DONALD J. RATCLIFFE
Politics in Jacksonian Ohio:
Reflections on the
Ethnocultural Interpretation
Who voted for the two great political
parties in Jacksonian Ohio? Those
historians who have asked this question
have usually given two sorts of
answers. Some have seen the popular
basis for the party division in
essentially socioeconomic terms.
Occasionally they have detected a class
conflict between rich and poor, but more
commonly they have followed
Frederick Jackson Turner in seeing the
cleavage in regional terms: the
more isolated back-country and upland
(or "butternut") districts are
considered the bedrock of Democratic
support, while the more commer-
cialized, river-valley areas are seen as
the center of Whig strength.1 The
other answer stresses the importance of
ethnic influences: settlers from New
England were Whig, while those from
Pennsylvania and the South joined
with foreign immigrants in voting for
the Democratic party. Though few
historians have stressed the socioeconomic
interpretation to the exclusion
of the ethnic, some historians and
political scientists have seen ethnic
factors as the exclusive determinants of
voting behavior; and this latter
view has recently gained new
respectability from the application of more
sophisticated statistical techniques to
this historical problem. In almost
every state and county the result of
such "cliometric" analysis has been the
same: the socioeconomic interpretation
has no evidential basis, the party
division can be understood only in
"ethnocultural" terms.2
Mr. Ratcliffe is Senior Lecturer in
Modern History, University of Durham, England.
1. Frederick J. Turner, The United States, 1830-1850 (New York.
1935). 29, 303. 307.
Typical older works in this tradition
include Edgar A. Holt, Party Politics in Ohio, 1840-1850
(Columbus, 1931); Harold E. Davis,
"The Economic Basis of Ohio Politics, 1820-1840," Ohio
State Archaeological and Historical
Quarterly, XLVII (1938), 288-89; Francis
P. Weisen-
burger. The Passing of the Frontier, 1825-1850 (Columbus, 1941); and even Walter D.
Burnham, Presidential Ballots,
1836-1892 (Baltimore, 1955), 7-9, 11-13.
2. The word "ethnocultural"
embraces the meanings usually associated with the adjectives
ethnic, religious and cultural. Similar
emphasis on the origins of the voters may be found in
works as old as George M. Gadsby,
"Political Influence of Ohio Pioneers." Ohio Archaeologi-
cal and Historical Publications, XVII (1908),
193-96, as well as in more recent political studies
like Thomas A. Flinn, "Continuity
and Change in Ohio Politics," The Journal of Politics,
XXIV (1962), 524-27.
6 OHIO HISTORY
This new ethnocultural interpretation
has arisen from the praiseworthy
effort of historians to burrow beneath
the self-justificatory statements of
political leaders and to find out what
politics meant for the humble voter.
The aim has been to escape from the view
of events expressed by the
articulate and educated people of the
past, who commonly came from the
more affluent strata of society, and to
discover more about the mass of men
who left no record besides the aggregate
results of their behavior at the
polls. Historians like Samuel P. Hays
and Lee Benson have argued that
careful analysis of voting returns can
give a greater precision to our
understanding of political history and
help us uncover the social basis of
political behavior thus revealing the
experiences, the conditions of life,
and the cultural values and assumptions
which made ordinary men behave
as they did in elections.3
The most impressive work of the
ethnocultural school has been con-
cerned with the late nineteenth century.
Paul Kleppner and Richard Jensen
have shown that elections in the Midwest
in those years saw voters lining
up primarily according to their ethnic
and religious affiliations. The
Republicans drew their strongest support
from "pietistic" or evangelical
Protestants (including many Protestant
immigrants) who wished govern-
ments to safeguard the moral order
against alien and Catholic intrusions;
the Democrats received their staunchest
backing from ritualistic or "anti-
pietistic" Protestants and
Catholics, both of whom sought to protect their
institutions and practices by preventing
government interference. This
"cross of culture" (to use
Kleppner's phrase) was often profoundly affected
by the business cycle, but even after
the realignment wrought by the
depression of the 1890s, cultural
conflicts continued to play an important
political role in various states and localities.
The importance of such
ethnocultural divisions in the party
politics of the second half of the
nineteenth century has been ascribed by
Kleppner to the crisis of the 1850s,
when a massive influx of Catholic
immigrants from Germany and Ireland
provoked a Know-Nothing crusade to
preserve the nation's cultural ho-
mogeneity, Protestant character and
republican institutions. The resulting
heightened awareness of cultural
identity deeply influenced the political
realignment of the 1850s, and made the
threatened groups rally behind the
appropriate political party.4
3. Lee Benson, The Concept of
Jacksonian Democracy: New York As a Test Case
(Princeton, 1961); Samuel P.
Hays,"The Social Analysis of American Political History, 1880-
1920," Political Science
Quarterly, LXXX (1965), 373-94. The main works which have
resulted from this "new"
approach are well summarized by Samuel T. McSeveney, "Ethnic
Groups, Ethnic Conflicts, and Recent
Quantitative Research in American Political History,"
The International Migration Review, VII (1973), 14-23.
4. Paul Kleppner, The Cross of
Culture: Social Analysis of Midwestern Politics, 1850-1900
(New York, 1970); Richard J. Jensen, The
Winning of the Midwest: Social and Political
Politics in Jacksonian Ohio 7
Ethnocultural historians have also
argued, however, that such ethnic
and religious influences were of primary
importance in electoral behavior
even before 1850. Lee Benson himself
made a path-breaking contribution
with reference to the so-called Age of
Jackson: he acutely criticised much of
the evidence that earlier historians had
used to sustain an economic in-
terpretation of Jacksonian politics in
the state of New York, and he argued
instead in favor of an interpretation
which ranged Puritans, natives, and
new British immigrants against
non-Puritans and new non-British immi-
grants. Younger historians soon
sustained and refined this line of interpre-
tation. In particular, Ronald P.
Formisano has produced evidence of the
importance of ethnocultural factors in
Michigan politics between 1837 and
1852, and has argued in favor of seeing
the Jacksonian electorate as made
up of a series of "political
cultures": according to Formisano, these
"antagonistic . .. political
subcultures" among the voters perceived
political issues in symbolic terms which
related to the moral values of each
group. Thus each party developed a distinctive
political character based
upon these perceptions, and that
character had a direct impact upon its
success as a political party.5 One
corollary of such an interpretation has
been the belief that most voters were
influenced mainly by their own
immediate social and cultural
experiences, and scarcely at all by the
practical issues debated by the
politicians. This Formisano sees as generally
true of all "mass party
systems" marked by "self-conscious party loyalties";
only in a "pre-party polity"
such as existed before the 1830s were electoral
cleavages "oriented to more
immediate issue conflicts."6
Stephen C. Fox has recently used this
line of interpretation to explain
voting behavior in Jacksonian Ohio. Fox
uses the election returns for 1848
and the manuscript returns of the 1850
United States Census to demon-
strate that electoral cleavages in Ohio
followed the same patterns as those
discerned by Benson and Formisano in New
York and Michigan. Further-
more, he makes
"anti-partyism," or the distrust felt by many evangelicals
Conflict, 1888-1896 (Chicago, 1971); and, for Connecticut, New York and New
Jersey,
Samuel T. McSeveney, The Politics of
Depression: Political Behavior in the Northeast, 1893-
1896 (New York, 1972). For the 1850s, see Michael F. Holt, Forging
A Majority: The
Formation of the Republican Party in
Pittsburgh, 1848-1860 (Yale, 1969) and
Ronald P.
Formisano, The Birth of Mass
Political Parties: Michigan, 1827-1861 (Princeton, 1971), 195-
331.
5. Benson, Concept of Jacksonian
Democracy, esp. 123-328; Formisano, Birth of Mass
Political Parties, 1-194. See also William G. Shade, "Pennsylvania
Politics in the Jacksonian
Period: A Case Study, Northampton
County, 1824-1844," Pennsylvania History, XXXIX
(1972), 313-33; and idem. Banks or No
Banks: The Money Issue in Western Politics, 1832-
1865 (Detroit. 1972), esp. 17-19.
6. Ronald P. Formisano, "Toward A
Reorientation of Jacksonian Politics: A Review of
the Literature, 1959-1975," Journal
of American History, LXIII (1976), 58.
8 OHIO
HISTORY
for the new techniques of party
management being developed by the
Jacksonian Democrats, even more central
to the party division than did
Formisano, who first drew attention to
its importance in this period.7 More
recently, Fox has criticised in the
pages of this journal two recent works (by
Roger Sharp and myself) which had in
common an emphasis upon
economic experiences as influences on voting
behavior in Jacksonian Ohio:
Fox dismisses this interpretation, and
damns both works for their metho-
dological weaknesses and their devotion
to narrow economic
determinism.8 If he is right,
then there can be no argument against the
establishment of an ethnocultural
interpretation of Jacksonian politics in
Ohio to which, indeed, some historians
are already beginning to pay lip-
service.
However, the work of the
"ethnoculturalists" has its difficulties, as
notably James E. Wright and Richard L.
McCormick have shrewdly
argued. Among other things, McCormick
points out that the "ethnocultu-
ralists" cannot explain how
government policies are determined, since they
create a huge gap between elected
officials and the people who elected
them.10 Furthermore, their
studies concentrate on communities dominated
by distinctive ethnic or religious
groups, and often ignore the many rural,
7. Stephen C. Fox, "The Group Bases
of Ohio Political Behavior, 1803-1848." (Ph.D.
dissertation, University of Cincinnati,
1973); R.P. Formisano. "Political Character, Antipar-
tyism, and the Second Party
System," American Quarterly, XXI (1969), 683-709.
8. Stephen C. Fox, "Politicians,
Issues, and Voter Preference in Jacksonian Ohio: A
Critique of an Interpretation," Ohio
History, LXXXVI (1977), 155-70. The works criticized
are James Roger Sharp, The
Jacksonians versus the Banks; Politics in the States After the
Panic of 1837 (New York and London, 1970), and Donald J. Ratcliffe,
"The Role of Voters
and Issues in Party Formation: Ohio,
1824," Journal of American History, LIX (1973), 847-
870. The present article is not intended
as a reply to Fox's critique, except on points of fact and
interpretation relevant to the argument
presented here. In general, that critique is based on a
misreading of my earlier article so
blatant that I am willing to allow our differences to be
adjudicated by those who have read both
pieces. They can decide, for example, whether an
article which emphasized the role of
moralistic antislavery sentiment in the Presidential
election of 1824 can fairly be described
as devoted to the proposition that men are motivated
primarily by greed: or whether there is
a logical contradition in arguing both that lines of party
cleavage were initially dictated by the
voters rather than the politicians in the election of 1824,
and that politicians played a decisive
role in stimulating interest and participation, especially
during the subsequent period of
extension and build-up (1826-28). Cf. Fox, article, 156.
