Let us now praise forgotten men

I wrote something a few days ago about the inability to find heroes in history. I don't want to suggest that I am looking for these, but when hanging out in their world there is an urge to find sympathetic persons to cheer on. 


Given my focus on suffrage, one obvious metric is whether someone supported the extension of the right to vote to all classes and races. Most come up short, with the class conservatives most likely to be taking the egalitarian position on race and vice versa. So those who defy this pattern, and defend an unambiguously egalitarian agenda, are worthy of note.


In the Pennsylvania constitutional convention of 1837-38, there were only between 5-8 members who supported both.[1] 


Earle, of Philadelphia
Clarke, of Indiana County
Dickey, of Beaver County
Farrelly, of Crawford County
Cleavinger, of Greene County
Hayhurts, of Columbia County
Purviance, of Butler County
and White, of Tioga County.


Even the beloved Thad. Stevens [2] would vote against removing the taxpayer qualification. All but Dickey and Purviance (who were Anti-Masons) were Democrats, which was the party most vigorously opposed to black suffrage, so their courage on this issue is even more notable. 


Earle is especially notable. He was a Democrat, the publisher of the Mechanics' Free Press and Reform Advocate, and would go on to be the Liberty Party's vice-presidential candidate in 1840, after losing favor with the Democrats for his stand on black suffrage. So, here's to Earle. The origins of the alliance between labor and the civil rights movement are further back in history than we usually believe, and Earle was one of the points of contact during the antebellum period.


[1] There were two votes on whether the suffrage should not differentiate between blacks and white: on the first, 8 voted against differentiation who also voted for the removal of the tax qualification, while only 5 did so on the second. 
[2] I love Thaddeus Stevens. And so should you. Not only was he a near constant vanguard advocate of far-reaching racial equality, he was accordingly "slandered" as Austin Stoneman, the Radical Republican leader (with a mulatto consort) in Birth of a Nation. His biographer describes him as "The Great Commoner, savior of free public education in Pennsylvania, national Republican leader in the struggles against slavery in the United States and intrepid mainstay of the attempt to secure racial justice for the freedmen during Reconstruction, the only member of the House of Representatives ever to have been known, as the 'dictator' of Congress." (Trefousse, Hans L. Thaddeus Stevens: Nineteenth-Century Egalitarian (1997) , p.xi). Personally, my favorite slander of Stevens came during his early career, as an Anti-Masonic delegate to the state constitutional convention of 1837-38: "the great unhinged of Adams county."