Daniel W. Crofts, Old Southampton: Politics and Society in a Virginia County, 1834-1869 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992).

SYNOPSIS:

Crofts analyzes individual voting returns for Southampton County from the 1840s through the election of 1860 and the secession votes in 1861. Crofts finds that the most salient determinate for voting seemed to be geographical location. His analysis divides the county into two halves--one upper section, where whites outnumbered slaves and were generally small and medium landholders, voted Whig by a two-to-one majority, and the other lower section, where slaves and free blacks outnumbered whites and whites were either big landholders or landless workers, who voted strongly Democratic. Neighborhoods with sharp wealth skew tended to be strongly Democratic, while those with a more even smallholding demographic tended to be Whig. According to Crofts, the 1860 presidential election vote in Southampton followed a pattern established for years, but the secession voting created a much more polarized electorate. Secession, he argues, increased the division between the upper and lower county and the highest polarization ever between slaveholders and nonslaveholders.

EXCERPT:

"Available evidence plainly indicates that Cobb and other party loyalists received sectionally divisive cues from the party's cosmopolitan elite." (172)

Democratic secessionists "included almost all of the . . . cotton growers in the county." (176)

"All but one of the eight local voting districts in Southampton had a definite partisan identity." (178)

"The regional polarization of the vote within Southampton in early 1861 was accompanied by a record polarization between slaveholders and nonslaveholders." (179)

The data "suggest that the interconnected influences of family, neighborhood, partisanship, slaveholding, agricultural production, and religious affiliation combined to generate markedly different responses within a single county during the great crisis of 1860-61." (186)

RELATIONSHIP:

We do not find the kind of clear division in Augusta that Crofts found for Southampton--one section of the county committed to growth and Whiggery, another largely planter dominated and Democratic. Crofts' geographic argument accounts mainly for the division he sees between upper and lower Southampton, while ours systematically tests for the salience of a variety of geographic variables. We found a strong presence for slavery across Augusta, unlike Crofts for Southampton. On the other hand, we do see in 1860 voting patterns that the areas of concentrated Democratic voting were also ones with high levels of slaveholding and wealth.

"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."

"In Augusta, Whig Party activists were more likely to own slaves and to own bigger and more valuable farms than their Democratic counterparts."