163-68. For an alternative discussion of
my earlier article, see Bernard Sternsher, Consensus,
Conflict and American Historians (Bloomington, Ind., and London, 1975), 184-86, 194-98,
202.
9. For example, Jed Dannenbaum's study
of "Immigrants and Temperance: A Study of
Ethnocultural Conflict in Cincinnati,
Ohio, 1845-1860," Ohio History, LXXXVII (Spring
1978), produces evidence which implies
that ethnocultural conflicts had been less important
before the crisis of the early 1850s,
but then expresses his faith that they had, in fact, previously
been the major determinants of party
identity, as Benson had said. See ibid, 130, 139.
10. James E. Wright, "The
Ethnocultural Model of Voting: A Behavioral and Historical
Critique." Allen G. Bogue, ed., Emerging
Theoretical Models in Social and Political History
(Beverly Hills and London, 1973), 35-56;
Richard L. McCormick, "Ethno-Cultural
Interpretations of Nineteenth-Century
American Voting Behavior," Political Science
Politics in Jacksonian Ohio
9
native-American voters and the many who
possessed no religious affilia-
tion. When a rural community made up
overwhelmingly of native voters
has been examined, the result has been
to play down the significance of
ethnocultural conflicts, even in the
1850s.11
This essay is not primarily designed to
criticize the ethnocultural
interpretation as a whole. Indeed, it is
based on the assumption that
ethnocultural factors did largely
determine the character of the parties after
1852.12 But it will argue that an ethnocultural interpretation,
pure and
simple, which rejects completely the
role of economic factors, cannot work
in the specific case of Jacksonian Ohio;
Michigan cannot be extrapolated
to the Buckeye State. The basic argument
is, briefly, that since the major
influence on Jacksonian voting behavior
was party loyalty, the period
when loyalties were first formed is of
particular significance; and ethnicity
was only one of a number of factors
operating at that critical period. The
voting pattern established then was
therefore a somewhat complicated one,
but it was one which modified in time as
a result of various pressures; and,
of those pressures, economic issues and
socioeconomic character were at
least as important, for a time, as
ethnocultural influences. The economic
factors that can still be detected,
however, took the form not of socioeco-
nomic class interests or
antagonisms but of communal responses to the
varying economic experiences undergone
by the different regions of Ohio.
The Force of Party Loyalty
The most obvious feature of electoral
behavior in Jacksonian Ohio was
its extraordinary stability. In election
after election, the same constituen-
cies gave majorities of roughly the same
proportion to the same party. Any
map showing the counties won by each
party in a Presidential election after
1828 shows remarkable similarity to any
other such map; and when
deviations occur, as they regularly did
in state elections held in years when
there were no Congressional elections,
they were the result more of a
falling-off in the vote of one party
(usually the anti-Jacksonians) than of a
transfer of allegiance from one main
party to another. This stability is most
Quarterly, LXXXIX (1974), 351-77; Robert Kelley, "Ideology
and Political Culture from
Jefferson to Nixon," American
Historical Review, LXXXII (1977), 531-62, impressively
attempts to interpret the history of
American national politics and governmental policies in
ethnocultural terms, but in the end
fails to satisfy both "ethnoculturalists" and more tradi-
tional historians. See the comments, ibid.,
563-82, especially those of R. P. Formisano.
11. See, for example, Eric J. Cardinal,
"Antislavery Sentiment and Political Transforma-
tion in the 1850s: Portage County,
Ohio," The Old Northwest, I (1975), 223-38.
12. Melvyn Hammarberg, The Indiana
Voter: The Historical Dynamics of Party Alle-
giance During the 1870s (Chicago and London. 1977), effectively qualifies the
ethnocultural
interpretation for the post-civil war
period by applying the most sophisticated statistical
analysis to evidence of individual voting
behavior in Indiana.
10 OHIO
HISTORY
surprising in view of the rapid economic
development experienced by most
of Ohio's counties in this period, which
meant that their interests and even
outlook changed without any major effect
on their political behavior. The
best explanation of this phenomenon, as
many historians have recognized,
lies in the extremely strong loyalties
which voters contracted towards the
major parties. At each election most of
them tended to vote for the party
they had voted for on previous
occasions, and these loyalties were
commonly transmitted from generation to
generation.13 As E. D. Mans-
field wrote after the Presidential
election of 1876, "Anyone can see, by
examining the votes of 1828, how little
the strength of the parties has
changed since. The truth is that
politics, like religion, descend from father
to son, with little variation."14
The stability created by persistent
party loyalties among the voters has
some important logical consequences for
those who would discover the
significance of the party division.
Suppose, for example, that someone tried
to analyse the influences which operated
on voters in the elections of 1844
or 1848: could they be sure that the
influences they deduced from the
characteristics of the voters actually
operated in that election? For might
not those influences be ones which were
important at some earlier period,
but which by the 1840s had ceased to be
of immediate significance and
owed their continuing force to
persisting party loyalties? Were ethnocultu-
ral factors important all the time, or,
as some "ethnoculturalists" have
suggested, only at the period when party
loyalties were formed?15 For
similar reasons, it is a mistake to assume
that any one election provides a
means for analysing the pattern of
loyalties which marked a "stable phase"
of party politics like that of
1836-1848.16 As most political historians now
13. The importance of party loyalty in
voting behavior throughout much of American
history is implicit, if not explicit, in
the writings collected in Jerome M. Chubb and Howard
W. Allen, eds., Electoral Change and
Stability in American Political History (New York and
London, 1971), and Joel H. Silbey and
Samuel T. McSeveney. eds., Voters, Parties and
Elections: Quantitative Essays in
American Popular Voting (Lexington,
Mass., 1972). For
acknowledgement of the role of party
loyalty in the Jacksonian period, see, inter alia, Charles
G. Sellers, Jr., "The Equilibrium
Cycle in Two-Party Politics," Public Opinion Quarterly,
XXIX (1965), 19-34, 36; Formisano, Birth
of Mass Political Parties, 21-27, 322; Fox,
dissertation, 182,405-10.
14. Edward D. Manfield, Personal
Memories, Social, Political and Literary, 1803-1845
(Cincinnati, 1879), 235.
15. Silbey and McSeveney, Voters,
Parties, and Elections, 3.
16. For example, the Presidential
election of 1844 in New York cannot be extrapolated
with safety to earlier Jacksonian
elections, especially since the controversy over Catholic
schools in New York during that year
caused a heightening of nativist feeling which could well
have transformed what had previously
been a relatively minor influence on voting behavior
into an obvious major influence. Benson,
Concept of Jacksonian Democracy, 123-328. esp.
117-19, 187-91.
Politics in Jacksonian Ohio 11
recognize, we need to study every
election and to disentangle the long-term
influences like party loyalty from the
immediate, short-term pressures.
Such a distinction would also help to
explain why particular ethnocultu-
ral groups tended to support one party
rather than another. "Ethnocultu-
ralists" usually explain such
behavior by analysing the group's cultural
attitudes and then demonstrating that
the views of one party were much
more congenial to those holding such
attitudes. But is it not possible that
the party in question held congenial
views because it had long enjoyed the
support, and been subject to the
pressure, of that particular ethnocultural
group? The Quakers and the
"pietist" sects may have been attracted to the
Whig side because the Whigs had a sense
of mission and holiness; but it
might be more accurate to say that the
Whig party developed a heightened
sense of moral purpose because it grew
out of a political formation which
had always had the support of Quakers
and "pietists." Similarly, to decide
whether Irish Catholics voted Democrat
because they were Irish or because
they were Catholic, it is useful to
examine not only the statistical correla-
tions among the characteristics
involved, but also the circumstances which
led Irishmen and Catholics into a
particular party.17 It is also worth
remembering that groups of voters may
have joined a party initially for
reasons which had little to do with
group membership, but their group
characteristics may have become of
extraordinary significance for the
party's subsequent development. The
electoral analyst ought to look more
closely at the historical circumstances
which brought the constituent
groups into each party; and he cannot do
that by generalizing across the
voting behavior of the years 1836-1852
on the basis of figures derived from
the 1850 census.l8
Thus it is of some importance to
identify when the mass parties of the
Jackson era first attracted their
popular support. The "ethnoculturalists"
frequently assert that political parties
became "emotionally significant
groups" in the 1830s, yet they have
offered little evidence to support that
claim; indeed, they seem almost
unnecessarily committed to the notion that
17. Cf. Fox. dissertation, 215, 254,
294, 299, 323, 347-50.
18. Of the
"ethnoculturalists," Formisano has most satisfactorily analysed the process
of
party formation in the Jackson period.
In Michigan national partydivisionswereformed only
as the territory entered upon statehood,
and that process was marked by a conflict over alien
suffrage which made ethnocultural
factors particularly potent. However, one wonders
whether more emphasis should not be put
on loyalties established earlier by some voters,
especially in view of the emphasis
Formisano places on the polarising effect of the Antimason-
ic political campaigns; and, indeed, the
fact that the issue of alien suffrage divided the
Democrats in 1835 suggests that the
party had been formed earlier, possibly under the
influence of non-ethnocultural factors.
Ronald P. Formisano, "A Case Study of Party
Formation: Michigan, 1835," Mid-America, L (1968), 83-107, and Birth of Mass Political
Parties. 3-137, esp. 60-67.
12 OHIO
HISTORY
party formation could not have occurred
before about 1834.19 Admittedly,
there was a period of considerable
turmoil in 1834 and 1835 from which a
stable party division emerged, yet the
"ethnoculturalists" never seem to
consider seriously whether the division
which emerged repeated the
patterns of division which had expressed
themselves in 1828. Indeed, it may
be that the strongest evidence that party
loyalties had been established
before 1834 lies in the resilience with
which the Jackson party, in particular,
survived the storms of dissension and
schism aroused by Jackson's Bank
War. In fact, many observers have seen
the beginnings of a stable party
division in Ohio in the Presidential
election of 1828, while some, including
Dr. Fox, have seen that the
"ultimate party alignments" of the 1830s and
1840s were "roughly" predicted
by the election of 1824.20
A strong case can, indeed, be made for
claiming that the campaign of
1824 is the proper starting-date. In
that election, the old Federalist party
failed to run a candidate for the
Presidency, while the dominant Republi-
can party could not agree upon a nominee
to succeed President Monroe. In
Ohio politicians formed completely new
alignments, and organized cam-
paigns on behalf of three of the major
candidates Henry Clay, Andrew
Jackson, and John Quincy Adams. The
voters appear to have identified
each group clearly, as was shown by the
remarkably low level of ticket-
splitting.21 Indeed, the
sudden appearance of ticket voting in this election is
well revealed by the
"pollbook" for one township in northern Ohio. Here
the tellers began by assuming that there
were forty-eight individual
candidates for Ohio's sixteen places in
the electoral college, and so they
kept a tally of votes for each
individual electoral candidate. After six or
seven ballots had been counted, all of
them straight party votes, the tellers
began to record only one vote for each
ticket, under the first name on the
ticket. Not one of the fifty-five voters
offered a split ticket, and all the
electors on each ticket received the
same number of votes.22
Subsequently the politicians appear,
from their private correspondence
and newspaper writings, to have assumed
that the voters had contracted
some sort of emotional commitment of the
groupings created in 1824. After
19. Fox, dissertation, 345, 410, 432-33;
Formisano, Birth of Mass Political Parties. 3-4.
