Project Syndicate From the American Revolution to Universal Suffrage Jul 3, 2026 Danielle Allen

 Project Syndicate

From the American Revolution to Universal Suffrage

Jul 3, 2026

Danielle Allen

Britain’s attempt to crush the American Revolution exposed a constitutional crisis at the heart of its empire. One English statesman saw in it proof that only broader suffrage could check royal power, tame corruption, and ensure that imperial rule remained compatible with liberty.

CAMBRIDGE—October 1765 found 30-year-old Charles Lennox, the Third Duke of Richmond, serving as Britain’s ambassador to the Court of Versailles. Largely unknown to contemporary scholars, Richmond was already five years into a bitter feud with King George III and in his first major post, though one beneath his abilities and ambitions.

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Within a few years, Richmond’s political trajectory would intersect with that of Thomas Paine. By 1768, he had become Paine’s first patron, when Paine was working as an excise officer in southern England and secretly writing radical political tracts. A decade later, Paine was in America, having written Common Sense, while Richmond had emerged as one of the most outspoken defenders of the American cause in the House of Lords and the first member of Parliament (MP) to recommend recognizing American independence.

On June 3, 1780, Richmond introduced what is widely considered the first bill proposing universal manhood suffrage. While the origins of that proposal lay in his earlier work in Paris, it was the American Revolution that made it necessary—not as a solution to the war itself, but as an answer to a deeper constitutional issue the war had exposed. Universal suffrage arrived on the world stage as a remedy for domestic tensions generated by Britain’s imperial expansion.

Richmond’s path to universal suffrage invites a reconsideration of how we understand the relationship between empire and popular sovereignty. While in Paris, he was tasked with resolving lingering issues from the Franco-British Seven Years’ War: disputes over fishing rights in Nova Scotia, compensation for British merchants left holding now-worthless French currency, and, most importantly, the governance of the newly acquired Canada.

Richmond carried this work into 1766, when he briefly served as secretary of state responsible for parts of Europe and the American colonies. In that role, he advanced religious toleration of Canadian Catholics—the first such policy in British colonial history. At the same time, he began to consider how to link the colonies to the English government through the King, with support from local assemblies.

A serious student of political philosophy—especially Montesquieu—Richmond was a Whig in the sense that he treasured British liberties and believed British subjects deserved to have a voice in government through a legislature acting in conjunction with the King. For Canadians, that meant religious toleration and political representation.

With remarkable acuity, Richmond was sketching the principles that would later become the 1774 Quebec Act, which granted Canadian Catholics freedom of religion and restored French civil law in the colony. Although the Act alienated many American colonists, who saw the toleration of Catholicism as a betrayal of their British liberties, it also marked the emergence of the British Empire’s defining strategy: governing through accommodation of local customs.

Yet the Quebec Act departed sharply from Richmond’s vision in one critical respect. By 1774, he was in opposition, and Lord North’s government had placed Canada under the control of a “governor-in-council,” vesting authority in a governor and an appointed advisory body without an elected legislature. While supportive of the Act’s toleration of Canadian Catholics, Richmond opposed the arrangement, arguing that it created an executive with unchecked power. In Parliament, he rebuked the government for repeatedly invoking “immediate necessity” to justify its constitutional innovations and allowing those emergency measures to become what he called an “engine of oppression and tyranny.”

A Constitutional Crisis Unfolds

As conflict intensified in the colonies south of Canada, Richmond grew increasingly sympathetic to the colonists’ claim that Parliament should not exercise legislative authority over them. While he still believed that the American colonies should remain within the British Empire, he was no longer convinced that Parliament held sovereignty over them. In his view, the Americans needed their own legislatures, much as the Canadians did. They should recognize the King as their sovereign, but not Parliament as their representative body.

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This created a constitutional puzzle. In 18th-century Britain, sovereignty was understood to lie in the combined authority of the monarch and the legislature, an arrangement known as “King-in-Parliament.” The Crown did not act independently of Parliament, and the idea that it might govern the colonies on its own did not fit within that framework.

By early 1775, even the parliamentary opposition agreed that the American conflict had triggered a constitutional crisis. Members of the opposition, however, were deeply divided. Richmond, for his part, decried “the desperate temerity of the Ministry” and wished that “all the real friends of England and of America” would “heartily unite to save the Nation.”

Seeking to unify his faction, Richmond helped advance an expansive bill calling for the withdrawal of standing armies from the colonies, a promise not to tax subjects without their consent through provincial assemblies, and the restoration of trial by jury in civil cases. It was a serious attempt to avert war, one that might have laid the foundation for something like the modern British Commonwealth. But the King and his ministers adamantly opposed this solution.

The summer of 1775 brought one final attempt at reconciliation. At the urging of John Dickinson, the Continental Congress sent its Olive Branch Petition directly to the King, bypassing Parliament and asking him to dismiss his cabinet and repeal the laws to which they objected.

The Americans had concluded that George III was the true source of authority. But the King rejected that notion, declaring the petition an unconstitutional request to overrule Parliament. The laws in question had been passed by the legislature, and he was merely executing its will. The Privy Council soon issued a proclamation declaring the colonies in “open and avowed rebellion” and pledging to use “utmost endeavours” to suppress them.

