Who is free to vote

Reading The First Emancipator by Andrew Levy [F229 .C34 L48 2005] has made me wonder a bit about what I really know concerning black history. The concluding sentence of the introduction intrigues me - "The mystery of Robert Carter, then is really two mysteries: why he freed his slaves, and why we couldn't care less."

I went to GALILEO, selected Databases A-Z, selected show all and began to scroll through, looking for a database that might tell me more about emancipation. The Annals of American History which
includes the full text of primary documents in American history, including historical accounts, speeches, memoirs, poems, editorials, landmark court decisions, and cultural criticism seemed like a great place to start.

Searching for emancipation brought up 100 articles. The difficulty with using this database is I can't see how to sort the articles by time/date, author, title, or something. I just get a list of articles. The Help menu notes there should be a Sort By link - I'm not seeing that option after the results come up from a search.

Letting serendipity guide me by scrolling through I noticed an article that refers to African Americans right to vote in Pennsylvania being denied in 1838 ["Appeal of Forty Thousand African Americans, Threatened with Disfranchisement"].
The document is quite clear- African Americans had been voting in Pennsylvania since the Revolution- not all blacks, not everywhere in Pennsylvania but enough to warrant a protest with 40,000 people. Free blacks voting in a northern state prior to the Civil War. Why don't we know about this?

A Google search on Black voting rights turned up the 15th Amendment and the Voting Rights Act and an ACLU voting rights timeline. None of these sites noted blacks voting in
Pennsylvania pre-1838. This article from the Historical Society of Pensylvania shed a bit of light on who was voting and what happened in 1838.

I did get distracted didn't I? Started out looking for emancipation- ended up with voting.

Following a trail can lead you to a destination unthought of- get the password to use GALILEO at home from your Georgia librarian.


-kls