Benson sees the voting patterns of the
next two decades as crystalizing in New York in 1832.
two years before formal party
organization was achieved. Benson, Concept of Jacksonian
Democracy, 62.
20. Mansfield, Personal Memories, 235;
Richard P. McCormick, The Second American
Party System: Party Formation in the
Jacksonian Era (Chapel Hill, 1966),
265; Fox,
dissertation, 427.
21. Harry R. Stevens. The Early
Jackson Party in Ohio (Durham, N.C., 1955). For the
range of votes each ticket received
through the state as a whole, see Columbus Gazette,
November 18, 1824.
22. Pollbooks for Sandusky township,
Huron County, 1815-1824, Vertical File Material,
Ohio Historical Society.
"Pollbook" is an inaccurate description since voting was not done
viva voce in Ohio, and the preference of individual voters cannot
be traced.
Politics in Jacksonian Ohio 13
the House election of 1825, when the
Clay and Adams forces combined to
make the latter President, the
Jacksonians maintained their opposition
though not reviving their organization
until 1826. They then focused their
attention upon the Congressional
elections in those districts of eastern
Ohio which had voted for Jackson in 1824
but whose Congressmen had
supported Clay in 1824 and voted for
Adams in the House election; in some
of these counties the politicians
succeeded in persuading the electorate that
a commitment to Jackson for President
meant a vote for a Jacksonian
Congressman, but their failure to pull
out the vote in one or two counties
prevented their success in 1826.
However, the Adams men recognized that
the established popularity of Jackson in
these districts ensured that three
loyal and talented Adams-Clay
Congressmen were "certainly" going to be
defeated in 1828-as, indeed, they were.23
Similarly, the Adams and Clay
organizations of 1824 withered away
after the election, in this case partly
because the leaders in Ohio believed
that the alliance of their principals
was satisfactory to the majority of Ohio
voters, as, indeed, the Congressional
elections of 1826 suggested. By 1827,
however, the administration party was
developing its organization and
reminding voters that the Adams-Clay
administration represented the kind
of economic policy and moral symbol
desired by most Ohioans in 1824.
Recognizing the formidable threat
offered by the Jacksonians, the Adams
men endeavored to secure victory in 1828
by thorough party organization
in that area of the state-the Western
Reserve-which in the 1824
Presidential election had been most
hostile to Jacksonism.24 In fact, more
evidence than can be presented here
exists to confirm that by 1828 many
voters identified themselves
self-consciously with well-advertised party
labels which they associated with
"an ongoing organization, symbols, and
traditions," in so far as any
traditions could be said to be established after
only four years.25
But do the voting returns for this and
subsequent elections confirm that
the nascent parties in Ohio had by this
time acquired a stable body of loyal
identifiers who voted for them
regularly? Table 1 reveals how far the
23. Charles Hammond to J.C. Wright,
Columbus, December 16, 1827, Charles Hammond
Papers, Ohio Historical Society. For the
development of the Jackson party between 1825 and
1828, see the Larwill Family Papers,
Ohio Historical Society, and idem, Western Historical
Manuscript Collections, University of
Missouri. An interesting analysis of the progress of
organization in each congressional
district may be found in the Washington, D.C., United
Slates Telegraph, July
19, 1828, reprinted in the St. Clairsville Gazette, August 2, 1828. See
also Weisenburger, Passing of the
Frontier, 218-36, and Homer J. Webster, "History of the
Democratic Party Organization in the
Northwest, 1820-1840," Ohio Archaeological and
Historical Quarterly, XXIV (1915), 6-34, though the latter is not entirely
reliable.
24. For the organizational efforts of
the Adams men, see, in particular, the Charles
Hammond Papers. Ohio Historical Society,
and the Peter Hitchcock Family Papers, Western
Reserve Historical Society, as well as
the party press.
25. Cf. Formisano, "Toward a
Reorientation of Jacksonian Politics," 58.
14 OHIO
HISTORY
distribution
of the vote (by counties) of the Jacksonian Democratic party in
each
Presidential election between 1828 and 1840 correlates with the
distribution
of its vote in preceding and succeeding elections.26 Clearly
there
was a very high degree of party regularity in Ohio throughout these
years;27
and the stable pattern of party loyalty dates back not merely to the
1820s
but even to the Presidential election of 1824. This last conclusion is
based
on the positive correlation of .759 between the elections of 1824 and
1828,
which seems surprisingly high in view of the fact that the number of
people
voting in 1828 increased by more than two-and-one-half fold over
1824,
and Jackson won far more counties than he had in the earlier
TABLE 1
Interyear Correlations of Democratic Percentage Strength
of Counties in Presidential Elections, 1824-1844
1824 1828
1832 1836 1840
1828 .759
1832 .666 .923
1836 .510 .763 .889
1840 .426 .744 .818 .888
1844 .421 .705 .828 .875
.970
election;
however, it seems clear that, despite Jackson's considerable gains
in
1828, the degree of support he won in that year in most counties was
primarily
determined by the amount of support he had inherited from the
campaign
of 1824.28 Thus, if the parties of the second party system began to
26.
All correlations (with one exception) used in this paper are Pearson
product-moment
coefficients
of correlation, and are significant at the .001 level. Particular problems are
faced in
drawing
up a table of this kind because of the frequent boundary changes and the
creation of
new
counties in Ohio, and different researchers will get marginally different
results according
to
how they handle the problem. I have used Randolph C. Downes, The Evolution
of Ohio
County Boundaries, reprint ed.
(Columbus, 1970), to help me distinguish the major changes
and
have followed different strategies as seemed most appropriate in each case, but
I have
taken
great care not to correlate the returns of counties possessing the same name
but covering
markedly
different areas of land.
27.
When Formisano applied this test to successive Presidential elections in
Michigan, he
discovered
a positive correlation of between .622 and .858, which he considered suggested
"the
high
stability" of party loyalty during those years. Formisano, Birth of
Mass Political Parties,
24-25.
28.
If we calculate the coefficient of determination, then it appears that 57% of
the
variations
in the Jackson vote from county to county in 1828 might be explained by the
variations
in the vote inherited from 1824. See also Ratcliffe, "Voters and
Issues," 866. I am
grateful
to The Journal of American History for allowing me to reproduce, in this
and the
following
section, material originally published in that journal.
Politics in Jacksonian Ohio 15
acquire bodies of identifiers and became
"emotionally significant reference
groups" as early as the election of
1824, then we must make certain that we
correctly identify the factors which
influenced that critical, initial cleavage
which so determined the future character
of the party division.
Party Formation in the 1820s
So how important were ethnocultural
factors in determining the voting
patterns in those critical first
elections of 1824 and 1828? To date no
"ethnoculturalist" has devoted
much attention to this question, but clearly
Dr. Fox holds that the factors at work
in these elections were much the
same as those he has discerned in the
elections of the 1830s and 1840s. He
rejects the argument that the perception
of economic interest played any
role in drawing voters to one side or
another, and insists that the basic
conflict was of essentially moral
dimensions. This conflict had its roots in
the "profound sense of moral
anxiety among Americans who were only just
beginning to grasp the implications of
the sweeping revolutions in their
social, economic, cultural, and
political worlds that historians too casually
refer to as 'Jacksonian Democracy'.
" Some people were drawn, by their
resentment of privilege and corruption,
to the side of the Jacksonian party,
with its egalitarian and
anti-intellectual standpoint; others objected to the
Jacksonians' establishment of an
"inviolable party dominion" because it
jeopardized "independent political
activity," communal feeling and tradi-
tional civic virtues. This
"anti-party" sentiment was especially strong,
claims Fox, among the evangelical
elements in the Ohio population, and
particularly among settlers from New
England. In this way the moral
overtones of the party conflict tended
to divide the voters of the state into
distinct ethnocultural groupings,
according to how their cultural attitudes
made them view such issues;
consequently, since particular ethno-cultural
groups had concentrated in particular
areas of the state, the distribution of
party support reflected
"ethnocultural regionalism."29
Yet the evidence for the critical
election of 1824 suggests that such
moralistic concerns were in fact the
common possession of all Ohioans at
the time and so provided no basis for
the electoral division. All accepted the
basic principles of republicanism and
federalism, and the disagreements
over those terms that had marked the
first party system in Ohio did not
reappear in the campaign of 1822-1824.
The tradition of"antipartyism," of
objecting to the control of an
"aristocracy" of office-holders, was now
turned against the "caucus
candidate," William H. Crawford of Georgia;
but he had in any case almost no support
in Ohio, and the attempt to
control public feeling by use of the
traditional nominating machinery was
attacked by the friends of all the
candidates in Ohio. At the same time "anti-
29. Fox, article, 162, 166-70, and
dissertation, 334, 372-93,421-31. Cf. Flinn, "Continuity
and Change in Ohio Politics,"
524-27.
16 OHIO
HISTORY
partyism" did not prevent any of
them from using techniques of partisan
organization and agitation. There was
undoubtedly a profound sense of
moral anxiety about the future of the
republic and about the "proper" role
of politicians, yet this anxiety was not
essential to the party division, even if
in some communities that had undergone
certain experiences it helped to
influence political choices.30
Furthermore, the distribution of the
vote in 1824 cannot be explained
simply in terms of ethnocultural
influences, at least not in the broad and
generalized terms commonly used. A fully
developed ethnocultural inter-
pretation emphasizes religion as much as
ethnicity, but it is very difficult to
discover very much about the
relationship between religion and voting in
the 1820s because of the scantiness of
the evidence. The general impression
is that the major churches, particularly
the Methodists, divided between
the candidates, although the Quakers
moved with some homogeneity
towards John Quincy Adams.31 It
is rather easier to test systematically the
broad generalizations commonly made
about the voting behavior of
settlers from different sections of the
Atlantic seaboard. Undoubtedly New
Englanders, clustered primarily in the
Western Reserve and the Ohio
Company counties, gave remarkably few
votes to Jackson in both 1824 and
1828.32 But is it equally true that
Southern and Middle-state origins in
themselves automatically produced
support for Jackson? The mere fact
30. For this election, see Eugene H.
Roseboom, "Ohio in the Presidential Election of
1824." Ohio Archaeological and Historical Publications, XXVI (1917),
153-224; Stevens,
Early Jackson Party in Ohio; Ratcliffe, "Voters and Issues." For the first
party system in
Ohio, and some of the attitudes it helps
to illuminate, see Donald J. Ratcliffe, "The Experience
of Revolution and the Beginnings of
Party Politics in Ohio, 1776-1816." Ohio History,
LXXXV(1976), 186-230.
