Paul Bourke and Donald Debats, Washington County: Politics and Community in Antebellum America (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

SYNOPSIS:

Using a statistical program called RISK, Bourke and Debats try to piece together the salient variables that affected individual voting in an antebellum Oregon community. They find a subtle, modest, and perhaps mysterious connection between partisan choice and general social indicators, such as wealth, region of birth, marital standing, length of residency, age, occupation, and religious adherence. They also find that variables added together formed no coherent picture of partisan voting and socio-economic position. These variables "wash out" in the general electorate, and Bourke and Debats assert that consistent participation in the electoral process characterized those who had a stake in the community, for the most part the wealthy. The groupings of partisanship, then, were more spatial than social, as clusters of family and neighbors committed to partisan men around them.

EXCERPT:

"First, we emphasize the nature of institutional rules for voting in the traditional electorate, and second, we stress the bearing that individual-level information can have on wider questions of popular engagement in past political life." (6)

"In these and many other ways that we explore in this study, the individual-level information available in the poll books of Washington County has enabled us to refine the picture of the traditional electorate derived from aggregate returns. We are able to take account of the fact that system-wide cues at the top of the ticket produced higher turnouts; that socio-economic differences served chiefly to distinguish voters from nonvoters; that socio-economic, cultural, and demographic factors separated partisan leaders but that these distinctions fell away in the wider electorate. None of this gives us warrant for generalizing about the policy issues that engaged state legislatures and the Congress; it does, however, help us to develop a sharper sense of the culture of those to whom policy cues were directed." (15)

"Those who were active in political organization in the 1850s understood what is now apparent to us: that the divisions that stratified the politically active faded out in the larger population, to be replaced by another stratification that looked more like a surveyor's map." (281)

"We have sought to present Washington County as a political culture in which rich and poor, members of all the county's Protestant communities, and men of all regional groups and all ages were to be found in the electorate on both sides of the general political contest. Although wealth did not distinguish between partisans, it did distinguish between consistent voters and those who voted irregularly or not at all." (249)

"It is difficult from general social profiles to work out the relationship of the visibles to the mass of the electorate. Although that relationship remains elusive, the groupings of voters that we have observed suggest affinities structured more around spatial than social attributes." (246)

"Somewhat to the edge of the world of intense ideological commitment defined by the regular partisans, was the mass of people--more concerned, we may surmise, with ordinary life, prone from time to time to abstain from the big choices, to abandon party, and even to join the opposition. What determined which of these diverging actions they would take or the degree to which they would align themselves completely with the visible partisans cannot be known for particular individuals in any but a few random cases. But what may be recovered of the culture in which these people lived suggests that the physical and social networks to which they belonged provided the essential settings in which their choices about everything else, including politics and public affairs, were made." (322)

RELATIONSHIP:

We cannot address the issue of permanence and mobility in this study of 1860, but the Valley of the Shadow project's archive indicates that wealth, status, and longtime residency coalesced into political authority. We have not tested for family structures and neighborhood partisanship, as Bourke and Debats did, but we do find spatial partisanship in both counties. Bourke and Debats also find that political affiliation was a part of a larger cultural and social matrix, "one experience among many that defined the lives of people who resided in a particular locality." (275) We agree with Bourke and Debats that the physical and social networks of the community set the context of its choices in public affairs.

"In Augusta clusters of contiguous precincts gave their support in the 1860 presidential election in similar patterns."

"Whigs accounted for the most visible party activists in Augusta County, but activists in both parties exerted significant influence."

"Precincts in Augusta that supported Breckinridge at a high level in 1860 represented the extremes of wealth, as the wealthiest and the poorest precincts drew more support for Breckinridge than any other precincts."

"The precincts with high Bell support had average household wealth and farm value well below county averages. For these marginal places a vote for Bell represented a safe course, the least change."

"In Franklin County, John Breckinridge won a majority in six precincts, most of them in the far northern and western belt of the county, where few blacks lived and farmers planted corn not wheat."