The Party-in-the-Electorate in the Jacksonian South (Spring 1990)

[I submitted this paper with the full title “The Party-in-the-Electorate in the Jacksonian South: An Historiographical Review” as part of the requirements a University of Florida grad student seminar titled 19th Century America (AMH 6199) taught by Ronald P. Formisano in the spring of 1990. I presented the paper at a History Graduate Research Conference in Gainesville, October 1990.]

In 1913, Arthur C. Cole published The Whig Party in the South, the only full study to date of either of the parties central to the “Second American Party System” of the antebellum South. ¹ Although historians have since contributed many state and county studies of Jacksonian politics and politicians, no political historian has really attempted to tie all of these studies together into a full synthesis of southern antebellum politics. ² Cole’s interpretation, following in the tradition of “progressive” sectional and economic determinism, fully dominated southern political historiography until the late 1950s and its influence continues to be felt even today. He raised all the major issues and points of contention that later political historians would address when examining the second party system in the South. Cole originated the dichotomy between the political culture of the Upper and Lower South that later southern historians would continue to perpetuate. Later interpretations of antebellum southern political culture, including the most recent ones emphasizing republican ideology in an economic framework, would add only thin layers of sophistication to Cole’s simple class analysis. While political historians of the antebellum North, pursuing a multivariate analysis of political culture, have thoroughly attacked the economic determinism of “progressive” historians, political historians of the antebellum South have settled comfortably into “neo-progressive” acceptance.

Through electoral analysis, Cole showed that the antebellum southern Whig party drew its strength from “those districts which were drawn by economic interests to the support of the ‘American system,’ or with those in which the negro‑slave‑plantation system predominated.” ³ “The economic and political interests of the southern Whigs were the ‘special interests’ of the slavocracy.” The second party system polarized southerners along socioeconomic lines: Whig cotton belt aristocratic planters versus Democratic up‑country yeoman farmers and “common people.” ⁴ In addition, the Whigs drew “American system” support from hemp growers in Kentucky and sugar planters in Louisiana who benefited from a high tariff, commercial Maryland, and bank and internal improvement supporters in western North Carolina.

The Whig movement initially drew on a combination of anti‑Jackson forces: Calhoun anti‑tariff and strict-constructionist states rightists, bank supporters and opponents of deposit removal, old Clay National Republicans, out‑of‑favor Democrats, anti‑Van Buren Jacksonians–a “strange union” dictated by politics and never a “real love match.” The initial strength of the Whig party came from the states rightists, not the nationalists who had never been that popular in the South. By the 1840s, just as the two parties had agreed to disagree primarily over the banking issue, economic depression created a more favorable outlook towards banks even among southern Democrats. As the two parties converged on economic matters, inevitably they turned to the one issue which could always arouse partisan emotions.

Although southerners might have argued over a variety of economic matters, all political issues bowed down before the power of the only real issue–preservation of the institution of slavery. Throughout the course of the second party system, the underdog party always agitated the slavery issue, accusing the other party of being soft on abolitionism. The dominant party initially tried to suppress or divert the issue, but eventually ended up “raising the ante” by accusing their opponents of being even softer. In this classic game of race-baiting one-upmanship, “the force of sectionalism…was destined to run its full course,” inevitably ending in the Civil War. ⁵

Overall, Cole displayed a highly ambivalent attitude about the “artificial” nature of southern politics. Behind the question “Who are the southern Whigs?” lay the nagging question: “How could a bunch of aristocrats have won in any truly democratic system of politics?” Cole believed the overwhelming southern support for Andrew Jackson rested on “a somewhat artificial basis”‑‑a herd of “eleventh hour converts” who jumped on the Jacksonian bandwagon in an effort to better “control and direct the rushing waters.” ⁶ Cole dismissed Whig presidential victories in the South in 1840 and 1848 as “log cabin, hard cider” politics which aristocratic Whig leaders regarded with personal, but silent, disgust.

The Whig Party in the South culminated a growing body of research in southern political history heavily influenced by the movement at Johns Hopkins University to scientifically analyze voting data and Frederick Jackson Turner’s promotion of sectional interpretations and electoral mapping analysis. ⁷ In 1910, the most important of these “new” southern historians, U. B. Phillips, published what Cole himself called an “extremely suggestive essay,” “The Southern Whigs, 1834‑1854.” Although Cole claimed the essay “appeared after my material had in large part been collected and my work planned and partly written,” Phillips undoubtedly had a great influence in the final shaping of The Whig Party in the South. ⁸ But Cole’s interpretation would have the lasting dominance on southern political historiography.

