The American Civil War changed the way men voted. The most important change was the vast expansion of the role played by the federal government and its agents. This was the case everywhere except the eleven states of the Confederacy, which were, of course, out of the Union; although elections occurred in the South, there is very little information available on how they were conducted. In the North and in the border states, however, the Civil War imposed a new condition on voting: the legitimacy of an election now often depended on whether or not those loyal to the Union prevailed at the polls. This condition, in turn, justified the use of measures that had been almost unknown before the war. In the border states, for example, loyalty oaths were imposed as one of the requirements for determining voter eligibility. These oaths screened out those who had either actively supported the Confederate war effort or harbored southern sympathies without acting on them. In the border states and some northern states as well, Union troops and loyal state militia also appeared at the polls. Their presence was ostensibly intended to maintain order and protect the polls from Confederate guerrillas. In practice, however, their influence was more commonly felt through their own informal tests of voter loyalty; those merely suspected of hostility to the Republican party were often physically ejected from the polling place, whether or not they were willing to swear the required loyalty oath.

In many areas, opposition to the Republican party marked men as disloyal to the Union cause because the Republican party was always the most fervent and often the only organization supporting the northern war effort.

During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the United States struggled through a long and bloody Civil War, settled much of the western prairie, and embarked upon a transition from an agrarian to an industrial society. During these two decades, Americans went to the polls, whether located in hamlets swarming with Union soldiers, wooden cabins so isolated that even neighbors had difficulty finding them, or saloons in the most densely populated sections of great cities. Their votes have come down to us as election returns reporting tens of millions of officially sanctioned and tabulated democratic acts. Neatly collated and arrayed in columns by office, candidate, and party, these returns are routinely interpreted as reflections of the preferences of the individuals composing the communities in which they were made out. Seen this way, we might conclude that the returns constitute unambiguous evidence of the existence of a robust democratic ethos. One of the purposes of this book is to suggest some important caveats that must attend this conclusion.

Most of the literature on mid-nineteenth-century politics has assumed that the electorate responded to the policy positions set down in party platforms. From this perspective, voters critically compared candidates and platform planks before choosing the alternative closest to their own personal tastes and policy positions. Rational choice theorists, usually operating under strong assumptions characteristic of methodological individualism, are particularly prone to such interpretations. Party organizations wrote platforms and chose candidates precisely because they believed these platforms and candidates would attract voters.

From a very general perspective, there were three different venues for voting in the middle of the nineteenth century. For example, many men in the nation's largest cities voted at precincts where party challengers and election officials did not personally know them. With highly transient populations in each neighborhood and very large numbers of voters at each polling place, those attending the voting window usually had little more than a man's physical appearance by which to judge their qualifications and partisan allegiance. While the physiognomy and attire of would-be voters could be visually inspected, reliance on the information thus revealed involved very different practices from those in older, more settled rural communities. In sharp contrast with the latter, the ways in which it was decided who was eligible to vote and which party ticket they might be carrying usually involved stereotypes that did not rely on detailed, contextual histories of an individual. To apply these stereotypes, the crowds surrounding the voting window frequently questioned those approaching the polls, backing up their interrogations with verbal intimidation and physical force. In some cities, such practices appear to have generated the armed political clubs that commandeered precincts in their neighborhoods. Political anonymity thus came at a very high price.

A second, very different venue for voting characterized the western frontier. Situated within an ever-changing social landscape sparsely populated with men constantly moving about in search of good land and economic opportunity, precincts along the line of settlement were places in which anonymous individual voters confronted the petty but nonetheless intense interests of those who ran the polls.

The physical arrangement and design of ballot boxes, voting windows, and party tickets would have been recognizable to American voters throughout the nation. These material elements of the election process gave rise to practices that influenced the formation of individual voting decisions and shaped the way in which those decisions became registered as formal votes. Here we examine how these practices and the structure of voting were exploited by party agents as they sought to turn the process to personal and partisan advantage.

Election practice emerged out of the interaction between, on the one hand, the degree of familiarity between party agents and voters and, on the other, the formal requirements for voting set down in election law. With respect to the latter, the Constitution of the State of Virginia stipulated:

Reflecting the thoroughly democratic impulses of American politics, precincts were created on the frontier almost as soon as places for receiving votes appeared. These places were often lonely outposts such as houses occupied by men who ran ferries across unfordable rivers, isolated homes for sheep and cattle ranchers, or forts garrisoned by federal troops. Such polling places were often ephemeral because the line of settlement was a rapidly changing social landscape. Local landmarks such as ferries often disappeared as fast as they emerged when the pattern of occupation changed the paths that farmers took to market or the tracks followed by migrating settlers. Homesteaders changed their residences as well. Many were no more than squatters who could not file a claim until the land they cleared and cultivated had been surveyed. With nothing more than their sweat invested in any particular plot, they frequently moved around, searching for the best unoccupied site.

