William G. Shade, Democratizing the Old Dominion: Virginia and the Second Party System, 1824-1861 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996).

SYNOPSIS:

Shade argues that Virginia in the 1850s became more "democratic" and that neither the Whigs nor the Democrats were sectional parties within the state. The Whigs were not, he argues, the "party of the West," nor were the Democrats the party of the Tidewater. Shade contradicts older interpretations that stressed the geographic split in Virginia--that the non-slaveholding Germans of the Shenandoah Valley and the small independent farmers in the counties of the southwest typified Democrats or that large slaveholders in the east and nascent manufacturers in salt, iron, and woolens in the west were Whigs. Instead, Shade asserts that Whigs prevailed in towns and in town-dominated counties and that Democrats did better in agricultural areas where large planters were clustered. Shade finds the ethnoreligious explanation for party formation most persuasive. Neighborhood, church, and family ties, he finds, determined party allegiance. The state changed dramatically in the 1850s as fewer than half of Virginia white men worked as farmers and the power of the planters among the social elite declined significantly. The change in leadership was equally dramatic, Shade finds. Lawyers rose and planters declined in their membership at the state constitutional conventions. Shade considers this growth and development the crucial factor for explaining Virginia's movement toward secession. The election of 1860 in Virginia, he argues, resembled the same patterns already established in earlier elections, patterns that were completely swept away in the six months before the 1861 constitutional convention that voted to secede. The elections for constitutional convention delegates for the first time set non-slaveholding unionists against slaveholding secessionists.

EXCERPT:

"While the most detailed study of the Virginia Democratic Republicans insisted that ethnicity and religion did not influence voting, the analysis of both polling place 'neighborhoods' and individual voters shows ethnoreligious factors to have been crucial determinants of partisan identification for a significant number of voters. The importance of neighborhoods clustered around churches with a community core of kinship networks can hardly be exaggerated." (11)

"While there was some fluctuation on the anti-Democratic side as the national Whig party disintegrated and its followers drifted first to the Know Nothings and then to Bell's Constitutional Union party, the Virginia electorate showed a relative stability throughout the 1850s. The national Whig party had disappeared, but the old Whig leaders and the fraternity of voters and the anti-Democratic cadre who had manned the grass-roots party machinery remained to sustain Virginia unionism in its myriad forms. In the course of the entire decade, only a small number of Virginians actually switched allegiance." (284-285)

"While the Democrats had consistently received a higher proportion of slaveholders' votes than the Whigs, slaveholders and non-slaveholders supported both parties and in the presidential election Virginia voters divided along traditional lines." (286)

"The Old Dominion lingered as a genteel republic in the age of the common man." (264)

"Party allegiance had no effect on the way delegates voted on apportionment. Instead, delegates from east and west stood fast on the opposite sides of the issues. The final division on representation could have been no less partisan or more sharply sectional." (281)

"The conflict over secession pitted a party dominated by slaveholders against one representing men with no direct stake in the peculiar institution and divided the electorate in a sectional fashion that had previously been associated with the question of constitutional reform." (291)

RELATIONSHIP:

Our data remain inconclusive on Shade's argument that the Valley counties were dominated by religious and ethnic political alignments. Shade finds that Scots-Irish--Presbyterian and Anglican--Valley residents supported the Whig Party and the Know-Nothings, while the Germans--Mennonite, Lutheran, and German Reformed--residents voted Democratic. We agree with Shade that political affiliations were shaped by ethnic and religious identity in the Valley, though our analysis of Augusta County does not show a direct correlation. We suggest that the correlation between ethnic and religious identity and political expression may have varied significantly from county to county.

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

"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."

"Augusta's Whig Party emphasized that slavery was safer within the Union than without and that in the 1860 election slavery had become needlessly politicized. The Augusta Whigs moved to develop a new party around Constitutional Unionism."

"Augusta's Democratic Party emphasized that slavery was the country's economic engine of success, protected in the territories by the Dred Scott decision, and they defended Stephen Douglas to the end as the best candidate to defeat Lincoln."