A History of Election Day

Developing Classical Thinkers

In 1845, Congress passed a law designating the first Tuesday in November as election day. Henceforth, the nation would vote every four years for a Presidential candidate, members of the House of Representatives, and, depending on the year, a suite of Senate candidates, with elections for other offices occurring in by-years depending on the state and the locality.
The act of voting each year is often seen as the bare minimum of a citizen’s political participation. Voting is indeed an important, sacred trust that American citizens from age 18 upwards should not take for granted, for the vast majority of people across the world do not get a say in their “elected" officials or the policies that their leaders carry out.
Voting is neither the floor nor the ceiling of our political participation. Indeed, it is just one more thing we do to “keep” our republic, to quote an oft-told story from Benjamin Franklin at the close of the Constitutional Convention.
At the end of the convention, a local Philadelphia resident asked Benjamin Franklin: “Well Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy? She asked.
At this, Franklin quipped, “A republic!...If you can keep it!”
Franklin’s reply is a reminder: a republican government (like that of the United States) needs its citizens to have virtue, those “habits of moral excellence” if we are to keep our republic--and virtue lies at the heart of classical education and of our responsibility as citizens in the greatest country in the world. Let us not take this responsibility lightly but do our duty to keep the freedoms we have been entrusted with.