The 1835 Constitutional Convention: Wider Voting for White Men, Fewer Rights for Free Black Voters

In the summer of 1835, delegates filled the State House in Raleigh and argued over who should hold power in North Carolina. Some of them were pushing to end old property tests that kept many white men from voting. Others were working to shut a door that had been open, at least in part, to free Black men for decades.

The convention produced one document that did both. It expanded the political rights of white men while removing a right that free Black men had held under the state's earlier constitution. Understanding the 1835 convention means seeing how those two changes were written together.

The old rules of the 1776 constitution

North Carolina's first state constitution was adopted in 1776, during the Revolution. It tied the right to vote to property. Men who owned land, usually a freehold of a set acreage, could vote for members of the Senate, and voters for the House of Commons were defined in terms of land or taxes paid.

The constitution also set property requirements for officeholders. Senators had to own a substantial freehold, and the governor was chosen not by voters but by the General Assembly, the legislature that met in Raleigh. Power sat with the eastern planters who dominated the legislature and with the rules that protected their share of it.

The 1776 document did not name race as a voting bar. Free Black men who met the property and tax tests could vote, and some did in the decades before 1835. That openness is central to what the 1835 convention changed.

A convention called to fix old grievances

By the early 1830s, complaints about representation had grown loud. Western counties, which had fewer slaves and a larger share of white farmers and small landholders, felt underrepresented in a state government that favored the east. Demands for a new constitution gained support, and voters approved calling a convention.

Delegates met in Raleigh in June 1835 and worked through the summer. The meeting was a deliberate effort to revise the constitution, not a revolution, and its members included men of both major parties who were then taking shape in state politics.

The convention's most lasting changes concerned who could vote and how the governor would be chosen. Each change was debated, and each passed through the same convention hall.

Wider white male voting and a popular governor

The new constitution removed the property requirements that had limited voting for the House of Commons. Ownership of land was no longer required for white men to cast a ballot for the lower house, which made the franchise broader for white men in the state's counties.

The convention also moved the election of the governor from the legislature to the voters. Under the new system, the governor would be chosen by popular vote, the first step toward a state executive answerable to ordinary white voters rather than to the General Assembly. Edward Bishop Dudley was elected under this rule in 1836 and is generally cited as the first governor chosen by popular election in North Carolina.

The reforms did not end the link between property and power. The Senate continued to be apportioned in part by taxes paid, and the convention kept some older features that favored the east. Historians generally describe the 1835 changes as a partial democratization, one that widened the electorate for white men while leaving many structures of privilege in place.

The end of free Black suffrage

The same document that opened the franchise to more white men replaced the words "free men" in the voting article with "free white men." The change took away the vote from free Black men, who had been able to qualify under the older rules.

The timing mattered. The Nat Turner rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831, had produced fear and harsh repression across the South. Free Black people were increasingly viewed by many white leaders as a threat to the racial order, and the convention reflected that climate.

Some historians have argued that the exclusion was less a sudden reaction than the end of a slow narrowing of Black civil rights in the years before 1835. The state's laws were already tightening around free Black residents, and the constitutional change made the restriction permanent in the state's highest law.

Why the two changes belong together

The 1835 convention showed that reform and exclusion were not opposites. Many white men gained a stronger voice, and a governor was made answerable to voters. In the same act, a group of free Black men lost a right they had held in practice under the 1776 document.

The new constitution took effect in 1836, and the first popular election for governor followed that year. Free Black men were not voting in those contests. The exclusion stayed in the state constitution, and it would be part of North Carolina's law until later revisions and the postwar era changed the terms of citizenship.

For readers, the lesson is that a constitution can be a record of who is included as well as who is shut out. The 1835 document expanded democracy for one group by narrowing it for another, and it did both in the same text.