Whatever might be the pattern of occupation when the country was first opened up, the coming of the railroad, with its stations and access to eastern markets, dramatically changed the social topography. Hamlets that had formed at the intersection of dusty roads were suddenly abandoned, replaced by small towns erupting like mushrooms wherever railroad lines happened to cross. In general, the social topography of the frontier was but a great and tentative experiment as men and women, both individually and collectively, responded to constantly evolving economic opportunities.

Many of the earliest landmarks to appear on the western frontier were political in nature.

Broad economic interests clashed in national politics throughout the middle decades of the nineteenth century. These conflicts were mediated by local and national political institutions, particularly the party system and the federal allocation of power between the national and state governments. In terms of platform declarations and policy implementation, both the party system and government institutions more or less spoke the same language, executing a fairly transparent translation of economic interests into public policy. However, the logic and language of the great struggles dominating national politics were often garbled when transmitted into the electoral settings of the polling place. These settings were constructed out of material very different from that out of which the parties made policy in the state and national capitals. And they marshaled the attention and understandings of ordinary citizens whose concerns often were both different in quality and much more limited in scope. Many of the policy logics and disputes rending state legislatures and the federal Congress were simply beyond the event horizon of the individual voter.

Many elements entered into the construction of the local settings in which individual voters determined the fates of national parties. One of the most important was the sheer physicality of electoral practice, the arrangements through which citizen preferences were recognized and registered as official votes. Another was the social environment of the voter that determined how he aligned himself with others and thus distinguished between friend and foe. A third was the intermittent intrusion of national policy conflicts into the daily lives of citizens. For example, for many northerners, taxes and the draft were the most important ways that the Civil War materialized in their daily lives.

In terms of political practice and material organization, rural precincts in long-settled regions of the slave and free states had more in common with each other than either had with polling places in large cities. And large cities, whether northern or southern, resembled one another more than either looked like their immediately surrounding rural areas. This general divergence between rural and urban polling places arose for a number of reasons. For one thing, urban populations were much more diverse in terms of ethnicity, religious beliefs, and economic livelihoods than were their rural hinterlands. This diversity, along with the emergence of ghettos that concentrated urban inhabitants in their own distinct ethnic, religious, and class communities, meant that party agents and election officials did not personally know many of the men who approached the voting window. And even if one of them might recognize a man, the others usually could not help to establish that voter's identity.

In addition, polling places in the nation's largest cities were much closer together than they were in rural neighborhoods. In rural areas, polling places were usually at least several miles apart, and riding from one to the other was inconvenient at best. But in the largest cities polling places might be only blocks apart, with one close to where a man lived, another near the place in which he worked, and perhaps yet another somewhere along the path he normally took between home and work. The close proximity of polling places in larger cities, combined with the relative anonymity of individuals, meant that men could choose the precinct in which they might vote without going too far out of their way.

Scholars have celebrated American democracy from many different perspectives. Some have seen democratic practices as a social ritual through which communal identity is learned and reinforced. This identity, in turn, underpins the social cohesion and understandings that allow any society to function as a political community. Others have valued democracy more for what it requires than for what it does. They have viewed freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of assembly – all of them products of democracy – as the most important ends served by a democratic system. From this perspective, democracy becomes an ideology that entails freedom as a consequence. And it is the consequence, not the process itself, that justifies democracy. From yet a third perspective, members of the pluralist school have seen democracy as the best defense against public chaos and disorder. The way they see it, democratic institutions almost magically adjust government policy to the popular will – much as the hidden hand of the market matches economic production to consumer demand. Finally, there are those who take a more jaundiced view. These scholars cite the pathologies associated with popular government, among them tyrannical majorities, simplistic election slogans, and the social inefficiencies thus induced in public policy. For them, the only things worse than democracy are the alternatives.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, nineteenth-century American democracy can be viewed from all of these perspectives. As communal identity, for example, suffrage eligibility marked the boundaries and shaped the content of what it meant to be an American during the global flowering of the nation-state.

The core of that identity was the northern, rural, native-born, white, Protestant male.