31. Ratcliffe, "Voters and
Issues," 854. The Presbyterians also probably divided according
to whether they were associated with the
Pennsylvania Scotch-Irish or the New England
tradition.
32. Ratcliffe, "Voters and
Issues," 855. 856. There is almost no evidence about individual
voting behavior for this period in Ohio,
and the historian is forced to consider the behavior of
communities as defined by political
boundaries. He must therefore look forcommunities that
are fairly homogeneous, which means that
he should look for the smallest possible political
units. Unfortunately, it is difficult to
find township election returns for these early elections,
especially that of 1824, although it is
sometimes possible to associate a distinctive ethnocultu-
ral group with a particular township. In
general, the historian can make a systematic analysis
only at the county level, and even here
the historian is forced to rely on impressionistic sources
such as the various county histories and
gazetteers and Henry Howe's Historical Collections
of Ohio, 1st
ed. (Cincinnati, 1847) and centennial ed.
(2 vols., Cincinnati, 1889).
The historian must, of course, make use
of the 1850 Census, the first to provide suitable
material. But it is a mistake to assume
that the character of the population in each county was
necessarily the same in the earlier
decades as it was in 1850. And to say,
as Dr. Fox does, that
"The competitive stability of the
two parties in Ohio from 1834 to 1848 suggests that the
location of ethnic groups in 1850 was
not significantly different from earlier residential
patterns" is to use one's
conclusion as part of the proof that the conclusion is true. Fox article,
158.
Politics in Jacksonian Ohio 17
that Miami county, which in 1818 had
been reported as "settled by
emigrants chiefly from Pennsylvania, New
Jersey and Kentucky," returned
anti-Jackson majorities in 1824, and
subsequently, suggests that some
groups of Southern and Middle-state
settlers were less favorable to the
Jacksonians than were others.33
In fact, those communities which were
most probably dominated by
Southerners in the 1820s were far from
being uniformly strong in their
support of Jackson. The Virginia
Military District was, with reason,
regarded as the main center of Virginian
settlement, yet in this area in 1824
Jackson for the most part gained less
than his average proportion of the
vote over the state as a whole. In the
southern part of the district Jackson
gained some substantial majorities, as
he did in neighboring counties to the
west which were not particularly marked
by Southern settlers. In the
northern and eastern parts of the
district, Jacksonism was much weaker;
indeed, one contemporary observer gained
the impression in 1824 that "the
Kentucky and Virginia population, on the
Scioto, the Muskingum, and the
Upper M iami, supported Clay."
Certainly this was true of the area around
Chillicothe, an undoubted center of
Virginian settlement.34 Such evidence
suggests that Southerners in Ohio
provided considerable support for the
Adams-Clay party of 1828, and it is
interesting that the only counties in the
state (other than those settled by New
Englanders) which swung towards
Adams in 1828 were the three counties of
Logan, Champaign and Clark, of
which at least two were almost certainly
dominated by people from
Virginia and Kentucky.35 As
Eugene H. Roseboom suggested, Southerners
who settled before 1830 differed in
political outlook from later migrants
from the South; hence any association
between Democratic voting and
33. Samuel R. Brown, The Western
Gazetteer, or Emigrant's Directory (New York, 1820),
287-88.
34. Edward D. Mansfield, Memoirs of
the Life and Services of Daniel Drake, M.D.
(Cincinnati, 1855), 170. For Virginians
in the Scioto Valley at this period, see William Renick.
Memoirs, Correspondence And
Reminiscences of William Renick (Circleville,
1880), esp. 11;
John Cotton, "From Rhode Island To
Ohio in 1815," Journal of American History, XVI
(1922), 253; Morris Birkbeck, Notes
On a Journey In America (London, 1818), 64-5; Benton
J. Lossing, A Pictorial Description
of Ohio (New York, 1848), 83, 84, 88, 89. See also David
C. Shilling. "Relation of Southern
Ohio To The South During the Decade Preceding the Civil
War," Quarterly Publications of
the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio, VIII
(1913),4.
35. Gersholm Flagg to Azariah Flagg,
Springfield, O., November 12, 1816, and January 8,
1817, Solon J. Buck, ed., "Pioneer
Letters of Gersholm Flagg," Transactions of the Illinois
State Historical Society, (1910), 143, 145; John Kilbourn, The Ohio Gazetteer,
or Emigrant's
Directory, 11th, revised ed. (Columbus, 1833), 281; Howe, Historical
Collections (1847), 84;
Lossing, Pictorial Description. 41,
48, 72; William E. and Ophia D. Smith, A Buckeye Titan
(Cincinnati, 1953), 144; Ohio Writers'
Program of the Works Projects Administration,
Springfield and Clark County,
Ohio (Springfield, 1941), and Urbana
and Champaign County,
Ohio (Urbana. 1942).
18 OHIO
HISTORY
Southern settlers probably did not
develop strongly until the 1840s if
then."
It is equally difficult to prove that
Pennsylvanian origins as such made a
man more likely to vote for the
Jacksonians, for people from that
Commonwealth had spread to most parts of
Ohio, including those highly
favorable to Adams and Clay. Apparently
only those Pennsylvanians who
were also members of distinctive
non-English ethnic groups gave signifi-
cant degrees of support to Jackson.
Thus, in the end, the only generaliza-
tions about ethnocultural voting in the
1820s that may be made with
confidence are that Adams did well in
areas of New England and Quaker
settlement, while Jackson won much
support among German and Scotch-
Irish settlers from Pennsylvania.3'
But why should these groups behave in
this way'? Republicans from New
England had not always been noted for
insisting that a fellow New
Englander like Adams should be elected
President: they had fully support-
ed the election of Madison and Monroe.
Why had they now become so
much more self-conscious? Why did people
begin to talk, in the early 1820s,
of the "Universal Yankee
Nation"? The answer which emerges from their
spokesmen in Ohio is simply that the
South's success in the Missouri crisis
had made them aware of the power that
the South exercised in the nation, a
power which, like Rufus King. they
ascribed to the unity of political action
that was prompted by the "black
strap," the common interest of slavehold-
ing. As a New York politician recorded,
at this time many Republicans in
the North became "anxious to be
relieved" of the "reproach" of"support-
ing southern men"; and this feeling,
in New York as in Ohio, was strongest
among settlers from New England. Thus
the constant identification in later
years of the anti-Jackson men with
moralistic concerns may be largely
explained as resulting from the
extraordinary significance of the slavery
issue in the period of initial party
formation in the early 1820s.3s
But what of the "Pennsylvania
Dutch?" There can be no doubt of their
political homogeneity in 1824. for even
a future British prime minister
noticed it;9 but why did they vote so
overwhelmingly for Jackson in that
Presidential election? No doubt Dr. Fox
is right in saying that a study of the
36. Eugene H. Roseboom. "Southern
Ohio and the Union in 1863". Misis.ssippi lallev
Historical Review, XXXIX (1952), 38-40.
37. Ratcliffe. "Voters and
Issues." 862, 863.
38. John C. Fitzpatrick. ed., The
Autobiographyl of Martin Van Buren, reprint ed. (New
York. 1973), 1. 13148: .abez D. Hammond,
The History of Political Parties in the State of
Nevw Ylrk (Albany. 1842). 11. 127-28. See also Donald J.
Ratcliffe,"Captain.James Riley and
Antislavery Sentiment in Ohio.
1819-1824." Ohio History. IXXXI (1972). 76-94: idem.
"Voters and Issues." 851-55:
and Shaw Livermore. Jr.. The Twilight of Federalismi: Ihe
Disintegration of the Federalist
Party. 1815-/830 (Princeton. 1962),
95-97.
39. Hon. E. Stanley (later Earl
ofDerby). Journalof'a Tour in America, I824-25 (priately
printed in limited edition for Lord
Derby. 1931), 178.
Politics in Jacksonian Ohio
19
group's cultural attitudes can make its
political behavior understandable,
but what was it they perceived in
Jackson that drew them to his side'? How
can it have been their established
"political habits," since all the candidates
were portrayed as good Republicans and
earlier factional loyalties did not
directly relate to particular
candidates'?4" Probably, as Benson once
suggested, their behavior was an
expression of the "marked conflict"
between "Yankee" elements and
the "Dutch," but where is the contempor-
ary evidence to show it'? Unfortunately,
the German newspapers in Ohio
said little about their reasons for
supporting Jackson.41 One can only
assume that the Germans were overwhelmed
by gratitude to the hero who
had apparently defeated a British
invasion of America, since they saw it as a
defeat for those who had least sympathy
for them. In that case the loyalty
they now showed to Jackson was based on
similar roots to that of the
Scotch Irish from Pennsylvania, who
undoubtedly had good reason for
identifying themselves with him and
rejoicing over the defeat of the British
oppressor.42 Here again,
recent experiences may have heightened the self-
awareness of an ethnocultural group and
prompted its members towards a
specific choice of sides in this
critical election.
Whatever emphasis may be placed on such
ethnocultural factors,
however, the fact remains that neither
the Yankee-dominated Western
Reserve nor the Scotch-Irish and German
belt of settlement across the
"backbone" of the state acted
uniformly in 1824. Every county in each of
these belts gave at least one-third of
its votes to Adams or Jackson,
respectively; but the counties in the
center of the belts gave a plurality of
their votes to Clay. while those on
either side gave absolute majorities to
Adams or Jackson, as map I reveals.43
What the less enthusiastic counties
had in common was not a smaller
proportion of settlers from New England
or Pennsylvania, but rather a location
on the proposed route of the great
40. Fox. article. 165. 169. Kim T.
Phillips. "T1he Pennsylvania Origins of the lackson
Movement." Political Science Quarterlv.
XCI (1976). 489-508. sensitively reveals how a
radical faction concerned for economic
reform was drawn into the Jackson party in 1X24. but
she is less convincing in explaining why
so many of the state's factions decided to support
Jackson. The evidence suggests that the
clear preference, expressed early in the campaign by
the Scotch Irish. if not the Germans,
tempted all factions to attract their sympathy and sup-
port by jumping on the Jackson
band-wagon themselves.
41. i ee Benson. "Research Problems
in American Political Historiography," Mirra
Komaroxski. ed.. Commoon F 'rontiers of the Social Sciences (Glencoe,
11l., 1957), 153;
l.ancaster Ohio LtJklg/c,
1823-24. In view of the scantiness of contemporary evidence, it is
interesting to note that one British
traveller reported in 1817 that "the most perfect cordiality"
existed in I'crr\ county between the
German settlers and their neighbors. Birkbeck. Notes on a
Jou'ti e', 56.
