Contested Election Laws: Representation, Elections, and Party Building in Pennsylvania, 1788–1794

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In preparation for the 2012 presidential election, members of the Pennsylvania GOP have been considering changing the way the state awards its electoral votes. Under the current system, the candidate who wins the greatest number of votes statewide receives all twenty of the state's votes in the Electoral College. In recent years, heavy Democratic voting in urban areas such as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh has offset Republican victories in rural parts of the state. In order to build on their strength in the less-populated areas, Republicans are considering having Pennsylvania award electors based on a district method. While this approach is technically constitutional, political commentators have been quick to condemn the proposal as unethical and potentially dangerous.1 This is not, however, the first time a political party has attempted to change election laws to their advantage. The manipulation of election law dates back to the first elections under the Constitution.Concern over the lack of representation in the British Parliament was one of the major reasons the colonists decided to declare independence.2 The Revolution established the principle of actual representation—that all regions of a state or the nation ought to be represented in the legislature, and that federal representation ought to be apportioned by population in the House of Representatives—but there were still many questions about what that meant in practice. As the country went through the process of establishing a government, representation remained a divisive subject. Specifically, there was disagreement over how to elect a federal representative and whether the electoral votes a state cast for president ought to be divided by district or given completely to the statewide winner.Historians who have discussed representation and election law in the early Republic tend to focus on ideology. The standard narrative is that Federalists supported at-large elections because only the most qualified, well-known candidates had a chance at winning. Additionally, large election districts ensured that no single interest group had too much influence. Anti-Federalists, and later Republicans, advocated district elections to ensure that representatives remained tied to local interests. Whereas Federalists wanted the “best” men to serve in office, Anti-Federalists and Republicans believed a representative should be one of the people.3 There is certainly truth to this account, but a straight ideological explanation fails to explain why Pennsylvania changed the way it elected representatives four times in the first four congressional elections even though Federalists held a majority in the state legislature the entire time.The federal Constitution left it to each state to select a method for electing representatives. In 1788 the Pennsylvania legislature passed a law providing for at-large elections for the commonwealth's allotted eight seats in the House of Representatives. Each voter wrote the names of eight different men on a piece of paper, and the eight men receiving the greatest number of votes were elected. Although Federalists remained in control of the state legislature, an election law passed in 1791 divided the state into districts for elections to the Second Congress. Then, in 1792, the legislature narrowly voted to return to at-large elections. Finally, in 1794, the state settled on a district system. While Federalists and Anti-Federalists/Republicans clearly had ideological disagreements, a review of the debates surrounding the framing of election laws reveals that political strategy played a decisive role in the decision to select a particular mode of electing representatives. Strategically, Federalists favored the at-large system because, while they had a numerical advantage over their opponents, most of their supporters were concentrated in the more populous eastern part of the state, in and around Philadelphia. Anti-Federalists, on the other hand, favored a district system because their supporters were dispersed throughout the state. Federalists could easily dominate at-large elections, but a state divided into election districts could lead to the election of a number of western Anti-Federalists.In addition to illuminating the ways in which partisans manipulated election laws to get the upper hand, a close study of the change between at-large and district elections sheds light on the development of political parties in Pennsylvania. Parties emerged from the crucible of ongoing electoral experimentation, geographic tensions, and shifting attitudes toward the federal government. The process of switching back and forth between at-large and district elections forced politicians to develop communication networks throughout the state, hone methods of nomination, and devise new ways of campaigning.After losing the majority of seats in the first elections, opponents of the Federalists began to organize. Their efforts led to the legislature dividing the state into districts for the second congressional elections and the defeat of a few Federalists. Due to confusion over the number of seats allotted to Pennsylvania in 1792, the state returned to the at-large system for the third congressional elections. Despite preferring districts, Republicans used this opportunity to dramatically increase intrastate cooperation and improve their methods of campaigning. This party building resulted in a number of gains throughout the state. The realization that they were not equipped to compete with the Republican organization led Federalists to abandon at-large elections in 1794. There is, therefore, a clear relationship between the state's election laws and the rise of political parties.4The fault lines that would divide Federalists from Anti-Federalists and later Republicans date back to long-standing geographic and socioeconomic tensions. On the eve of ratification, Pennsylvania was a socially and economically diverse state. With a population of 28,522 according to the federal census of 1790, Philadelphia was the second-largest city in the country and home to a diverse group of merchants, manufacturers, laborers, artisans, and a few slaves.5 It was a center of both