Although Edwin Miles has traced the origins of the “aristocratic” South theme at least as far back as Richard Hildreth, the “progressive” school of southern political historiography nevertheless represented a decisive break with previous interpretations. ⁹ Cole rejected the “national political party” bias, the “great man” biographies, and the too ready acceptance of political rhetoric which had dominated traditional accounts. Even such previous “southern” interpretations as Political History of the South, the fourth volume of the twelve volume survey series The South in the Building of the Nation published in 1909, treated elections as little more than personality contests. ¹⁰

That interpretations of antebellum southern political history changed so little from the early twentieth to the late twentieth century might reflect the unchanging nature of the primary sources and methodologies used. Indeed Cole cited all the traditional literary archival sources (elite letters, diaries, speeches, memoirs, reminiscences, and biographies), as well as public federal and state documents (censuses, journals, reports, statutes) and a full collection of periodicals, newspapers, and pamphlets. On top of this, Cole firmly established the relationship between slaveholding and party preference through a “Turnerian” electoral mapping analysis of county returns for all the southern states from the presidential elections of 1836 through 1852 in conjunction with a map of relative strength of negro and white populations by county taken from the 1850 census.

Nevertheless, there were major problems with Cole’s inter­pre­tation which would provide fuel for revisionists. Cole side­stepped or dismissed much contrary evidence. He generally ignored the upper South in favor of an interpretation of the South based solely on the lower South, following U. B. Phillips’s practice of interpreting the South as his home state of Georgia writ large. Cole did not explain why the upper South differed so much from the lower South on the basis of party preference, simply identi­fying the Whiggish tendency of the upper South (including Louisi­ana) upon “a priori” grounds of support for the “American system.” ¹¹ Cole admitted that the evidence from North Carolina, where planters voted Democrat and yeomen voted Whig, seemed to refute his hypothesis, but inevitably dismissed such “hard” evidence in favor of an unsubstantiated belief that the “tradi­tion of plantation aristocracy is often found associated with the Whig party of North Carolina.” ¹² He almost totally ignored Ambler’s 1910 study of antebellum Virginia which had shown the great complexity existing in just one state. ¹³

Cole also fell into the trap (the mapping equivalent of the “ecological fallacy”) of equating county returns with individual voting behavior. Cole never really explained how an aristocratic minority was able to control the vote in the plantation districts and did not recognize that his maps reflected an active two‑party system in all regions of the South. Nevertheless, multivariate analysis and ecological regression would hardly have disproved the observation that the Black Belt region of the South voted overwhelmingly Whig. For its sheer simplicity, Cole’s more intuitive, “progressive” interpretation of antebellum southern political culture became the standard for twentieth century textbooks. ¹⁴

Malcolm Carroll, in his acclaimed Origins of the Whig Party published in 1925, found Cole “particularly helpful…for it made unnecessary an exhaustive study of the party’s fortunes in that section.” ¹⁵ State studies of antebellum politics in several southern states rested heavily on Cole’s basic thesis of an aristocratic Whig party. James E. Winston, in his essay on the Mississippi Whigs published in 1935, acknowledged that his “indebtedness to this volume far exceeds what might be inferred from the specific citations of the same.” ¹⁶ Henry H. Simms’s examination of the rise of the second party system in Virginia rehashed many of Ambler’s findings and demon­strated again the complexity of Virginia’s antebellum politics. Nevertheless, he was able to conclude “that the struggle between the Jackson and anti‑Jackson forces was in large part a class struggle,” although he admitted that “the relation between property and party politics could not be clearly established.” ¹⁷

Theodore Jack’s study of Alabama party politics from 1819‑1842 confirmed that Alabama Whigs drew on “aristocratic and conservative elements” whose chief concern was “easy access to the markets for their cotton and a financial system to which they might readily and confidently look for the money necessary to finance their operations from one cotton crop to another.” Jack also stressed the slavery and states-rights one-upsmanship so central to Cole’s antebellum southern party politics. ¹⁸