42. Ratclillf, "Voters and
Issues." 863. The tensions between these non-English groups and
Nexw Englanders are persuasively
described in general terms in Kellev. "Ideology and Political
Culture." 534-43.
43. Some of the complexities of this map
are explained in Ratcliffe. "Voters and Issues."
853-63.
22 OHIO HISTORY
canal which was to connect Lake Erie
with the Ohio River. Indeed, nearly
all the counties which lay on planned
lines of communication. including the
National Road, tended to be more
favorable to Clay than their other
characteristics might lead one to
expect. (See map 11). This suggests that an
awareness of local economic interests
was a powerful influence on voting
behavior in this election, which is scarcely
surprising in view of the long
campaign to persuade Ohioans that the
state's economic problems, made
so obvious by the long depression
following the Panic of 1819. could best
be solved by the building of certain
roads and canals: while Henry Clay was
clearly seen as the one candidate with a
real chance of success who was
publicly committed to the "American
System" policy of federal appropria-
tions for such internal improvements. Of
course the demand for a Western
President had a moral content, combining
nationalism with a sense of past
sectional injustices, but it transformed
itself into votes mainly in those
counties which could see immediate
economic advantages in the "Ameri-
can System" of Henry Clay. For, as
Benson has written, "economic factors
are most likely to determine voting
behavior when direct, significant, and
clearly perceived relationships exist
among government action, party
policy, and material interests."44
In practice, the necessities of local
economic interest cut across the
ethnocultural considerations. Among New
Englanders in Ohio there was a
great public argument in 1824 as to
whether hatred of slavery or the need
for roads and canals should have
preference, for Adams as an Easterner
was considered unsafe on the
internal-improvement issue; and a moral and
upright Congressman like Elisha
Whittlesey, representing the most quin-
tessentially Yankee district on the
Western Reserve, nearly wrecked his
political career by publicly stating his
preference for roads and canals.45 In
other parts of the state similar debates
took place about the merits and
disadvantages of the leading advocate of
internal improvements, especially
where a local interest in the proposed
canals conflicted with some sort of
prejudice in favor of another candidate.
The uncertain outcome of this
conflict made
"chicken-hearted" politicians who wished to come out on the
winning side hesitate before committing
themselves to one candidate or
another, and so prevented Clay's
campaign from gaining the early
advantage of a legislative nomination
which his leading partisans had
hoped to secure.4' In
the end Ohio's voters had to choose between these
countervailing pressures, and
three-quarters of those who voted showed
44. Benson, Conceplt of Jacksonian
Democracv, 156. See also Ratcliffc, "Voters and
Issues," 850- 51 853-54: Fox.
article, 165, 167-68.
45. Whittlesey to Hammond, January 17.
February 14, 1824. Charles Hammond Papers:
Whittlesey to Giddings. January 18,
February 19, May 13, September 18, 1824. Joshua
Giddings Papers. Ohio Historical
Society.
46. Ratcliffe, "Voters and
Issues." 850-53.
Politics in Jacksonian Ohio
23
that they preferred a slaveholding
Western candidate, be it Jackson or
Clay, to a non-slaveholding candidate
associated with the economic
interests of the seaboard.47
The inadequacies of an ethnocultural
interpretation, pure and simple,
when faced by these complex interactions
of 1824 is further revealed by the
political behavior of the voters in the
line of counties between Sandusky
Bay and Columbus. They gave Adams between
91.2 and 56.5 percent of
their votes, and yet, contrary to Dr.
Fox, these counties were not dominat-
ed by New Englanders.48 True,
in Huron and Sandusky counties, as well as
in the northern half of Marion which
later became Crawford county,
Yankee settlers were numerous and may
well have formed a majority of the
population.49 And in Delaware
county many New Englanders moved in in
the decade before 1824, joining the
supposedly anti-Jacksonian Welsh of
Radnor township which, however, did not
become markedly opposed to
Jacksonism until the 1840s.5°
Yet throughout these counties many emi-
grants from Pennsylvania and other
states had also settled. In Union the
early settlers came chiefly from
Pennsylvania and Virginia, with New
Englanders not moving in until later.'"
Seneca was "settled principally
from Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and
New York, and by some few
Germans," while in 1831 the
inhabitants of the southern half of Marion
(which retained the name after the
division of the county) were reported as
being "from other parts of Ohio,
from New York, New Jersey, Pennsylva-
nia, Virginia, and Maryland, and a few
from Kentucky."52
47. It seems unfair to criticize an
historian for failing to "reconcile" countervailing
pressures which contemporaries could not
reconcile, or for allowing them to prefer an
economic rationale over moral principle
or ethnic predilection. More reasonably Dr. Fox
criticizes my former article for failing
to provide "a comparable means of assessing the clear
deviations" from economic
motivations. In fact. I tried to do this by means of four tables
which indicated trends and exceptions. A
more sophisticated statistical approach, which
would have placed numerical values on
things like proximity to the proposed route of the
National Road, seemed to me pointless.
Fox, article, 156, 163, 165: Ratcliffe. "Voters and
Issues," 851-53, 854, 856, 858,
863.
48. Fox is apparently misled by Table II
in my former article which indicated "Yankees"
where there was evidence of some
settlement by them. as distinct from the terms "Western
Reserve" and "Ohio
Company" which referred to areas where they were predominant. Fox.
article. 165-66; Ratcliffe. "Voters
and Issues," 856.
49. Warren Jenkins, The Ohio
Gazetteer and Traveller's Guide (Columbus, 1837), 233:
Howe. Hi.storical Collections ( 1847),
445. and ibid. (1889), 1, 482.
50. Kilbourn, Ohio Gazetteer, 6th
ed. (Columbus, 1819), 63; [W. H. Perrin and J. H.
Battle. eds], History of Delaware
Countr and Ohio (Chicago,
1880), 191-96; William H.
.lones. "Welsh Settlements in
Ohio." Ohio Archaeological and Historical Society Publica-
tions, XVI (1907). 211-13. The voting returns for Radnor
township may be found in the
Delaware Patron. the Delaware Ohio Slate Gazette, the Olentangv
Gazette and Delaware
Adverti.ser. and the Columbus Ohio Statemnan. See also Fox,
dissertation, 369.
51. Kilbourn. Ohio Gazetteer (1833).
450; l.ossing. Pictorial Description. 94: Howe.
Htistorical ( ollc( tion.s ( 889),
1. 714.
52. Howe, Iistorical Collectionsr (1847), 457: Kilbourn, Ohio Gazetteer (1833),
298. For
24 OHIO HISTORY
Some consideration other than Yankee
settlement must explain the size
of the Adams vote throughout this area.
Contemporary sources make it
clear that these counties had one
distinctive feature in common. They all
lay on the route w. ch the great canal
had been expected to follow-until the
canal commissioners, for suspect
reasons, declared the route to be imprac-
ticable in January 1824. The resulting
disillusionment with grandiose
schemes of internal improvement may well
have weakened the appeal of
the leading
"internal-improvement" candidate for the Presidency. and
made the arguments against voting for
the leading Northern and "non-
slave" candidate quite ineffectual.
The presence of New Englanders merely
boosted Adams' majorities to levels not
attained even farther east on the
Western Reserve, and nearly all Adams'
banner counties combined New
England settlement with doubts about the
state internal-improvement
program.5
For the most part, however, the demand
for "Western" policies carried
the day, and the Adams' men's main hope
for victory in Ohio lay in the fact
that those who preferred a Western
candidate divided between Jackson
and Clay. But why did they divide, and
so provide the basis for the
subsequent party division? One reason is
undoubtedly the ethnocultural
preference of the Pennsylvania
"Dutch" and Scotch Irish. but another must
be the unpopularity of Clay in the
southwestern corner of the state. As map
II clearly demonstrates, Clay failed to
win votes not only in some German
and Yankee counties and in those areas
most opposed to the new canal
system, but also in the populous
counties most closely linked with
Cincinnati. This overwhelming prejudice
against Clay in this area did not
arise from hostility to the
internal-improvement program; nor can it be
explained simply in ethnocultural terms,
since the region was already
extremely diverse in the character of
its population.4 Contemporary
sources suggest that the prejudice
derived instead from the well-known
hardships suffered by Cincinnati, and
the area dependent on it, following
the Panic of 1819; for those hardships
had been aggravated by the decision
of the Bank of the United States to take
legal action against the many
debtors in that area to whom it had so
prodigally lent money before the
more on the settlement of this area, see
the references in Ratcliffe. "Voters and Issues," 856 n.
26.
53. Ratcliffe, "Voters and
Issues," 855-56.
54. Kilbourn, Ohio Gazetteer(18
19), 83. 158-59. and ihid. (1833). 66, 146-47. 229.249,309.
382-83. 467, 485: Howe, Historical
Collections (1847). 21, 72, 101, 229-30. 249, and ihid.
(1889). I1. 299, 301: Iossing, Pictorial Description. 36. 65. 79. 95. See also Shilling.
"Relation of Southern Ohio To The
South", 4: Jones. "Welsh Settlements in Ohio." 198-202:
Albert B. Iaust, The German Elemlent in lthe 'litle States (New York, 1927). I. 428-30:
Ratcliffe, "Voters and
Issues." 857. 863 n. 53.
Politics in Jacksonian Ohio 25
Panic, and the blame for that decision
fell on the Bank's legal agent in Ohio,
Henry Clay. Thus popular hardships in
this area heightened moral
anxieties and indignation about
privilege and corruption and the selfish
things politicians get up to-and gave
the populace a good reason for
turning against Clay.5
In sum, then, the"self-conscious
party loyalties" which were established
for many Ohio voters in 1824, at the
very beginning of the new mass party
system, were created by the response of
individuals to a range of factors.
Ethnocultural perception and prejudices
played an important part, espe-
cially as heightened by either
reawakened antislavery sentiment or Anglo-
phobia; but cutting across them were
other considerations, notably
sectional awareness, local economic
interest, and the passions and hatreds
created by the unusually severe
hardships suffered since the Panic of 1819.
In particular, the new party loyalties
were to some extent fashioned, by the
policy programs associated with each
national candidate. These issues at
stake as the Republican party broke
apart were clearly perceived by
contemporaries, and openly discussed in
the Ohio press during the
campaign.5 Of course,
Formisano is more or less right in saying that the
cleavage of 1824 in Ohio could reflect
"more immediate issue conflicts" so
clearly because the "self-conscious
party loyalties" typical of the later mass
party system did not exist; but that
cannot contradict the argument that
this issue-oriented electoral cleavage
helped to establish the very party
loyalties that Formisano is talking
about.57
However, the party cleavage of 1824 was
substantially modified in the
55. Cf. Fox. article. 165, 166, with
Ratclifle. "Voters and Issues," 857-61. Dr. Fox doubts
whether it may be truly said that
"the dynamic heart of the early Jackson party in Ohio" lay in
Cincinnati. As he points out. Jackson
gained only 44 percent of his Hamilton County vote in
the city, in comparison with the 57.5
percent of the Adams vote that was gained there. Yet this
does not contradict the fact that
Jackson won 55.3 percent of Cincinnati's votes, compared
with 32.9 and I 1.8 percent for Adams
and Clay respectively. And if the surrounding rural part
of Hamilton county and neighboring
counties-voted for Jackson by even heavier majorities.
this not only suggests that the city
contained a more variegated population with morediverse
interests and attitudes, but confirms
that Jackson sentiment was especially strong in the rural
area subject to Cincinnati's
metropolitan influence. In any case, from 1824 to at least 1832 the
initiative in organizing the Ohio
Jackson party came from Cincinnati rather than the state
capital. as Dr. Fox himself has
acknowledged. Fox, dissertation, 431, 440. 445.
