once it actually threatened to become a reality and black people might even be able to sway a local election here or there, the political class worked to take away that right.

According to Leon F. Litwack's book North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860, "Negroes did not share in the expansion of political democracy" in the early republic, and the expansion of white male suffrage in this period "led directly to the political disenfranchisement of the Negro". During this early period, writes Litwack, "nearly every northern state considered, and many adopted, measures to prohibit or restrict the further immigration of Negroes" into their states. The "professed aim of immigration restriction was to settle the problem of racial relations by expelling the Negro or at least by preventing any sizable increase of his numerical strength." He writes that only about six percent of free black people in Northern states had suffrage in the antebellum period. Meanwhile, white male suffrage outside of South Carolina grew to almost universal by the 1830s.

Wesley makes case studies out of New York and Pennsylvania. In New York, the original constitution did confer voting rights to free black male residents if he paid taxes to the state, if he owned a freehold of the value of twenty pounds, or if he rented a tenement of the yearly fee of forty shillings.

However, according to Wesley, restrictions were put on black suffrage from the start. "The free Negro was known as 'free,' but in none of" the Northern states, let along Southern, says Wesley, "was he as free as the white man...It was possible that there were those who exercised political rights but even in the free states the property and special qualifications were barriers to a general participation by free Negroes in the exercise of the suffrage." New York was still fully a slave state until 1799, and in the 1790 census, only 4,682 black people were free (and roughly half would have been male), out of a total of 25,875 black people in the state. Few of those ~2,300 black males qualified under the freehold value. And of those who did, "wherever possible," says Wesley, election officials "rejected the Negro voters when they could not present certificate of freedom."

After the passage of New York's 1799 gradual emancipation law, the percentage of black people who would technically qualify for suffrage went up...so the state legislature quickly moved to restrict their suffrage. An 1811 state law in New York, says Wesley, essentially required a black male to hire a lawyer in order to actually get the necessary paperwork in order to vote:

"It was required that the certificate [to allow a black person to vote] should be obtained by going before one of the Judges of the Supreme Court or County Court or before the Mayor or Recorder of a city, where the proof of freedom could be obtained in writing. The services of a lawyer who had to be paid were needed for this purpose. Twenty-five cents was to be paid by the Negro applicant to the court, and the Judge giving the certificate was to be paid a shilling. Another shilling was to be paid to the County Clerk for filing the certificate in his office and an additional payment judged by the Clerk, was to be made to him for the certificate to be used by the voter. Then, too, the Negro voter would take an oath that he was the person whose name was listed in the certificate. Having fulfilled these conditions, the Negro was permitted to cast his vote. Many Negroes were discouraged from voting by these apparent obstacles."

At the 1821 state constitutional convention, the voting requirements became even stricter, disenfranchising almost all black people. Even before the more restrictive law, a delegate at this convention asserted that "five hundred Negroes had applied for the vote in the election of 1820 but that only one hundred and sixty-three had been allowed to vote".

At the 1821 convention, a large minority of delegates wanted to outlaw black suffrage entirely, but their proposals lost out. However, the compromise that did pass "placed the qualification for whites at the forty pound freehold, but Negroes were required to have a two hundred and fifty dollar freehold. Negroes were also required to live in the state for three years and to have paid taxes. White men could vote after one year's residence and the payment of taxes or the rendering of highway or military service." While Wesley doesn't give an exact number, this new law effectively disenfranchised all the 163 black voters of 1820, to almost zero. Maybe a few dozen, at most, still retained the right to vote. While this is obviously a generation or more after the founding fathers, the political class did everything politically possible to eliminate black suffrage just as soon as it threatened to become a practical reality.