Jack noted, however, that sectional and partisan demands increasingly tended to override social and economic interests. The few “cotton counties” in the North eventually aligned with the poorer counties in the Democratic party and a Whiggish South developed, although two party politics remained fairly healthy in both sections. From 1819 to 1842, “underlying all the political contests and shaping the attitude of the people on political theory, was this sectional bitterness, this struggle between northern Alabama and southern Alabama for control of the State…In every campaign, the economic interests of the large planter and slaveholder of the Black Belt and of the small farmer, generally a non‑slaveholder, of ‘the North’ conflicted sharply.” ¹⁹ Jack’s “intrastate” economic sectionalism, a natural extension of Turnerian sectional analysis, was not really new, because other historians had promoted intrastate sectional interpreta­tions. ²⁰ Nevertheless, Jack gave Cole’s interpretation a more sophisticated organizing framework that would prove attractive to later historians of the lower South. ²¹

Other state studies refined and extended Cole’s interpretation of the Upper South. Thomas P. Abernethy, in his 1926 study of the Whig Party in Tennessee, dismissed explanations of political partisanship based on intrastate geographical divisions and slavery agitation in favor of an emphasis on local commercial orientation. ²² Non-commercial counties went Democrat and commercial counties went Whig. Abernethy attacked the basic weakness of sectional analysis: that it ignores diversity within sections and similarity between sections. A two‑party system reigned in every part of Tennessee and which way a county voted depended on “prospects” of “profiting from the establishment of banks and the building of turnpikes and railroads.” ²³ The attempt to inject “the slavery question” into the presidential elections by the Whigs in 1840 and the Democrats in 1844 “had no appreciable effect. Tennesseans did not appear to be worried about the question of slavery.” ²⁴ Seconding Cole’s ambivalence about southern political culture, Abernethy located the essence of electoral behavior in the elite control of public opinion. “Court‑house influences”–town politicians, bankers, merchants, and pressese–“were usually able to deter­mine the stand of the counties, for the simple farmers of the back country were uninformed and easily led.” ²⁵

Abernethy drew Tennessee politics into the “American System” orbit of the Upper South while incorporating Cole’s Lower South planter-yeoman class relations. Tennessee political alignments arose due to “conflicting economic interests between the bankers, the merchants, and the planters on one side, and the small farmers on the other.” ²⁶ Thus Abernethy, in adding additional layers of sophistication, inevitably strengthened Cole’s Upper-Lower South dichotomy and class-based southern politics. ²⁷

In 1939, Roger Shugg, explicitly employing a Marxist class analysis, did for antebellum Lousiana politics what Abernethy had done for Tennessee. Shugg aligned Whig planters and merchants against Democrat small farmers and identified the importance of elite control of public opinion and the ignorance and lack or leadership among the downtrodden. ²⁸ “Repression was unnecessary in Louisiana until the crisis of secession because public opinion was almost exclusively the opinion of ruling planters and merchants.” ²⁹ But Shugg also combined additional elements of Cole’s Lower South interpretation. Shugg dismissed Louisiana state and parish politics as social hoopla in which “personalities and patronage generally overshadowed all other issues.” ³⁰ Recognizing the insatiable desire for dramatic electoral clashes among the populace, the Democrats denounced the Whigs as aristocrats while “the slavery question was ‘worn threadbare by party demagogues'” on both sides. ³¹ In the end, “government by gentlemen” created little real difference between the parties.

Shugg, nevertheless, extended his argument well beyond Cole and classical Marxism to a quite complex multivariate analysis which identified almost all the elements brought up by later “schools” of southern political culture to explain the absence of class struggle in a class society. Like interpretations based on “Herrenvolk Democracy” or racism, Shugg found the central key to the absence of class struggle in race relations, but like promoters of “republican ideology,” he tied the essence of race relations as much to preservation of liberty as to racial prejudice. “A white man might be as poor as a slave, but at least he was free, and did not have to work beyond the elementary needs of subsistence.” ³² Second to race relations, Shugg believed that genuine social mobility eased class divisions, as later “consensus” historians would note. ³³ Like “ethnocultural” historians, Shugg also emphasized ethnicity, religion, and political inheritance. “The conservative, French, Catholic tradition of the Creole and Cajun farmers south of Red River made them Whigs; the liberal, American, Protestant heritage of farmers to the north made them Democrats.” ³⁴ Shugg especially anticipated many of the main points of American followers of Gramscian hegemony. However, probably due to the very eclectic nature of his analysis, Shugg would have little direct influence on the course of southern political historiography.

