Extraordinary violence and the congressional struggle to create free, fair, and open elections in the nineteenth-century U.S.

Abstract

ABSTRACT The expansive, locally run, and uproariously violent United States was a testing ground for basic questions of democracy in an age of expansion, emancipation, and proletarianization. Over the nineteenth century, the U.S. led the way in extending the vote and in efforts to retract the vote from those who already had it, and thus became a key site for establishing the ways that democracies would respond to violence intended to recast vote outcomes. The effort to define the line between legitimate and illegitimate political violence and to establish the remedies of election contests to overturn disputed returns helps us see the complicated, sometimes paradoxical, relationship between voting processes and political outcomes. Over the late nineteenth century, U.S. elections were outrageously violent and also surprisingly open to working-class engagement, including of freedmen. Violence both oppressed Black southerners and offered them a path to victory. Reducing violence in politics was crucial for opening access to women, denied the vote virtually everywhere in the United States in the nineteenth century, and physically frailer men, and it was also crucial for eliminating Black participation in formal politics throughout the south. The system that emerged in the early twentieth century, purged of most election-day violence (but rooted upon constant threats of violence otherwise) and of contested elections was both fairer on its face and grotesquely more restrictive in practice. From these juxtapositions arise questions that still trouble the United States today, questions about the line between a valid and an unfair election, and remedies for injured voters.