56. Roseboom. "Ohio in the
Presidential Election of 1824," 153-224. Fox, article, 168,
states that, when I am not ignoring the
testimony of the actors, I am placing their words in a
context of my own, and not their,
choosing. The onus is surely on him to demonstrate the
point rather than for me to produce
still more testimony, yet it is interesting to note
contemporary editorials on the election
which see it in my terms: e.g., Liberty Hall and
Cincinnati Gazette, November 26, 1824; The Benefactor and Georgetown
Advocate, No-
vember 22, 1824; ChillicotheSupporter
and S(ioto Gazette, October 21, November 18, 1824.
57. Formisano, "Toward a
Reorientation of Jacksonian Politics," 58. It can be argued
that "self-conscious party
loyalties" already existed in Ohio deriving from the first party
system, but they had little influence in
1824 in an overwhelmingly Republican state in the
absence of a Federalist candidate. See
Ratcliffe, "Revolution and the Beginnings of Party
Politics," 192-227.
26 OHIO HISTORY
later part of the decade as at least
eighty thousand more voters were drawn
into the party conflict and formed their
party attachments. In this later
period the same factors as had operated
in 1824 were again at work, except
that the demand for internal
improvements in particular counties had
declined somewhat, since the projects of
1824 were already being
implemented. John Quincy Adams now
possessed all the advantages
enjoyed earlier by both himself and
Henry Clay, for since his alliance with
the latter in 1825 and his official
statements as President in favor of internal
improvements. Adams had come to
represent what most Ohioans had
wanted but not found available in the
1824 electoral campaign a non-
slaveholding President who favored
"Western" policies. This uniting of the
main opposing tendencies of 1824 ended
the political dilemmas of a
Congressman like Elisha Whittlesey, and
paved the way for his unanimous
re-election by his Yankee constituency
in 1826 and 1828.58 Certainly the
"Southern" quality of
Jackson's candidacy gave many men pause, and
turned against him those who were
concerned for the moral character of
the Republic if such a man gained power
as a result of the machinations of
party hacks as unscrupulous as Jackson's
Northern advocates were often
presumed to be.59
Such arguments might have been
overwhelming in 1828, had the Ohio
Jacksonians not been able to minimize
most effectively the differences
between the two parties over the
"American System" by supporting the
protective-tariff and
internal-improvement measures passed by the Con-
gress of 1828. As it was, they were able
not only to rely on strong support in
the southwestern counties and in
communities settled by German and
Scotch-Irish settlers from Pennsylvania,
but also to exploit two new
sources of support. First, there appears
to have been, especially perhaps in
backcountry areas, a widespread popular
suspicion of politicians and
lawyers, which had been of little
political significance in 1824 outside the
Cincinnati area, this ill-defined
prejudice worked in favor of a candidate
who did not possess power or the advantage
of office, who was not
commonly associated with politics, and
who had proved his commitment
to the Republic in its hour of gravest
peril.6" In addition, there is also
58. Hammond to J. C. Wright, Cincinnati,
March 16. 1825, Charles Hammond Papers:
('lay to Whittlesey. Washington, March
26. 1825, James F. Hopkins. ed.. The Papers of
Hli, r\ C/at (I.exington. Ky.. 1972), IV.
178-79. See also Ratcliffe, "Voters and Issues." 864-
66.
59 D. . Ratcliffe. "Antimasonry in
Context: Patterns of Conflict in a Western Yankee
Community. 1820-1840." an
unpublished paper which includes some interesting findings
about "anti-partvism" in this
period.
60. This perception of Jackson is best
analysed in John W. Ward. Andren .Jackson.
Srmthol For An Age (New York. 1955). though Ward does not always
discriminate between
attitudes common to the whole culture
and those peculiar to particular groups which tended
to favor Jackson politically.
Politics in Jacksonian
Ohio
27
evidence that Jackson's candidacy
benefitted in 1828 from the belief in
some quarters of Ohio that the old
Republican party of Thomas Jefferson
must be revived in order to prevent the
return to power of old Federalists
under the "amalgamationist"
regime of the second Adams.6' These new,
less tangible, influences which operated
on the new voters of 1828 not only
helped to bring about .ackson's narrow
victory, but also ensured that the
cleavage that had now been created among
the electorate would reflect a
range of influences even more diverse
than those of 1824.
The Implications for the 1830s and
1840s
Hence the primary determinants of voting
behavior in Jacksonian Ohio
were the partisan loyalties created in
the 1820s; and those loyalties were
established as a result of interacting
pressures and concerns which arose
out of immediate issues and the recent
experiences of Ohioans in the 1820s.
If these two propositions be accepted,
then important conclusions
immediately follow for the analysis of
the party alignments of the 1830s and
1840s. For one thing, it is clear that
the results of elections in most counties
and districts were determined by the
underlying pattern of party
identifications; and in most of those
counties the many new voters who
settled after 1830 did not differ
sufficiently from the older settlers in their
political predilections to overthrow the
established majority. Hence,
whenever a historian analyses the
distribution of voter support in terms of
electoral units, be they counties,
townships or wards, in any election (or
series of elections) between 1836 and
1852, the probability is that he is
studying a pattern which reflects the
concerns of the 1820s rather than those
of that later period. Thus, the fact
that the southwestern counties continued
to give majorities to the Democrats
through the 1830s and 1840s reveals
more about what had influenced an
overwhelming majority of the voters in
the period when most of their party
loyalties were formed, than it does
about what concerned them most during
those later decades.
This simple truth explains the paradox
that all students of Jacksonian
political behavior stumble over. In the
years after 1832, financial and
economic issues increasingly came to
dominate legislative proceedings,
party resolutions and addresses, the
political press, and even the private
correspondence of those actively interested
in politics. The importance of
this concern with matters of banking and
currency in Ohio has been well
brought out for the years after the
Panic by several writers, most notably
Roger Sharp."2 The
natural assumption to make after reading such
evidence drawn from the articulate
members of the political community is
61. D. .1. Ratclitte. "I he Persistence
of the First Party System: Southeastern Ohio. 1812-
1828." unpublished paper.
62. Sharp. Iack.sonians Vlersus The Banks. 123-89: Shade, Banks
or No Banks, 79-84, 102-
33; Weisenburger.
Pas.sing ofthe Frontier, 328-56. 387-440: Holt, Parti
Politics in Ohio, 59-
155.
28 OHIO
HISTORY
that the party division
reflected serious socioeconomic cleavages in society
and that voter behavior
was influenced by economic considerations. Yet
the fact is that no
attempt to prove that socioeconomic factors determined
voter alignments in
Ohio in the 1830s and 1840s has so far succeeded.
simply because counties
and townships with identical economic character-
istics and interests
are found on opposite sides of the party cleavage.
Sharp's own attempt to
establish that there was a real socioeconomic
difference between the
constituencies each party drew majority support
from between 1836 and
1844 is vitiated by far too many examples of
counties which were apparently motivated by quite
different
considerations as Dr. Fox has rightly pointed
out.6
Upon seeing that a
straightforward economic (or socioeconomic-class)
interpretation of the
party division cannot work, the "ethnoculturalists"
assume that economic
considerations had no relevance to popular voting
behavior. This
assumption is strengthened when they detect a large
measure of agreement
between the parties on economic policy and
considerable
inconsistency in the outlook of Democrats on such matters.64
So when these
historians find that ethnocultural factors had a marked
impact on voting
behavior, they do not ask whether, after admitting the
force of these
considerations, there is still room left for economic factors to
have had some influence.
In other words, they themselves succumb to a
form of
"single-factor analysis." and fail to test for countervailing cross-
65
pressures.
But suppose that, as a
simple check, we looked at a listing of Ohio
counties ranked
according to the per capita value of their real property as
assessed in 1830. This
is probably the most appropriate measure of the
economic character of
the various subdivisions in this essentially rural
society; it reveals,
however, not the average or typical levels of wealth
among the voters but
rather the general commercial value of real property
in each county, and
therefore reflects, to a large extent, the proximity of the
county to markets and
routes of transportation.6s On this listing we would
63. Sharp. Jacksonmians Versus the Bantks. 160-89:
Fox, dissertation. 135-50, and article.
156-62.
64. Fox. dissertation.
132-34. cites Hlarry N. Scheiber. Ohio 'Canal Era: A (Cae Stllr o/f
Govertnmlel andi the
Econollr. 1820-60 (Athens.
0.. 1969) as indicating that "neither the
Bank nor the State's
canal policy were clear-cut partisan issues either before or after the
financial crisis of
1837." Yet the works cited in ni. 62 above give ample evidence that the
bipartisan agreement of
1825-32 on matters of economic and financial policy gradually broke
down in the course of
the I830s. while Scheiber recognizes that "the rising influence of a
hardmoney. antibank
faction" within the Democratic party was threatening the canal
program by 1839. Ihir.,
145-49. 157-58, 297.
65. E.g.. Fox, dissertation.
161. 173. 186; formisano. Birth of 'as.s Political Parties, 31-
55.
66. Ihese values were
calculated by adding the assessed value of land (including houses)
and of town lots
(including buildings). as equali/ed by the State Board of Equalization. Ohio
Politics in Jacksonian Ohio 29
find that, of the thirty most
"valuable" counties, seventeen (or 56.7%) had
voted for Adams in 1828, while nineteen
(63.3%) of the thirty least
"valuable" had voted for
Jackson. But if we extract from the list those
counties which were attracted to the
side of Adams or Jackson in 1824 and
1828 as a result of ethnocultural
factors or because they shared in the deep
hostility to Clay generated in the
southwestern counties, then a far
more striking picture appears. For of
the ten most "valuable" counties
among those that remain, all but one
(90%) had voted for Adams in 1828,
and there are reasons for thinking that
the one exception should have been
omitted with the others. Of the ten
least "valuable" that survive, only three
had voted for Adams; and two of those
counties lay in the agriculturally-
backward area close to the Ohio River
which was involved in the
production of coal and salt and was
therefore more integrated into the
commercial system than were the areas of
subsistence agriculture which
also appeared at the lower end of the
list.67 If the same game is played with
the 1835 tax assessments and the 1836
Presidential election results, then we
obtain identical results: nine of the
ten most "valuable" counties that
survive voted for Harrison, and seven of
the ten survivors at the bottom of
the list voted for Van Buren.68
Such results suggest that there was a
real difference in the economic
character of the constituencies
supporting each party, even if that
difference was obscured because many
non-economic considerations,
including ethnocultural influences, also
helped to determine which way a
constituency voted. The distinction
between the more commercialized and
the more remote areas appears, after
all, to have some relevance to voting
behavior. As a further test, we must
attempt some sort of statistical
correlation between these economic
characteristics and Democratic
strength in the various counties. If we
correlate the per capita assessment of
real property for each county with the
percentage of the total vote won
there by the Democratic party in each Presidential
election, then (as Table
11 shows) some sort of reasonably
impressive correlation appears.69 The
General Assembly.