After nearly forty years of such historiography, Charles Sydnor concluded in his highly respected account of the Jacksonian era in the South, that the southern second party system “had the hollow sound of a stage duel with tin swords.” ³⁵ Following Cole’s economic interpretation, indeed accepting and extending Cole’s electoral mapping analysis, Sydnor recreated the same divisions along planter‑yeoman lines, grouping “Whig” cotton planters with true supporters of the American system: “Kentucky hemp growers, Lousisiana sugar planters, and the businessmen of Maryland.” ³⁶ He found that national Democratic‑Whig debates, reflecting class‑struggle elements and industrial developments in the North, drew little interest in the agrarian South. Southern politics was local politics and the only national issue of interest was protection of slavery. Faced with the choice between “two parties each of which contained disagreeable elements,” southern leaders learned to play the game of protecting the interests of the South “by making the two national parties bid for Southern support.” ³⁷ The southern electorate, finding little of importance to differentiate the parties, made its choice based on “minor events and insignificant words.” ³⁸

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. also incorporated Cole’s thesis into The Age of Jackson, the culmination of “progressive” interpretations of the Jacksonian era. Although his book almost totally ignored the South, Schlesinger concluded that wealthy planters predominantly followed the Whig party and that national parties offered southerners little positive alternative in their overwhelming concern to protect states rights, slave interests, and aristocratic agarian privilege. “The Southern dilemma was this: which was the greater menace to the plantation system‑‑radical democracy or finance capital?” ³⁹ Southern Whigs opted for an alliance with northern business community in a deal with the devil; by the 1850s they would learn a hard lesson, but too late.

Thus at mid‑century Cole reigned supreme in southern political history. Paul Murray claimed in 1948 that the “most generally accepted thesis explaining party division in politics is derived from Marxian doctrine of class cleavages along economic lines.” ⁴⁰ Even political scientists like V. O. Key, in his pathbreaking study of 20th century Southern politics, accepted at face value Cole’s interpretation. ⁴¹ Even those historians like Fletcher Green, who stressed the triumph of democracy over aristocracy in the Jacksonian era, and Frank L. Owsley, who emphasized the independent yeomanry, accepted the traditional aristocratic Whig party interpretation. For Green, constitutional reforms simply meant that the aristocrats, while still maintaining great economic, social, and political power, could no longer dictate policy. ⁴² Owsley seconded that the Whigs as the party of wealth “more often than not…took a beating.” ⁴³

Green and Owsley, nevertheless, represented the first serious assault on the class structure central to Cole’s interpretation of antebellum southern society. Owsley, a social historian for whom politics was only secondary, dismissed the possibility that planters controlled the mass of voters through coercion. Family and kinship ties ruled out physical threats and ubiquitous landownership among yeomen provided economic independence. “[W]hatever influence the planters exercised over the political action of the common people was of a personal and local nature. It was based upon the respect the plain folk of a community had for the character and judgment of individual planters in that community and such qualities of character and judgment in the planter were revealed only by his genuine participation in community affairs.” ⁴⁴ To gain votes of yeomen outside of the black belt required “less personal means” of “persuasion” directed at a plain folk quite attuned to whose interests were being served. ⁴⁵ Indeed, the popularity of good oratory and joint debates meant “‘there was never a people better educated on political questions than the Southerners of that day.'” ⁴⁶ Although political divisions may have continued to fall along socioeconomic lines, Owsley’s democratic-deferential political culture represented a significant revision of Cole.

But Owsley’s interpretation would find few followers among southern political historians who, more influenced by parallel developments in northern political history, were also beginning to question the “progressive” class and sectional interpretations. Alexander’s electoral mapping analysis of the second party system in Tennessee completely rejected simple explanations of political partisanship. A “comparison of Whig and Democratic counties on the basis of geography, soil, slaveholding, urbanization, and concentration of capital or business and professional men reveals only imperfect correlations between the political map and the geographic or economic map. Furthermore, the issue in early electoral contests display little conflict of immediate programs. No simple dichotomy explains the political geography of Tennessee.” ⁴⁷

Richard P. McCormick seconded Alexander’s Tennessee conclusions with his simple but clever analysis of the effect of dual property qualification on voting in antebellum North Carolina. McCormick found that those voters without a fifty‑acre freehold voted in the same proportion for Whigs and Democrats as those with, and that the similarity existed in almost every county. “Thus, whether or not a man owned fifty acres or more of land seemingly had little or no influence on his party affiliation.” ⁴⁸

