The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

This book examines voting practices in America during the nineteenth century.

Richard Franklin Bensel (Author)

9780521831017, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 April 2004

320 pages, 5 tables
23.6 x 15.8 x 2.3 cm, 0.537 kg

"This important and provocative book should be in the library of everyone interested in nineteenth-century American politics." - Speculum Thomas E. Jeffrey, Rutgers University

During the middle of the nineteenth century, Americans voted in saloons in the most derelict sections of great cities, in hamlets swarming with Union soldiers, or in wooden cabins so isolated that even neighbors had difficulty finding them. Their votes have come down to us as election returns reporting tens of millions of officially sanctioned democratic acts. Neatly arrayed in columns by office, candidate, and party, these returns are routinely interpreted as reflections of the preferences of individual voters and thus seem to unambiguously document the existence of a robust democratic ethos. By carefully examining political activity in and around the polling place, this book suggests some important caveats which must attend this conclusion. These caveats, in turn, help to bridge the interpretive chasm now separating ethno-cultural descriptions of popular politics from political economic analyses of state and national policy-making.

Preface
1. Introduction
2. Structure and practice of elections
3. Social construction of identity in Eastern rural communities
4. Ethno-cultural stereotypes and voting in large cities
5. Frontier democracy
6. Loyal oaths, troops, and elections during the civil war
7. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Elections & referenda [JPHF], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], History of the Americas [HBJK]