Senau .lJournal, 1830-31, p. 26. This
form of taxation had been adopted in
1825 in order to help shift the fiscal
burden of the state towards those whose property
appreciated in value as a result of the
state's canal program.
67. The excluded counties are indicated
in Ratcliffc. "Voters and Issues," 856. 858. 863.
The
exception among the most
"valuable" counties, namely l icking.
may fall into the range of
counties whose voting behavior was
influenced by "old party feeling": see Ratclifle,
"Persist-
ence of the First Party System."
For the mining area. see Sharp. Juaksonian. C' ersl\ 7Th
Bank, 171-73. and Ratclifle, "Voters and
Issues." 853.
68. Ohio General Assembly, House Journal 1835-36, table B located between pp. 180 and
181. This was the first full
assessment following the general realuation of 1X34.
and the
assessments had been checked by the
State Board of Equalization.
69. This result contrasts markedly with
the figures presented in Fox, article, 159-161, which
apparently demonstrate the lack of such
a correlation between the voting behavior and
30 OHIO
HISTORY
TABLE
II
Correlations
of Democratic Percentage Strength in
Presidential
Elections with the per capita Valuation
of
Land and Town Lots, 1828-1844.
Election
Year Year of
Valuation
1827 1830 1835 1840
1844
1828 .376 .394 .439
1832 .459 .457 .489
1836 .389
- .341 .213
1840 .415 .352 - .104
1844 .429-
.318 .086
correlation
may, of course, be accidental and needs to be subjected to
multivariate
analysis: yet these economic correlations remain striking in
that
they compare favorably with the ethnocultural correlations that I have
calculated
so far for Ohio in the 1830s, and that Dr. Fox has reported for
the
1848 election.70
economic
characteristics of the counties. 'Ihe difference arises because Dr. Fox has
used. not
the
valuation of real property, but two alternative measures. The first is based on
the
assessment
of "Merchants' and Brokers' Capital and Money at Interest," which is
surely a
most
unjust measure to use, in this rural society, since it conceals qualitative as
well as
quantitative
differences between the counties. In 1835 the most isolated counties reported
minimal
amounts of such capital, nearly one-half with under $55.000: one-third reported
more
than double this amount, and one (containing Cincinnati) was assessed at S
1591.833.
Inevitably,
the degree by which these figures vary could never be reflected in comparable
degrees
of party strength, as measured by Pearson correlations, which are based (n
interval
levels.
Far more suitable would be Spearman rank-order correlations and when that test
is
applied
to the relationship between "Merchants' Capital, etc." in 1830 and
Democratic
strength
in 1832. the answer is .377 as compared with the coefficient of .172 produced
by
Pearson's
test. (The assessment for 1830 has been used simply because it is the only one
I have
at
hand. but it cannot differ greatly from that of 1832. Ohio General Assembly. Senate
Journal,
1/30-31, p. 26).
As
his other measure. Dr. Fox employs the assessment of"Total Taxable
Property" which
not
only includes "Merchant's Capital, etc." (and so is not an
independent test), but also
incorporates
various forms of personal property. Yet the assessment of personal property was
notably
incomplete and inaccurate, and by the 1840s every Auditor of State was
complaining
of
the inadequacies of the system. At last a new system of assessing personal
property was
introduced
in 1846, and the first satisfactory assessments reported in 1847. The Pearson
correlation
coefficients between this assessment and Democratic strength in 1840 and 1844
are
.381 and .387. respectively. General Assembly Executive Dlocument's for 184142.
doc.
no.
3. p. 15: for 1842-43, doc. no. 6, pp. 23-25: and for 1847-48. pt. I, pp.
28-29. 71-73.
The
valuations used in Table 11 may be found, as equalized by State officials. in
the Senate
Journal. 1827-28, pp. 36-37. and in General Assembly Documents
for 184041 (doc. 69) and
1844-45
(doc. 7). For 1830 and 1835, see n. 66 and n. 68 above.
70.
Fox, dissertation. 310, 347. 383, 384. 390.
Politics in Jacksonian Ohio 31
Yet even if there was no case for saying
that the party division of 1828-
1840 in part reflected some sort of
economic division, the "ethnocultural-
ists" would still not be justified
in assuming that the absence of a clear
socioeconomic cleavage between the
parties necessarily proves that there
was no relationship between voter
behavior and the financial and economic
issues debated by politicians and journalists.
Surely the fact is that
constituencies of differing economic
characters gave majority support to
the same party, and similar
constituencies gave it to different parties,
simply because a majority of their
voters had established their loyalties at a
time when the financial and economic
issues connected with the banking
and currency problems of the 1830s were
almost entirely absent from Ohio
politics. The very variety of the
factors which in the 1820s had created the
pattern of party support ensured that it
would not reflect a simple economic
cleavage.7' Thus by the time
the banking and currency questions
reappeared in the 1830s, they had to be
handled by political parties formed
without any reference to those issues;
and the result was that many
constituencies continued to give
majorities to a party which did not
represent the outlook of most people in
that constituency on the leading
issues of the day.
This tension between established
loyalties and present outlook on the
immediate issues of the day helps to
explain why the Democratic party
became subject to such strong internal
factionalism over currency and
banking questions after 1832. In the
course of the middle 1830s an internal
struggle took place within the party, in
Ohio as nationally, which by 1838
had resulted in the triumph of those
most hostile to banks and paper money
over those Democrats who had greater
respect for them. The latter "soft"
faction in many cases remained in the
party; as men of talent, they often
gained important positions; and, on
occasions, they used their influence
and their votes to help defeat some of
the more extreme measures favored
by a majority of their party colleagues.72
Such men often came from the
more commercially advanced counties close
to Cincinnati where a large
Democratic supremacy had been
established in the 1820s as a result of
popular hostility to Henry Clay. Though
that hostility had been associated
71. Hence my interpretation in tact
endeavors to explain the very paradox which Dr. Fox
claims disproves it! Cf. Fox, article,
163, 165, with Ratcliffe, "Voters and Issues," 867. Dr. Fox
agrees that banking and currency
problems were of little importance in state politics between
1824 and 1830, but argues,
interestingly, that Ohio's confrontation with the national bank
between 1818 and 1821 resulted in
diverging attitudes towards partisan organisation which
influenced the party alignments that
emerged in the early 1830s. Fox, dissertation, 120-32.
149,426-54.
72. John M. McFaul, The Politics of
Jacksonian Finance (Ithaca and London, 1972), 69-
216: Weisenburger, Passing of the
Frontier, 277-84, 295, 308-13; Sharp, Jacksonians
versus
the Banks. 3-24, 123-59. Sharp's account is very good in dealing
with politicians who found
themselves trapped in this way on the
wrong side of the party fence. See ibid., 14-16, 123-59.
32 OHIO
HISTORY
with resentment against the deflationary
policies pursued locally by the
Bank of the United States during the
Panic of 1819, it is a mistake to
assume (as Sharp does) that there was a
long-standing anti-bank tradition
in that region which persisted until the
1840s; if anything. experience of the
earlier Panic simply made Cincinnatians
and their immediate neighbors all
the more aware of the need for adequate
banking facilities and a sufficient
currency.3 This at least
appears to have been the general opinion, yet
established party loyalties ensured that
only Democrats would usually be
elected to office. These
representatives, and those in similar constituencies,
often felt obliged to support
"soft" policies, if only because they were aware
that the majorities enjoyed by the
Democrats in their part of the state were
declining.74
Indeed, it is such shifts in majorities
that historians should look to if they
wish to determine whether the financial
and economic issues of the period
had any impact on voters. If the voting
pattern as a whole reflects decisions
of the 1820s. then it is the small
shifts in that pattern that reflect the popular
response to the short-term issues of the
1830s and 1840s. If we begin to
measure these "swings" in the
proportion of the vote that the Jackson party
won, then we immediately find that those
southwestern counties turn out to
be shifting quite markedly against the
Jacksonians in the course of the
1830s: and, in this respect, they are
behaving like the other most commer-
cialized counties in the state. Where
there are obvious exceptions to this
rule, they tend to be counties facing an
influx of new non-British immi-
grants, like Stark County. 5 Again,
from Table 11, one can see that the
general economic character of the
various counties appears to have most
relevance to voting behavior in 1832,
the year of the Bank Veto. This
suggests, at least tentatively, that in
1832 the.vote for Jackson tended to
decline in counties with higher property
valuations (and therefore better
placed in the nation's marketing system)
and to increase in more isolated
counties with lower property
valuations. which were less dependent upon
good banking facilities. Such figures at
least leave open the possibility that
economic problems had a measurable
effect on mass political alignments.76
However, Table 11 also suggests that
economic considerations began to
73. Sharp, Jacksoniatns vers.us rlle Bunks, 177-78. For the demand for more banking
among "mechanics or small
dealers" in Cincinnati itsell, see (incinnatiAdvcertiser, Januar
4.
1837.
74. Cl. Sharp, Ja( ksniuns ,ersul the Batik ,, IX4-88. Alternatively,
"softs" occasionally
came from counties with overwhelming
l)emocratic majorities marked by strong control
from the county seat.
75. Kilbourn.
Ohio (iazueierw (1833).
450. I hope on another occasion to present my
calculations based on "swing."
though they suffer from being restricted to county-level data.
76. C0. Fox, article. 157.
V.O. Key. Jr., The Responsible Electrorate (Cambridge. Mass..
1966) emphasi/es the role of issues in
influencing the voters who shifted sides, and indeed new
Voters. in the Presidential elections of
1936-1960.