Grady McWhiney’s 1957 essay “Were the Whigs a Class Party in Alabama?” produced the first direct challenge of Arthur Cole, whom McWhiney called the Whig party’s “most comprehensive examiner.” ⁴⁹ Using presidential election results from 1836 to 1856, McWhiney found only a weak statistical correlation between slaveholding and the Whig vote and pointed out, like Abernethy in Tennessee, that a two‑party system existed in every county of the state. (McWhiney, however, did not explore whether Jack’s intrastate sectional forces distorted the relationship between slaveholding and the Whig vote.) McWhiney rested most of his critique on an analysis which revealed little difference between party leaders by place of birth, education, religion, or occupation. “Both parties elected large planters as well as plain farmers‑‑’self‑made’ men as well as men born into wealthy families,” although McWhiney admitted that “in the state as a whole it may have indeed been true that more large planters were Whigs than Democrats. ⁵⁰

Alexander and his graduate students at the University of Alabama continued this critique and published a series of articles and theses on antebellum southern politics in the 1960s. Although this research supported McWhiney’s findings about party leaders, the analysis of electoral data (including beat level returns) generally supported what Cole had concluded using his electoral maps: that the percentage of slaves correlated significantly positively with Whig strength. “In the counties with the more advanced stages of general economic development, with the greater cash cropping and the greater commercial contacts with the outside world, in short, in the counties more nearly in the main stream of the national and world economy, Whig party appeals were more effective. And these appeals were more effective to all types of voters regardless of individual economic status.” ⁵¹

Wishing to explain these findings, which appeared exceedingly close to Abernethy’s “commercial prospects” thesis, without falling back into the pit of class analysis they had hoped to escape (Abernethy’s aristocratic dominance of ignorant poor whites), Alexander et al. suggested a “world view” hypothesis: “perhaps Democratic votes were more likely to come from those preoccupied with the way of life of their immediate place and time, while Whig support came predominantly from those whom environment, access to information, and temperament inclines toward an awareness of a way of life beyond their horizons of space and time.” ⁵²

Unfortunately the very vagueness of this hypothesis led southern political historians to use their findings in support of wildly divergent interpretations, from multivariate ethnocultural analyses to various economic interpretations stressing class, intrastate sectionalism, commercial orientation, and town‑country divisions. Indeed, by retreating from his earlier refutation of dichotomizations, Alexander cleared the way for a return to, what James Oakes called, good “old-fashioned class analysis.” ⁵³

James R. Sharp, who took a straight forward sectional‑economic determinist approach in his 1970 study of Jacksonian Mississippi, concluded that “despite Alexander’s denial of the validity of the traditional view of ante‑bellum Whiggery, his conclusions are not drastically revisionist.” ⁵⁴

Much of the “new” class analysis of southern political culture followed the lead of J. Mills Thornton’s Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800-1860, undoubtedly the most important work on antebellum southern politics since Cole. Thornton found antebellum Alabama “a society obsessed with the idea of slavery,” an obsession which made white men perpetually wary of any impingement on their own freedom, a freedom built solidly upon the backs of black slaves. ⁵⁵ Nevertheless, although all southerners shared the same basic goal of individual liberty–an “economically defined” liberty–they disagreed about how best to assure that liberty. “The Democrats sought this goal by decreasing interaction; the Whigs by extending affluence.” The Whigs were the “aristocratic” party of the wealthy, commercially‑oriented, slaveholding counties to the south, whereas the Democrats were the “democratic” party of the poor, subsistence-oriented, non-slaveholding counties to the north. ⁵⁶