economic and intellectual life and very much a part of the larger Atlantic community. The eastern counties of Philadelphia, Bucks, Chester, Berks, York, and Lancaster tended to vote with the city. Overall, the eastern parts of the state were ethnically diverse, with the largest groups being English and Germans. Those who lived west of the Alleghenies tended to live in isolated, rural areas. Despite encompassing more than half of the state's size, only 75,000 people, less than 20 percent total population, resided in the western counties of Allegheny, Fayette, Westmoreland, and Washington. Most westerners engaged in agricultural pursuits, although a few of the larger towns had attorneys and artisans as well. Populated primarily with recent immigrants, the two largest ethnicities were Scots-Irish and English.6The United States experienced a painful economic downturn at the end of the War for Independence, and Pennsylvanians from all walks of life were in desperate need of relief. Many farms in the west were devastated during the war; the price of land bottomed out, leaving westerners on the brink of ruin. The east suffered as well, just for different reasons. A surge in British imports in 1783 and 1784 drove down the price of goods, crippling many merchants. Laborers and artisans found themselves out of work for the first time in years. Rising taxes threatened to break people throughout the state.7These conditions help explain some of the disagreements over the ratification of the federal Constitution. Although not a monolithic group, Philadelphia merchants believed the Constitution offered a solution to their economic woes. Similarly, many of the urban laborers and artisans favored ratification as a way to bring about fiscal stability. A strong central government could ensure the collection of taxes and provide protection against foreign markets. Many in the west disagreed. The proposed Constitution, they believed, only favored the merchants and the rich. Farmers and small merchants feared the imposition of heavier taxes and worried that a stronger federal government would weaken state and local institutions. Although patches of Federalism existed in the west, the vast majority of westerners sided with the Anti-Federalists.8With the majority of Philadelphia and its environs supporting the new Constitution, Federalists clearly had the upper hand. Most of the state's wealth and nearly two-thirds of the population resided east of the Alleghenies. Even with this advantage, Federalists were not willing to leave anything to chance. During the ratification debates, Pennsylvania Federalists proved well organized and easily outmaneuvered their opponents. In fact, the majority of the debate surrounding the Constitution took place after the state convention had ratified the document.9 Federalists moved with such precision and speed that Anti-Federalists, whose supporters were dispersed throughout the west, were simply unable to mount an effective opposition in time. Anti-Federalist leaders in Philadelphia did their best to stall ratification (including hiding to prevent the calling of a quorum in the convention), but on December 12, 1787, Pennsylvania became the second state to ratify the federal Constitution.10After the necessary nine states ratified the Constitution, both sides turned their focus to the first federal elections. Pennsylvania Federalists had the momentum, but they did not take success for granted. In the late summer of 1788, Thomas Fitzsimons, a well-known Federalist and wealthy merchant from Philadelphia, decided that his party needed to seize the initiative. He wrote to a friend on August 20 that “the representation of this state in the new Congress will in a great measure depend upon the plan that may be adopted for choosing them. A good mode might now, I believe, be obtained, which in another Assembly would not be practicable.”11 Federalists outnumbered the Anti-Federalists thirty-seven to twenty-seven in the 1787–88 General Assembly.12 Federalists, therefore, had the numbers to pass an at-large election law that favored the more populous, Federalist, eastern part of the state.In the Assembly, the Federalist-sponsored bill providing for at-large elections came up for discussion on September 24, 1788. William Findley, a leading Anti-Federalist from Westmoreland County, led a weak effort to promote district elections, arguing that they were the only way “that eight men could have a particular knowledge of the local and common interests throughout the state.” He saw it as “almost impossible in so large a state as Pennsylvania, to have an actual representation in Congress.” James McLene, an Anti-Federalist from Franklin County, was the only other member to express support for the district method, but both McLene and Findley acknowledged that such a bill had no chance of getting passed. Findley did, however, manage to ensure that the language of the at-large bill did not apply to future elections. Clearly he viewed this debate as the first battle in a longer war. After Findley withdrew his measure, the at-large representation bill passed without a recorded vote.13 Elections were set for November 2, 1788.At-large elections for representatives were not part of the national Federalist program. Instead, Federalists supported the mode of election most likely to ensure a Federalist majority. Pennsylvania Federalists supported at-large elections because they had a numerical but not geographic advantage.14 In South Carolina the situation was reversed. Low country Federalists supported district elections because of the large number of Anti-Federalists residing in the backcountry.15 Likewise, although Pennsylvania Anti-Federalists supported district elections, their counterparts in other states fought for at-large elections. Though ideology certainly mattered, it appeared that modes of election were often contingent on political conditions.Both Pennsylvania Federalists and Anti-Federalists held nominating conventions in preparation for the first federal elections. These coalitions were not parties in the modern sense of the word. In 1788 Federalists and Anti-Federalists had organized for one purpose—either to support or oppose the federal Constitution. The first federal elections were an extension of this conflict. Although the Constitution had been adopted, Anti-Federalists held out hope that