Politics in Jacksonian Ohio 33
have less effect on voting behavior as
the 1 840s proceeded and approached
the point from which the
"ethnoculturalists" have made their calcula-
tions.77 In that case the
rise of cultural tensions in the 1840s began to affect
the character of a party system which
had never directly or exclusively
reflected them, any more than it had
been dominated simply by economic
considerations. It was because the second
party system was marked by a
variety of ethnocultural and
socioeconomic divisions that growing nativist
feeling was prevented from finding
expression simply through one of the
existing major parties; and so, as the
"ethnoculturalists" have shown,
religious and ethnic tensions played an
important role in bringing about the
collapse of the second party system and
the development of a new system of
party conflict in the 1850s.i'
Conclusion
Clearly, this line of argument is
intended to restore the finan-
cial and economic issues debated by
politicians and voters after 1832
to a central place in the explanation of
political developments in the
Jacksonian era. It also endeavors to
keep open the possibility that
Democratic voters shared the anti-bank
views of the politicians, and that
banking and currency problems had a
measurable effect on mass political
alignments. Merely to tolerate the
possibility of such an "economic"
interpretation is, however, enough to
make many historians assume that
the aim is to revive the worn-out
doctrines of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.;
indeed, such has been the impact of his Age
of Jackson on American
historiography that it is all too often
assumed that all socioeconomic
interpretations must be trying to
establish that the party system was
marked by socioeconomic class divisions-or
else must be based on a
simpleminded belief that men are
motivated by their economic self-interest
to which Schlesinger himself never
subscribed.79 However, it is perfectly
possible to construct an economic
interpretation which accepts that
people's views on economic issues were
often based on cultural attitudes,
that the political culture of a
particular group could determine the way it
responded to problems of banking and
currency. Marvin Meyers has
demonstrated the cultural significance
of such issues: he sees at the heart of
The Jacksonian Persuasion a conflict between the ideals of the old, static,
77. Cf. Fox. dissertation.
310.
78. Holt, Forging A Majority, shows
that the party cleavage in Pittsburg in 1848 reflected a
mixture of ethnocultural and
socioeconomic factors, but by the later 1850s it had shifted to
reflect primarily religious divisions.
79. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The
Age of Jackson (London, 1946). See also Fox,
article, 156, and dissertation, 93,
98-99; Formisano, Birth of Mass Political Parties, 31-55:
Edward Pessen. Jacksonian America.
Society, Personality and Politics (Homewood. 11..
1969). This article, like my earlier
article on 1824, presumes to say nothing about socioeco-
nomic class differences.
34 OHIO
HISTORY
agrarian Republic and the social and
cultural changes being wrought by the
rapid economic transformations of the
nineteenth century. For Meyers,
this conflict created a tension within
the people of the time, as they found
themselves condemning the very business
practices that they themselves
used in their workaday lives; yet, as
John William Ward has suggested, this
paradox may have lain not so much within
all "Jacksonians" as between
distinctive groups of differing
outlook.'o At this point ethnocultural and
economic interpretations at their best
can come close together, for William
G. Shade has effectively argued that the
issues associated with banking
were closely related to the attitudes of
particular broadly-defined ethnocul-
tural groups."
Granted then that political attitudes
were commonly determined by the
communal experiences of identifiable
groups living and often worshipping
together; but were the experiences which
fostered a political culture
necessarily always ethnocultural in
character? For has not Lee Benson
persuasively argued that the ecology of
an area, the character of local
economic activity, and the relative
isolation of a place or its integration into
the market economy can also encourage
the development of a particular
political world-view?82 What
is more reasonable than to propose the
hypothesis that the ways in which Americans
responded to the many
changes that were taking place around
them in the Jacksonian period were
determined not only by the attitudes
common among their ethnocultural
group, but also by the attitudes
fostered by the economic experiences of the
communities or localities in which they
lived? After all, there is some
modern social science research which
suggests that a person's political
behavior can be influenced much more by
the socioeconomic status of the
neighborhood he lives in than by his own
socioeconomic status; and there is
much evidence that different parts of
Ohio (and the United States)
experienced some marked changes of
socioeconomic status in the decades
after 1815.83
Such an interpretation has the great
advantage of relating voter behavior
80. Marvin Meyers, TheJacksonian
Persuasion: Politics and Belief'(Stanford. 1957);John
W. Ward, "The Age of the Common
Man," in John Higham. ed., The Reconstruction of
American History (New York. 1962). 95.
81. Shade, Banks or No Banks, 17-19,
133-44. The same point is recognized by Sharp, even
though in general he emphasizes
primarily economic factors; see, for example, his treatment
of the Ohio Germans in Jacksonians
versus the Banks, 178-84. See also Kelley "Ideology and
Political Culture," 541-42.
82. Lee Benson, Turner and Beard:
American Historical Writing Reconsidered(Chicago,
1960). 215-28.
83. David R. Segal and Marshall W.
Meyer, "The Social Context of Political Partisan-
ship," in Mattei Dogan and Stein
Rokkan, eds., Quantitative EcologicalAnalysis in the Social
Sciences (Cambridge, Mass., 1969). 217-32. Some of the economic
experiences in Ohio are
well summarized by Sharp, Jacksonians
versus the Banks, 160-89.
Politics in Jacksonian Ohio 35
to political developments. The
ethnocultural interpretation in general
ignores the relationship between
election results and the formulation of
governmental policy, and assumes that
politicians could make decisions
without worrying about their effects on
the voters. On the whole, the
"ethnoculturalists" are the
ones who "watch what we do instead of what we
say." or who, at least, refuse to
take seriously most of what the politicians
and journalists were actually saying.84
In fact, however, in the course of the
1830s the Ohio Democratic party moved
from a somewhat ambiguous
position on questions of banking,
currency, and economic development to
a much more radical and doctrinaire
standpoint which the Whigs de-
nounced as fatal to the prospects and
prosperity of the state. By the early
1840s Democratic policy threatened not
only the continuance of the state's
banking system, but even the successful
completion of the canal program.
Why were such policies adopted? Why did
most Democratic legislators
vote for them with such proven
regularity?85 Why did the people back home
continue to re-nominate and re-elect
them? Was it because the policies were
arrived at as a result of interactions
between the grass roots and the
decision-makers? Was it because, after
the experience of rapid economic
change which marked Ohio after 1825, the
people of certain political
cultures, living in particular
communities and already attached to one of
the great parties, would stand nothing
less?
Such questions, however, are not even
admitted by some ethnocultural
historians. They regard the proposition
as "established" that the issues
debated by politicians did not influence
voters, that the level of political
awareness among voters was very low. Yet
little systematic research has
been carried out into the question using
evidence contemporaneous with
the 1820s and 1830s; they are simply
reading back into the Jackson period
the results of some modern survey
research and the theorems of modern
political sociology. Surely the
historical evidence should be examined
before the proposition is regarded as
established, for, as Walter Dean
Burnham has argued, there are as yet no
grounds for assuming that at all
times and places there must be an
"absence of any clear issue cognition in a
mass electorate."86
Similarly, it seems to be assumed that
because voting behavior in the late
nineteenth century was largely dominated
by "the cross of culture," so it
84. Fox. article, 168, 170.
85. Herbert Ershkowitz and William G.
Shade, "Consensus or Conflict'? Political Behavior
in the State Legislatures During the
Jacksonian Era." Journal of American Hi.tory. L.VIII
( 1971), 591-62 I, which reveals
"sociocultural differences" among Ohio legislators compatible
with the line of interpretation proposed
in this article. Cf. Fox, article, 155.
86. Walter D. Burnham,
"Quantitative History: Beyond the Correlation Coefficient,"
Historical Method.s Newsletter, IV, (1972) 63, 65. Cf. Formisano, Birth of Mass
Political
Parties. 3-14: Fox. article, 161, 169.
36 OHIO HISTORY
must have been before 1850: indeed, the
"ethnoculturalists" assume that
they are describing the inevitable
characteristics of the mass political
parties which dominated American
politics from the I 830s onwards. Yet it
cannot be argued that the mass party
system was a new development in that
decade until the political system of the
previous thirty years has been more
thoroughly researched: the politics of
the Jeffersonian period, like Jack-
sonian politics later, may have been
marked by many characteristics of a
mass party system and at the same time
both could have been significantly
different from the politics of the
period following 1850."7 Historians should
think carefully before generalizing from
one period to another, and
especially before applying the precepts
of modern political science and
sociology to earlier epochs; but equally
they should beware the trap of
hailing as "new" developments
which may well have been taking place in
earlier periods they have not yet
thoroughly studied.
87. For differing views of the early
period, see Ronald P. Formisano, "Deferential-
Participant Politics: The Early
Republic's Political Culture, 1789-1840," American Political
Science Review, LXVIII (1974), 473-87, and Ratcliffe, "Revolution
and the Beginnings of
Party Politics."
DONALD J. RATCLIFFE
Politics in Jacksonian Ohio:
Reflections on the
Ethnocultural Interpretation
Who voted for the two great political
parties in Jacksonian Ohio? Those
historians who have asked this question
have usually given two sorts of
answers. Some have seen the popular
basis for the party division in
essentially socioeconomic terms.
Occasionally they have detected a class
conflict between rich and poor, but more
commonly they have followed
Frederick Jackson Turner in seeing the
cleavage in regional terms: the
more isolated back-country and upland
(or "butternut") districts are
considered the bedrock of Democratic
support, while the more commer-
cialized, river-valley areas are seen as
the center of Whig strength.1 The
other answer stresses the importance of
ethnic influences: settlers from New
England were Whig, while those from
Pennsylvania and the South joined
with foreign immigrants in voting for
the Democratic party. Though few
historians have stressed the socioeconomic
interpretation to the exclusion
of the ethnic, some historians and
political scientists have seen ethnic
factors as the exclusive determinants of
voting behavior; and this latter
view has recently gained new
respectability from the application of more
sophisticated statistical techniques to
this historical problem. In almost
every state and county the result of
such "cliometric" analysis has been the
same: the socioeconomic interpretation
has no evidential basis, the party
division can be understood only in
"ethnocultural" terms.2
Mr. Ratcliffe is Senior Lecturer in
Modern History, University of Durham, England.
1. Frederick J. Turner, The United States, 1830-1850 (New York.
1935). 29, 303. 307.
Typical older works in this tradition
include Edgar A. Holt, Party Politics in Ohio, 1840-1850
(Columbus, 1931); Harold E. Davis,
"The Economic Basis of Ohio Politics, 1820-1840," Ohio
State Archaeological and Historical
Quarterly, XLVII (1938), 288-89; Francis
P. Weisen-
burger. The Passing of the Frontier, 1825-1850 (Columbus, 1941); and even Walter D.
Burnham, Presidential Ballots,
1836-1892 (Baltimore, 1955), 7-9, 11-13.
2. The word "ethnocultural"
embraces the meanings usually associated with the adjectives
ethnic, religious and cultural. Similar
emphasis on the origins of the voters may be found in
works as old as George M. Gadsby,
"Political Influence of Ohio Pioneers." Ohio Archaeologi-
cal and Historical Publications, XVII (1908),
193-96, as well as in more recent political studies
like Thomas A. Flinn, "Continuity
and Change in Ohio Politics," The Journal of Politics,
XXIV (1962), 524-27.