From Brad DeLong’s most prodigious of all blogs by a working academic, there is some support for my “William Jennings Bryan coalition” post of a few days ago, with heavy-duty social science graphs.  As I understand it, the graphs show that 2008 southern voters were radically more responsive to race than voters in other regions, with the Midwest as the next most similar region, but not very similar. (It was the relatively underpopulated Plains that went for McCain, not the cities of the [post-] industrial Midwest.) Brad opines:

The whites in the heartland of today’s Republican Party just do not vote–and do not think–like the rest of us do. Richard Nixon wanted the Republican Party to lock up the South. Now it looks as though the South has locked up the Republican Party.

The post does not get any deeper into the history of the GOP’s southern problem, and emphasizes racism more than I did; yet one must note that for all Bryan’s humanism and good Christian intentions, southern racists were his hard-core base of support.  In his last run in 1908, Bryan pulled more than 70% of the vote in Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina, and over 90% in those last two.

This is a guest post, the fifth in our new series, running in honor of Philip Lampi and in conjunction with the Common-Place politics issue. See the introduction for an explanation. Click the logo below to see all of the posts.

WERE EARLY AMERICAN ELECTIONS FOR WHITE MEN ONLY?

On Voter Fraud and the Petticoat Electors of New Jersey

by Rosemarie Zagarri
George Mason University

Recent charges against the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) for registering nonexistent voters have raised the specter that the 2008 election will be marred by voter fraud. But as anyone who has studied American history knows, voter fraud—and allegations of corruption—are as old as the republic itself. The more closely contested the race, the likelier the possibility of fraud and the accusations of fraud.

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This is a guest post, the second in our new series, running in honor of Philip Lampi and in conjunction with the Common-Place politics issue. See the introduction for an explanation. Click the logo below to see all of the posts.

WAS ANDREW JACKSON REALLY THE PEOPLE’S CHOICE IN 1824?

by Donald J. Ratcliffe
Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford

[Click here for .pdf version, with footnotes]

Well, of course he was. American historical narratives have always told us so, and recent prize-winning tomes that agree on little else confirm it. Old Hickory’s fame as victor of New Orleans gave him widespread popularity, the story goes, especially with newly enfranchised voters. So when he ran for president in 1824, he came first in the Electoral College but, with four candidates in the race, did not quite win an absolute majority. When the House of Representatives broke the deadlock in favor of the second-placed man, John Quincy Adams, Jackson’s supporters screamed that the people had been cheated of their choice by “bargain and corruption” and avenged the old general with a massive victory in 1828.

But was Jackson’s “stolen” victory in 1824, the emotional heart of this tale, really quite so clear-cut? In 1884 Edward Stanwood pointed out the problem. In six states the choice of presidential electors was in the hands of the legislature and we have no direct indication of how a popular vote would have resulted. In the states where there was a popular vote, not all the candidates were on every ballot, and in some the overwhelming popularity of one candidate-not necessarily Jackson-resulted in very low turnout. All that can be reported with fair certainty is the vote in the fourteen states where there was a popular ballot, either on the district or the general-ticket system. According to Stanwood, those states gave Jackson 153,544 compared to 108,740 for his nearest rival, John Quincy Adams, who was far ahead of the other two, Henry Clay (47,136) and William Harris Crawford (46,618).

Even in these fourteen states, there is really little evidence of Jackson’s nationwide popularity in 1824. He may have won 43 percent of their popular vote, but, as Lee Benson pointed out in 1957, 42 percent of that vote came from winning four-fifths of the popular vote in just three states (Alabama, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania), which together cast 23 percent of the national vote. Local concerns explain his victories in those three states, while his success in the Carolinas followed John C. Calhoun’s decision to throw his support to Jackson in return for becoming vice-president. In other parts of the country-notably New England and New York-Jackson received negligible support in 1824, in the face of Adams’s evident popularity.

Even in some states where the electors were chosen by the people, Jackson was less popular than appears at first sight. In North Carolina, the popular contest was fought between the Caucus ticket (for Crawford) and the People’s ticket (for whoever had the best chance of beating Crawford in the Electoral College), which won by 20,145 to 15,621. The state’s electoral votes were duly cast for Jackson, and it is often assumed that they measure his popularity in that state. But in eleven counties voters followed the pre-election suggestion that they mark their ticket for electoral candidates with the name of their preferred presidential candidate. In those counties Adams men supplied about one-fourth of the People’s vote, which reconciles with contemporary estimates that about 5,000 of the 20,415 were given by friends of Adams. So we need to move 5,000 votes from the Jackson column to the Adams column.