members of the First Congress would adopt structural amendments to weaken the central government. For this purpose, a group of Anti-Federalists from across the state met at Harrisburg in early September 1788. Although the primary motivation was to draft a set of amendments, the men also agreed on an eight-man ticket to run statewide in the upcoming election. The convention occurred a month before the election law passed, suggesting that Anti-Federalists knew beforehand that the state would not be divided into districts. The ticket included a mixture of loyal Anti-Federalists, moderates, and two Federalist-leaning Germans.16 Four of the candidates came from the eastern counties and three resided in the west. Designed to appeal to a broad base, this eclectic group of candidates hailed from a variety of different social and economic backgrounds.At first, Federalists responded to the Harrisburg convention with outrage. According to one Federalist writer, the goal of “the Antifederal conclave” in creating a ticket had been to “save all the trouble of free elections in the future.”17 Federalists claimed the Anti-Federalists were attempting to deprive the people of Pennsylvania the right to vote for whomever they pleased. Despite their public outcries, some Federalist leaders were concerned that the Harrisburg ticket would prove successful and decided to hold their own convention in Lancaster on November 3, 1788. The ticket Federalists adopted at Lancaster was less varied than the Harrisburg ticket. Half of the men nominated by the Federalists resided in or near Philadelphia, and only one lived in the west. Because the vast majority of their supporters lived in the eastern parts of the state, Federalists had little incentive to nominate men from the west.Geographic voting in the first election led to a decisive victory for Pennsylvania Federalists. The Federalists' statewide election strategy worked perfectly. Even with members of the Harrisburg ticket outpolling the Federalists almost six to one in some western areas, only two of the state's eight seats went to Anti-Federalists.18 Federalist majorities in the heavily populated eastern counties more than offset whatever advantage Anti-Federalists had in the west. The two Anti-Federalists elected, Daniel Hiester and J. Peter Muhlenberg, were of German heritage and likely owed their victory to the tendency of Pennsylvania Germans to vote as an ethnic bloc. William Findley later recalled that, in effect, the 1788 election had been “carried wholly by one side of the state.”19Anti-Federalists did not put much effort into the first federal election.20 During the campaign season, backcountry leaders focused more on the upcoming fight over the state Constitution than on the election of federal congressmen.21 Besides the Harrisburg convention, no evidence exists that the Anti-Federalists made any concerted attempts to organize. Because the majority of their support was in the west and rural areas, without at least some organization the Anti-Federalists simply could not compete with the Federalists.Because the election law of 1788 applied solely to that year, the second set of federal elections could not occur without new legislation. But even as other states took steps to conduct elections in 1790, the Pennsylvania legislature was mired in debates over a new state Constitution and showed no signs that they were thinking about federal elections. With elected officials distracted, the debate over the means of electing representatives moved into the public sphere. Hoping to generate a discussion, William Irvine had penned a series of articles under the pseudonym “Juniata Man” beginning in January of 1790.22 A native of Ireland, Irvine moved to Cumberland County in 1764. Elected to the Confederation Congress in 1786, he allied himself with the conservatives and emerging Federalists. Although he had endorsed ratification of the federal Constitution, Irvine became disenchanted with the Federalist administration during the 1790s and drifted toward the Republican camp.23Irvine's political journey is reflective of a larger phenomenon. The new national government had inherited a fiscal disaster. During the Revolutionary War, the government lacked specie and had to pay soldiers in promissory notes. These notes quickly depreciated in the years following the Treaty of Paris. Poor veterans sold their notes to speculators for a fraction of their face value. The majority of the national debt was therefore owned by a small number of people. States also carried significant debt from the Revolutionary War. In 1791 Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton proposed that the federal government fund the notes at their original value, assume state debts, create a national bank, and levy excise and custom duties. The plan clearly benefited speculators, many of whom lived in the east, at the expense of veterans. Assumption of state debts and the establishment of a national bank pointed to a centralized, powerful national government. The direct taxes Hamilton proposed on distilled spirits fell particularly hard on poor western farmers who were still struggling to recover from the downturn after the war. The end result was that Hamilton's plan drove many moderates and lukewarm Federalists to the opposition and convinced the former Anti-Federalists of the need to organize.24In the “Juniata Man” letters, Irvine warned that the next Congress was about to “fund an immense public debt” and “will have a power to impose direct taxes.” The next congressional delegation, he insisted, must consist of men who would have the people's interest in mind. He argued that district elections were the best way to achieve this goal. Irvine blamed much of the state's problems on the men of Philadelphia who had been “in the habit of nomination at least, if not appointing, every officer of note.” In the last “Juniata Man” letter, which appeared on April 17, 1790, Irvine lashed out at the men in the east. “Let them rant, rave, or assume an air of gravity,” he sneered. “It is high time for the people of the middle and back countries to take themselves out of leading the of Philadelphia, Bucks, and part of Chester, the they have made in not them to put a into the of an election some politicians took steps to for the next elections. many former Anti-Federalists to a of 1788. Federalist Thomas