For most Whigs, the King’s supposed submission to Parliament was a farce. They believed influence ran in the opposite direction, as the Crown invested in elections to secure supporters in the Commons and dispensed lucrative “places” as patronage. By 1780, the government commanded the loyalty of about 200 of the House of Commons’ 558 members. This arithmetic explained why the opposition seldom prevailed: it was consistently outspent.

When the King opened Parliament on October 13, 1775, he again insisted that the Americans must be suppressed. Reports from across the Atlantic, he claimed, gave him “the strongest Hopes of the most decisive good Consequences.” Richmond rose to object, arguing that the policy of punishing the Americans had merely introduced “a new Cause of War and Revolt.”

Turning the King’s own language against him, Richmond invoked the phrase “bloody and expensive,” which George III had once used to describe the war with France that he inherited in 1760. Now, it was applied to the civil war his ministers had provoked, in which Britain was “almost inextricably involved.” The war, he warned, would exhaust the country’s resources, leave it vulnerable to France and Spain, and bring “the most deplorable Calamities to the whole British Race.”

He then pressed the constitutional point. The government’s strategy left only two options: the complete subjection of the Americans or their independence. Each new measure stripped colonial liberties, and every military action destroyed the colonists’ sentimental bonds with Britain.

Yet the British, as Richmond saw them, were defined by a spirit of liberty. Attempting to “break the Spirit of any large Part of the British Nation” should therefore provoke “Shame and Horror.” The colonies, he argued, should be preserved as societies of free people: British because they were free, and free because they were British.

Empire Without Oppression

A shift in policy was required. No legislation had ever described the relationship between the British Empire and the American colonies in positive terms, as one grounded in connection and freedom. But that was precisely what was needed. As he had once sought to clarify Canada’s place within the imperial system, Richmond now sought to clarify America’s. The Crown’s policy, he maintained, should be “to regulate, not to destroy.” Any victory achieved by stripping subjects of their constitutional liberties opened the door to the same degradations at home. The treatment of the Americans risked “establishing Precedents the most dangerous to the Liberties of this Kingdom.”

Richmond did not yet have a solution to this puzzle. He had, however, brought the problem into sharper focus. Given the structure of British constitutionalism, the war seemed to demand the subjection of the Americans to the authority of Parliament. But what the Americans wanted most was their own legislature. Preserving that constitutional order would paradoxically require limiting Parliament’s power over the colonies while giving the King a more direct relationship with them.

This, in turn, raised another conundrum. If Parliament gave up control over the colonies, what would prevent the King from overpowering its two Houses? Would maintaining America within Britain’s orbit unduly strengthen the monarch? Such an outcome would be unacceptable. Richmond needed to find a way to preserve, or even bolster, Parliament’s strength and independence from the Crown even while limiting the scope of its authority over the colonies.

In the summer of 1779, Richmond’s thinking began to crystallize. We know this from the marginalia in the books he was reading. These notes, which have never been published, capture the moment at which a modern conception of representation was born. Richmond was reading a remonstrance against George III that observed: “It is the misfortune of your majesty; it is the misfortune and grief of your People; to have a Grand Council [Parliament] and a Representative under an undue and dangerous Influence.”

He marked the sentence with an asterisk and wrote: “This is the real source of all the evils and danger with which the Nation is at present afflicted; no Remedy, therefore, can be so efficacious as a Reformation in that very point. There cannot be a legal government in this kingdom, without a due Representation of all the People.”

Only one in 75 people had the right to vote, Richmond noted, and not all who held that right exercised it. Parliament had become “rather a misrepresentation than a Representation of the People.” Every individual, he wrote, “ought to be esteemed in the State, what he is in the Christian church; viz a Member of it; because no inheritances of Land, Houses, etc., are to be esteemed so valuable as that common inheritance in the Laws, to which everyone is entitled.” On the next page, he added: “There can be no constitutional Authority without the free and uninfluenced assent of the Majority of the People.”

With that, Richmond arrived at a reconceptualization of the foundations of the British political system: the surest way to secure Parliament’s independence from the King was to extend the franchise. If every adult man could vote on behalf of his family, and if each MP owed his seat to a broad constituency rather than to a narrow, patronage-driven one, MPs could no longer be bought. Popular sovereignty would thus make it possible to bind a monarch to multiple legislatures across his realm without weakening them, while universal manhood suffrage offered a way to preserve British liberty at home amid imperial expansion.

Prompted by the American Revolution, Richmond gained insight into how executive power could be restrained. The broader the electorate and the more competitive the elections, the less likely corruption and authoritarianism are to take hold. Having reached this conclusion, Richmond introduced his bill for universal manhood suffrage in the House of Lords on June 3, 1780. In it lay the first conception of what would eventually become the modern constitutional monarchy.

Popular sovereignty, then, did not arise as the antithesis of the British Empire but as its foundation and anchor. By providing a means of checking executive power, it made imperial rule compatible with liberty. Paradoxically, the Empire became the vehicle through which popular sovereignty spread around the world.

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Danielle Allen

Danielle Allen

Writing for PS since 2026

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Danielle Allen, University Professor at Harvard University, is the author, most recently, of Radical Duke: How One Aristocrat—and the American Revolution—Transformed Britain (W. W. Norton, 2026), and Founder and Publisher of The Renovator.

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