Suffrage. Restricted

suffrage was the rule in America till well into the present century. Ma achusetts and New Haven colonies for atime gave the suffrage to none but church members. In most of the colonies a freehold qualification prevailed, sometimes the ‘‘ forty-shilling freehold” of English law, sometimes a freehold of so many acres. The constitutions made in the Revolutionary period mostly provided for the former in the Northern States, for the latter in the Southern, while New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Georgia had simply a requirement of tax-paying. The Constitution of 1787 left this matter entirely to the States, allowing all to vote for Congre men in a given State who could vote for the members of the State House of Representatives. After 1789, the influence of democratic principles led to the abolition of property qualifications in Georgia in 1798; in Maryland in 1801 and 1809; in Ma achusetts in 1821; in New York in 1821; in Delaware in 1831; in New Jersey in 1844; in Connecticut in 1845; in Virginia in 1850; in North Carolina in 1854 and 1868; in South Carolina in 1865; in Rhode Island, except in some municipal elections, in 1888. The Fifteenth Amendment forbids any State, or the United States, to deny the suffrage to any citizen because of race, color or previous condition of servitude. The new States have mostly provided for manhood suffrage from the first, often even for the suffrage of aliens in proce of naturalization. (For the extension of the suffrage to women see art. Woman Suffrage. ) Sugar Act, an act pa ed by Parliament in 1733 and renewed in 1763, by which heavy duties were laid upon all sugar and mola es imported into the American colonies from foreign colonies. It was one of the direct causes of the Revolution.