In the case of Georgia, Philip Lampi’s research reveals a measurable popular vote on the presidential question although the decision was made by the assembly. In the election to choose the assembly, candidates were identified as friends of either Crawford or Jackson, and one ticket representing each side was run in each county. The Jackson men lost to the Georgia candidate, but still attracted (on my arithmetic) 15,478 votes, which need to be added to the Jackson column. That takes the calculation to 164,022 for Jackson to 113,740 for Adams.

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This is a guest post, the first in our new series, running in honor of Philip Lampi and in conjunction with the Common-Place politics issue. See the introduction for an explanation. Click the logo below to see all of the posts.

DID THE ELECTION OF ANDREW JACKSON USHER IN THE “AGE OF THE COMMON MAN”?

by Andrew W. Robertson
City University of New York

One of the most persistent myths in American history is the idea that the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 marks the first “democratic” election in the history of the United States. The dawn of the so-called “Age of the Common Man” supposedly brought forth universal (i.e., white manhood) suffrage and a truly participatory democracy for the first time in the United States.

This mythology obscures the messiness of the actual history of voting in the years following the Revolution and preceding the Age of Jackson. It reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of American voting practice that too often ignores the ways in which American democracy ebbed and flowed — in fact, was redefined and restricted — in the years preceding the Civil War. Poor white men could and did vote in unprecedented numbers in the years following the election of 1800. Free men of color voted not only in New England and Pennsylvania, but also in some southern states, including Maryland and North Carolina. Women who held property in their own right — widows and spinsters — could vote in New Jersey from 1776 to 1808.

Rather than seeing the election of Old Hickory as a landmark event in American democratization, we should recognize that it was the preceding period, from 1800 to 1824, that marked the first efflorescence of American democracy, in all its messy inconsistency. Nowhere in the Age of Jackson could any woman vote; free blacks faced increasing race-based restrictions on their voting, and in most states voter turnout in the Jacksonian elections of 1828 and 1832 never equaled the peak turnout of the preceding quarter century.

Authorized by the Jacksonian mythology to ignore the elections of the period, historians of high politics have long portrayed the history of the United States from the Constitutional Convention in 1787 to the end of the Virginia Dynasty of presidents as a bright stage upon which great men enter, deliver memorable lines, and exit. This top-down approach is understandable, given the brilliance of the group that Jefferson called an “assembly of demi-gods” at Philadelphia. It diverts attention, however, from the fact that Jefferson and his contemporaries delivered their lines to an audience of ordinary men and women. In so doing, it obscures one of Jeffersonian America’s most enduring contributions to posterity: the emergence of the first truly democratic political culture in an extended republic anywhere in the world.

Contrary to the “Age of the Common Man” myth, my research suggests that the era of mass democratization began 28 years earlier, with Thomas Jefferson’s election to the presidency. The years from 1800 to 1816 saw the most dramatic surge in voting turnout in the nineteenth century, and the greatest expansion of the voting universe until woman suffrage a century later.

Suffrage Expansion and Electoral Competition, 1800-1820

In the first years of the nineteenth century, the United States was already a highly partisan, deeply polarized political culture. The Federalists and Republicans were fiercely and increasingly competitive in state elections from the middle of the 1790s to the end of the War of 1812. Thomas Jefferson’s election in the so-called “Revolution of 1800″ was not the culmination of these electoral battles, as he asserted, but it inaugurated a largely forgotten era of intense if uneven democratization.

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What we have here is the introduction to the series. The first post, by Phil Lampi’s chief New Nation Votes accomplice Andrew W. Robertson, is here. Click the logo below to see all of the posts in the series.

A blog series dedicated to Philip Lampi

Exploring early American politics one reality at a time.

We sail out
on orders from him
but we find,
the maps he sent to us
don’t mention lost coastlines,
where nothing we’ve actually seen
has been mapped or outlined
and we don’t recognize the names upon these signs.

Okkervil River, “Lost Coastlines“

AN INTRODUCTION
by Jeffrey L. Pasley
University of Missouri

When you first approach early American political history with the idea of seriously studying it, it can be hard to avoid the feeling that there is nothing you could possibly add. Everything that can be known about the Jay Treaty negotiations or the election of 1828 or the Webster-Hayne debates is already exhaustively covered in numerous books and articles and digested for public edification in textbooks and Wikipedia. If you’re lucky, this feeling dissipates once you get to know the details and nuances and realize that not everything really has been adequately covered. Even then, there are paths you just avoid as overly beaten or simply unmarked.

