Presented by Willard Hurst as part of his course "Introduction to Modern American Legal History" at the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1978. A continued discussion of the issues surrounding the 1647 debate and the presence of Cromwell's army is used to begin an examination of suffrage. Social stability is linked to governmental representation, and Hurst emphasizes the necessity of protecting public interests. He explains the representative councils that constituted Cromwell's army and the relation of these groups to the political consciousness that existed in the Greek city-states, the Roman Empire, and the 1620 Mayflower Compact. The previous lectures on representation and social stability in England are used as a base to begin describing suffrage in the American colonies. Hurst explains how the right to vote was viewed as an instrument of power, the dangerous potentiality some feared in this privilege, and the ways in which these premonitions played into the decisions that were reached at the Philadelphia Convention.