Although offering an ideological framework not unlike Alexander’s “way of life” thesis, Thornton dismissed Alexander’s futile attempt at sidestepping the class issue. Ideological differences were class differences. “[C]lass hatred and fear of corporate wealth was a continuing theme in Alabama history” since an “imported Georgia elite” installed themselves in the 1820s as a “royal party” and “created the structure of all future political activity.” To the lower classes of Alabama “the royal party was real…It was the embodiment of all the insecurity of small farmers in the midst of plantations, of the poor in the midst of plenty.” ⁵⁷ Like Owsley’s yeomen, Alabama’s small farmers by sheer force of numbers made politicians address their concerns and put Whigs on guard against appearing “aristocratic” in the slightest way. Yet Thornton’s paranoid “masses,” so easily bamboozled by politicians’ manipulation of democratic symbols like during the election of 1840, were hardly Owsley’s highly attuned, independent voters. (With very little in the way of electoral analysis, Thornton made the highly simplistic assumption that campaign rhetoric, which he acknowledged politicians cynically foddered the “masses,” reflected true popular sympathies otherwise politicians would not have continued to use such rhetoric.) In the end, as Cole and other Progressive historians had demonstrated over sixty years earlier, eventually Alabamians came to recognize an even more ominous “monster aristocracy” in a “sectional guise” which threatened the one sacred issue–the Negro slavery upon which white men had built their own freedom–and all other issues fell by the wayside. ⁵⁸ Thus, while never really acknowledging any historiographical debt, Thornton ended up with a “neo-progressive” thesis only slightly removed from an eclectic blend of Cole, Abernethy, Jack, and Owsley. ⁵⁹

Harry L. Watson, in a major study of Jacksonian politics in Cumberland County, North Carolina, continued Thornton’s ideological‑cum‑class interpretation, emphasizing more the role of urban culture and town‑country divisions. Country Whigs were “much more likely to come from the county’s plantation aristocracy than the rural Democrats.” ⁶⁰ Watson concluded that “it is not difficult to see why the North Carolina Journal could plausibly describe the emerging party system as a contest of ‘Aristocracy against the farmers, the mechanics, and the laboring class.'” ⁶¹ Watson dismissed McCormick’s contrary findings in a footnote, finding the freehold requirement not “subtle enough to distinguish between economic groups of real political significance.” ⁶²

Lacy Ford’s study showed that Cole, McCormick, and other southern historians had been too quick to totally dismiss the second party system in South Carolina. Drawing evidence mainly from contemporary correspondence and newspapers, Ford found that South Carolina Whigs–made up of commercially-oriented planters, farmers, and merchants aligned against a self‑sufficient yeoman Democracy–believed very much like Thornton’s Alabama Whigs, “that expanding the material basis of individual autonomy was essential, in the long term, to the maintenance of personal independence, and that the power of government could be harnessed to encourage economic development.” ⁶³ But, overall, the Whigs were greatly outnumbered. In 1840 Whigs won only fifteen of 169 seats in the state legislature, and most of these Whigs were subsequently defeated in 1842. ⁶⁴ Although Calhoun’s massive presence undoubtedly hurt Whig prospects, Ford believed that “in a larger sense, the Whigs failed to flourish in South Carolina simply because the majority of South Carolinians rejected the party’s basic ideological assumptions,” the assumptions of a “‘moneyed aristocracy,'” “‘an Aristocracy in disguise.'” ⁶⁵

In a major historiographical review essay published in 1985, Harry Watson neatly synthesized the main direction of southern political historiography. The antebellum South was “an arena of sharp social and political conflict that turned on an attempt to preserve what southerners called ‘liberty’ within the context of a particular type of community.” All classes collaborated on the preservation of slavery but the commercial aggressiveness of planters, merchants, and bankers conflicted with the isolationist interests of the independent yeoman community. This “particular combination of conflict and collaboration governed the political relations of classes in the white community,” “not because non‑slaveholders were brainwashed but because slavery was in their best interest. Within this community of interests, however, slaveholders kept the ultimate upper hand.” ⁶⁶

In another historiographical essay published in 1987, Drew Faust interestingly lumped Alexander, Watson and other historians emphasizing commercial orientation and multivariate analysis in with the “‘ethnocultural’ interpretation of American political life that deemphasized the influences both of class and of ideological forces.” ⁶⁷ Faust rejected this emphasis on “the national orientation and character of southern politics” in favor of an interpretation based on a unique southern political culture‑‑honor, republicanism, and defense of slavery. ⁶⁸

A distinct pattern emerges out of this analysis of the changing interpretations of antebellum southern political culture. The major focus for both social and political historians of the post‑World War II era, North and South, has centered on explaining the absence of class conflict in a class society. In the South, although perhaps most directly traceable to the work of Green and Owsley, this trend actually commenced with Roger Shugg’s fascinating study of antebellum Louisiana politics. Post‑war historians dismissed the standard explanation of the pre‑war years which underlay all “progressive” class analysis‑‑the assumption of an ignorant, manipulable lower class‑‑as elitist. ⁶⁹ Post‑war “consensus” historians followed the lead of Louis Hartz and claimed that all Americans, Whig and Democrat, North and South, were attracted to a common liberal ideology. More recent historians of the South have proposed alternative frameworks like Celtic origins, Herrenvolk Democracy, southern honor, planter hegemony, and republican ideology to explain the absence of class conflict. ⁷⁰ For studies of southern political culture, republican ideology undoubtedly reigns supreme.