to in early that the next elections “will be in districts and in that I it that the of be without a In members of an emerging Republican had out a August had that “the people to with a high less than a total of the in and that in future the have but one On September 2, 1790, the state adopted its new Constitution, potentially leaving time to hold elections. the Assembly the next without an election law and the new House of did not the second congressional elections December of 1790, after most states had held their the legislature in a of westerners and former Anti-Federalists narrowly in a district bill in the Pennsylvania House by a vote of to The bill included a that districts to elect men who resided in other parts of the three Federalists sided with the and just two Republicans voted against its In addition to a the voting also showed a clear geographic with the representatives from the west the bill and from the east party lines interests often In the the bill passed nine to with all the from Federalists in the the elections were held in districts, party needed to hold a state nominating were in a with a few the a situation that led to declare that “in to the that and the congressional of 1791 was and This may be the just at the actual elections, but the over election laws are the elections are just as and as any of the second congressional elections were not as for the Federalists as had but the opposition did the eight Federalists Republicans and one or was of the Federalists victories came in the eastern part of the state. Despite Republicans a few eastern the only Republicans elected came from the western part of the state. Daniel Hiester in the of Berks, and of the second congressional election to a few the state was still with the eastern voting Federalist and western areas with former Anti-Federalists and emerging The also that opponents of the Federalists had to organize. the first election, western leaders William Findley put more time and into the second congressional elections. Overall, the elections that most Pennsylvanians remained Federalists. Republicans had their strength in the west, but the populated eastern areas were still in the Federalist It would take more than a change in election law for the Republicans to a majority of the congressional the second congressional elections were held so only a time remained before the Pennsylvania legislature needed to draft an election law for the third congressional elections. But before they could they needed to out how many representatives Pennsylvania would be to Congress. The Constitution a census to help the of federal representatives the census the federal Congress much of the of the of representatives. The census that Pennsylvania had a population of it the second-largest state House and passed a bill on 1792, that would divide the total population of the country by and the representatives based on their population, with one representative for every people. This would have into congressional seats for Pennsylvania. under the that this bill would the Pennsylvania legislature discussion of a new election On a Republican representative from County, made a to divide the state into districts. representative from the west and all but one Republican voted in but it was not Republicans and supporters of the district method had seats in the Pennsylvania House and was by two votes. The state to be toward at-large elections became even more on April a proposed federal of at-large elections upon this and forced a vote on the election law that, with the number of representatives still at-large elections were the only The vote on the bill providing for an at-large election in the Pennsylvania House was to In the Republicans and made a to pass a law district elections. But the of Republican from the district resulted in an that was by the of Philadelphia, who supported at-large elections meant that Republicans would have to increase their intrastate cooperation with the that eastern Federalists would select the majority of Republicans set out to build an at-large campaign William William Findley, and in with Philadelphia Republicans James and Alexander In addition to the of letters, western and eastern of the of the Franklin of the General and of the Republicans with of to their to the These communication networks proved in the process of party of the surrounding the election of from methods of nominating Most Federalists advocated a whose members were to as while the majority of Republicans, or favored out a to their supporters for for Federalists the method because it was more a select few with could to take time work and to Republicans, on the other hand, were an effort to create a The could people who would be from as the build communication networks that could be in future different means of candidates emerged following a strategy on which both parties that were the way to support in Philadelphia. The to that the people of Philadelphia were well of the of federal 1792, Republicans in the House to develop an election In the they made a appeal to artisans, and The was set for in order to their the time the more than two people had into the House it the largest public in Pennsylvania Thomas a Federalist and of the Pennsylvania was to the the The group agreed to a series of that established a to draft and a to of the sense of the people in different parts of the state, the to be nominated as of Congress.” Those to draft the included Republicans and and Federalists and one of the state's On August 3, of the were The goal was a of the whom of every and in every part of the state, to be This was a from weak effort in responded by their own the following The was to at a time Republicans claimed was to prevent and from In Republicans the city with and that on their supporters to leave work Republicans turned out that the Federalists were unable to votes to elect a As the more and more Republicans through the they would be a group of Federalists to the western part of the a few from the and to select Federalist as the Republicans quickly on and the Federalists. A nearly and in the the and were order was both parties withdrew from the A that was with of a more were clearly that Republicans were equipped to so Federalists simply that there would be a nominating in Lancaster on September nine of the state's twenty counties and the city of