Paradoxically, this was the same era in which women’s suffrage succeeded. The greatest expansion of the right to vote coincided with the greatest crash in the use of that right. This odd moment crystallizes a truth about voting: Access matters at least as much as legal right.

Law and access converged more in the second half of the 20th century. The Voting Rights Act allowed the federal government to work to close the gap between theoretical rights and real participation for black Southerners. Voting by women and later 18- to 21-year-olds meant that a larger proportion of the population could participate. The Cold War abroad, and low levels of partisanship at home, gave Americans reason to tell themselves an easy fable about a stable, broadening democracy.

But this period was unusual, and the longer-term trend of volatile voting rights has re-emerged in the 21st century. Americans are again debating the right to vote, and focusing on state voting laws, in ways we haven’t for nearly a century.

This history offers several lessons. For one, we’ve been here before, and it was worse: It is almost insulting to compare recent state voter ID laws with the experiences of black men who faced lynching while trying to vote.

This doesn’t mean there are no dangerous parallels. “It’s no big deal,” the head of President Trump’s Voter Integrity Commission said. “Nobody’s being disenfranchised.” But historically, official, technical disenfranchisement has not always been the issue — few were disenfranchised in the North in the late 19th century, even as millions of poorer white men found too many new hurdles to voting, and turnout dropped by 40 percent.

The story of a small group of former slaves’ first votes, in 1867, offers a final wrinkle. Among them were the survivors of the Wanderer, one of the last slave ships to arrive from Africa, in 1858. These men went from living in what is now Angola to American slavery to American democracy in under a decade. Many lost their votes within the following years. If anyone’s story proves that there is no natural arc of justice in the universe, it’s theirs.

But that lack of guaranteed progress is motivating. It means that we cannot sit back, confident that our institutions are protected by some immutable law. People have lost rights that they once thought secure and have won those they never thought possible. We must be proud of our first votes — and mindful of our last.