Voting in the Early Republic was one of those topics for me. Reading for comps, it seemed like vote-counting was just about all that a lot of political historians ever did, and you couldn’t even do that, I read, for the early period that most interested me. The data didn’t exist: few of the states voted in the same way or at the same time, especially for president, and almost none of them saved the appropriate records before the advent of what they used to call the Age of the Common Man in 1828. Political scientist Walter Dean Burnham called early 19th-century elections the “lost Atlantis” of American politics, and the seeming lack of data licensed electoral scholars to treat the Federalist-Republican era as a prologue to the real democratic action at best.* Other political historians were increasingly explicit about conceiving early American politics as essentially coterminous with the post-Revolutionary elite better known as the Founders. The philosophical debates and personal relationships of various well-known gentlemen were all that was worth knowing about. In short, there was nothing to see there in terms of popular politics, so I moved on, at least as far as the election results are concerned.

A King of New England

Philip Lampi’s work shocked me out of that attitude. His story has been written up many times by now — the AAS web site has a page of Phil’s press clips — but it never ceases the boggle the mind. Common-Place co-founder Jill Lepore, writing in The New Yorker, called it “one of the strangest and most heroic tales in the annals of American historical research”:

He began this work in 1960, when he was still in high school. Living in a home for boys, he wanted, most of all, to be left alone, so he settled on a hobby that nobody else would be interested in. He went to the library and, using old newspapers, started making tally sheets of every election in American history. His system was flawless. It occupied endless hours. Completeness became his obsession. For decades, at times supporting himself by working as a night watchman, Lampi made lists of election returns on notepads. He drove all over the country, scouring the archives by day, sleeping in his car by night. He eventually transcribed the returns of some sixty thousand elections.

Where professional historians and political scientists shrugged off a whole era because they could not send a graduate student to the library or call up a colleague in Michigan to get the proper data, Phil Lampi committed himself to filling in the blanks of the history books, as a hobby, to be pursued in the spare hours of a rather laborious, hardscrabble life.

In the process of his quest, Phil also made himself one of the country’s leading authorities on the early American press as well as its election returns. At some point, he got at a job at the American Antiquarian Society, the nation’s leading repository of early American newspapers, to be closer to his sources. After many years of photographing the old papers for microfilm and paging them for AAS patrons, making up his tally sheets and helping out interested scholars on the side, Andrew Robertson and John Hench secured National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities grants that finally allowed Phil to spend some of the work day focusing on his grand project. The grants also launched the process of organization and preservation that has eventually resulted in the immense New Nation Votes database.

Phil is very much a man of the pre-blogospheric era, but in many ways he is a precursor of those self-taught experts who created some of the Internet’s most iconic sites, and the weblog itself, strictly by pursuing their personal interests. New Nation Votes realizes the dream of pioneer Internet history sites like the University of Virginia’s Valley of the Shadow — American history presented with a depth, transparency, and flexibility that no other medium can match. Certainly no other data source can. New Nation Votes users can not only find the once-missing election data, but drill all the way down to Phil’s sources and handwritten notes if they so desire.

All that said, it is in some ways a disservice to overemphasize Phil’s biography. If you talk to Phil at any length, you realize that he did not choose his hobby solely for its boringness. He was also an explorer who sensed the gaps in the available political cartography. He once told me that he enjoyed looking at the voting charts he found in some of the reference books at the public library and wondered why they had so little information on the early part of American history. A true “King of New England,” in the Cider House Rules sense, Phil wondered especially about the political “home team,” as he saw it, the Federalists. Why did the Federalists seem to just disappear from the charts and tables in reference books after John Adams lost? Very early in his data collection, Phil realized that this was not remotely accurate. In New England and selected other localities, Federalists competed in elections and held offices all the way into the Jacksonian era, when party names shifted. Phil was far ahead of his time in rediscovering the Federalists, whom historians now see as a tremendous influence on early 19^th-century developments in religion, culture, business, and social reform. The counter-Jacksonian America described in Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought?, for instance, has clear Federalist antecedents.

Explaining the Series

Time to move on to the series mentioned in the title of this post. Blogs being the somewhat confessional medium that they are, let me just admit that I decided to launch this series out of guilt. Here we have Common-Place throwing a special issue on politics, and no one invited electoral historians. Or at least that’s how it might seem. The truth is a bit more complicated, with the small number of people who actually work on early American elections and their lack of availability for the project being one set of reasons, and the greater speed with which other aspects of the issue came together being another. At a certain point, we just filled up, and the Common-Place staff screamed for mercy when I threatened to commission even more articles. The blogosphere seemed to be the answer to the question, how could we pay tribute to Phil — at a time when he is facing serious health issues — and also do some justice to his subject without doubling the size of our already very substantial special issue?

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