James Oakes noted in 1984 that if “a synthesis of social and political history is in the offing, it seems likely that it will center on the struggle for the preservation of republicanism.” ⁷¹ References to “republicanism” now run rampant throughout antebellum southern political historiography. Devotees among southern political historians include‑‑besides Thornton, Watson, Ford and Faust already discussed‑‑William J. Cooper, Kenneth Greenberg, Steven Hahn, Michael Holt, Thomas Jeffrey, Thomas Brown, Daniel Walker Howe, Richard B. Latner, Major L. Wilson, J. William Harris, and Robert E. Shalhope. ⁷² Indeed, so many historians have used republican ideology in support of so many different interpretations of southern political culture as to make the whole concept verge on meaninglessness. Certainly Eric Foner’s “Republican ideology,” of which Thornton made so much use, was not the same as the Bernard Bailyn’s “republican ideology,” yet the two ideologies have mysteriously become one and the same in much modern modern work. ⁷³

The “republican synthesis” improved upon Hartz’s “liberalism” by recognizing that not all Americans were full‑blown capitalists and that, although all Americans, North and South, rich and poor, had a basic core of shared beliefs, the directions those beliefs took varied from region to region, class to class. But, in the work of many southern political historians, republicanism became little more than a buzzword to disguise a much older form of economic determinism. As Thomas Jeffrey noted, the widespread belief in republicanism did not actually dictate which party an individual would join and, thus, these class-conscious “ideological” historians inevitably returned to socioeconomic class categories to define partisan behavior. ⁷⁴ And as Thornton made expressly clear, ideological differences were class differences. Understandably, “republicanism” seemed to soften the harsh edges of class conflict, since the classes at least had some core of beliefs in common and since the conflict was not really “class conflict” anyway but “republican defense of liberty.” Yet, in effect, republicanism let political historians have their class conflict and eat it too.

Republican ideology and good old‑fashioned class analysis, however, have not totally eliminated all other frameworks for analyzing southern political culture. “Ethnocultural” interpretations have been a persistent–albeit a distinctly subordinate–theme in southern historirography at least since Ambler identified the importance of “the ‘Tenth Legion’ of the Valley, the German ‘invincibles'” to the Virginia Democratic party. ⁷⁵ Sharp, acknowledging that German‑Americans in Virginia voted strongly Democratic, linked ethnocultural and economic factors in his view that “the kind of society the Germans built was not conducive to the development of an entrepreneurial spirit.” ⁷⁶ Watson, although deemphasizing ethnic and religious factors, showed that rural Scots in North Carolina voted en bloc Tory, Federalist, National Republican, and Whig before the Panic of 1837 and Democrat thereafter. ⁷⁷ Shugg stressed the strong Creole and Cajun Whig vote, the Irish and German Democratic vote, and the importance of nativism in Louisiana politics. ⁷⁸ D.L.A. Hackett’s later study of Louisiana supported “the view that ethno‑cultural conflict, not class conflict, was more important in influencing the pattern of voting behaviour.” ⁷⁹ These findings suggest that, although the South may not have been as ethnically and religiously diverse as the North, southern political historians can not simply presume that the South was one homogeneous ethnic and religious monolith.

A renewed focus on local forces highlighted another divergent trend in southern political historiography. In a study of data taken from poll books of Prince Edward and Cumberland counties, Virginia in the 1840s, Bourke and DeBats identified the importance of local community context which overrode predilections based on other social and economic factors. “Voters lived in distinct clumps of like‑minded partisans.” ⁸⁰ Robert Kenzer, in a recent study of Orange County, North Carolina, also placed great emphasis on intracounty politics. Bitter partisan rivalry reflected not ideological differences between the two parties, but rather “the county’s neighborhood structure and ties of kinship,” reflected in the “landslide” voting differentials and continuity in voting behavior at the neighborhood level. ⁸¹ However, Bourke and DeBats, Jeffrey, and Thornton stressed the role that independent‑minded neighborhood leaders played in relating politics to the community level and swaying the vote in non‑traditional directions. ⁸²

