In 1735, a new basis for the suffrage was established. Freemen were disfranchised, but the suffrage was indiscriminately given to freeholders who owned fifty acres of land.[42] The exclusion of negroes, mulattoes, and Indians prevalent in the act of 1715, was abolished. Land-holding and not color was the basis of the suffrage. The only additional change in the suffrage qualification before the Revolution was made by the act of 1751, which required freeholders to be twenty-one years of age in order to vote.[43] The North Carolina constitution of 1776 granted the franchise to all free men without regard to race or color with the single limitation of residence.[44] This was the franchise law that was extended to the Southwest Territory by the Act of Cession of 1790, which stated, “that the laws in force and use in the state of North Carolina at the time of passing the act, shall be, and continue in full force until the same shall be repealed, or otherwise altered by the legislative authority of the said Territory.”[45] Congress accepted the Territory on the above condition.[46] The suffrage was not changed by the legislature of the Southwest Territory. The basis of the suffrage remained unchanged from the establishment of the Constitution of North Carolina in 1776 to the establishment of the Constitution of Tennessee in 1796. However, the Revolutionary State of Franklin, which flourished in western North Carolina from 1784 to 1788, proposed a constitution that gave the suffrage “to every free male inhabitant” who was twenty-one years old.[47] This is significant because it was an independent expression of the people in the territory that later became Tennessee. B. _Suffrage in the Convention of 1796._