Perhaps the most truly original effort along these lines was Thomas Jeffreys’s recent analysis of North Carolina. Jeffrey saw both Thornton and Watson’s studies as simply refinements and elaborations of the old “progressive” “economic model of political behavior” and particularly criticized Watson’s Cumberland County study for being unrepresentative of the state. ⁸³ Jeffrey concluded that sectional economic interpre­tations equating Whig strength with “market‑oriented plantation areas [had] only limited validity for North Carolina” and could not explain how two-party politics continued to flourish in almost every part of the North Carolina. ⁸⁴

In trying to understand how pairs of contiguous counties with identical levels of economic opportunity could vote completely opposite, Jeffrey suggested that “earlier partisan identities, local conflicts, and personal rivalries at the regional, county, and even subcounty level divided the political elite and played a significant role in conditioning the pattern of party alignment in North Carolina.” ⁸⁵ North Carolina political divisions originated in the Revolutionary era and eighteenth-century “ethnocultural” conflict between various immigrant groups. ⁸⁶

Overall, Jeffrey believed that Ronald Formisano’s “core‑periphery” framework provided the best explanation of party alignment in antebellum North Carolina. “In North Carolina the core was composed of planters of English stock living in counties in the middle east and along the Virginia border” who, unlike their northern counterparts, did not back government activities, but rather minimal government services and low taxes, and thus sided with the Democratic party. The periphery included Federalists excluded from the process of government who ended up supporting the Whigs. ⁸⁷

In conclusion, how much has southern political historiography progressed since publication of Arthur Cole’s The Whig Party of the South? Multivariate analysis and ecological regression have not significantly changed the results of Cole’s electoral mapping analysis. Whigs still dominate slaveholding plantation regions and Democrats general farming areas. Southern historians for the most part persistently ignore the complexity of local two party politics, preferring to examine sectional and regional patterns of aggregate county percentages.

Most historians of the South still emphasize local issues over national issues. Forever looking towards secession and the Civil War, these historians continue to stress the complete dominance of slavery and its defense as the central theme in southern politics, whether linked to republican notions of slavery or not. ⁸⁸ Historians today, however, are much less skeptical about southern two party politics than Cole and Sydnor. Few would hear “the hollow sound of a stage duel with tin swords.”

Cole’s polarization of Upper and Lower South endures in the literature. However, whereas historians of the Lower South continue to pit slaveholding aristocratic regions against non­-slaveholding yeoman regions in ideological‑cum‑class conflict, interpretations of the Upper South have changed greatly since Cole’s throwaway “a priori” analysis of that region. Political historians of the upper South now stress local diversity, town‑country divisions, and historical patterns, while downplaying class and sectional divisions. Historians of the lower South have really only added thin veneers of sophistication to Cole’s basic class conflict thesis by introducing such factors as intrastate sectionalism, commercial orientation, urban‑rural splits, and republican ideology without really questioning the foundation upon which they were building.

Many historians might believe that injection of “ideology” into the class equation makes present “neo-progressive” interpretations somehow qualitatively different from “old progressive” interpretations. But as these “neo-progressive” historians make adamantly clear, ideology and class can not be separated, and class analysis as applied to American history still remains as problematic as when Hofstadter, Hartz, Green, Owlsey, et al. first began criticism in the late 1940s. If class was equivalent to wealth (a variable which could be explicitly defined and easily measured), then we could simply drop the term class and talk of “most wealthy” and “least wealthy.” But class as a concept has never been limited to just wealth. Rather class carries implicit Marxist theoretical baggage of class relations, intangible baggage which seems constantly in flux, baggage which is basically circular in argument and non‑verifiable. Does the injection of “ideology” solve these basic problems? No, “ideology” simply introduces another level of circularity and non-verifiability on top of the old.

In their quest for overriding themes, southern political historians return again and again to the same old economic determinism, with a few modern touches of culture added for flavor. By so doing, they inhibit an understanding of the party-in-the-electorate. What the study of the political culture of the antebellum South needs are fewer state and regional studies, and more detailed monographs of local communities along the lines of Watson, Kenzer, and Bourk and DeBats, where the effects of kinship and neighborhood, economic, religious, ethnic, and town‑country differences can be studied in their full historical complexity. Only a multitude of detailed community studies spread across the South will provide historians the level of data required to test basic assumptions about the nature of southern political culture that have remained basically unchanged since Arthur Cole first published The Whig Party in the South.