Gerrymanders: How Redistricting Has Protected Slavery, White Supremacy, and Partisan Minorities in Virginia by Brent Tarter

Abstract

Reviewed by: Gerrymanders: How Redistricting Has Protected Slavery, White Supremacy, and Partisan Minorities in Virginia by Brent Tarter Seth C. McKee Gerrymanders: How Redistricting Has Protected Slavery, White Supremacy, and Partisan Minorities in Virginia. By Brent Tarter. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Pp. x, 130. $19.95, ISBN 978-0-8139-4320-6.) Brent Tarter's Gerrymanders: How Redistricting Has Protected Slavery, White Supremacy, and Partisan Minorities in Virginia packs a wealth of information into 130 pages. The book is a detailed and chronological history of state legislative and congressional redistricting in Virginia. The principal contribution is a thorough accounting of the motivations and consequences of redistricting in the Old Dominion. Foremost is an emphasis on the question of whose interests, from the 1600s to now, have been favored by district line drawing. Historically, because of their power as landowners and slave owners, the aristocracy, located mainly in the eastern part of the state (especially the Tidewater, where slavery was most prevalent), stacked the deck in crafting district boundaries. The vestiges of malapportionment benefiting wealthy power brokers have persisted for most of Virginia's existence. Importantly, Tarter focuses on the concept of representation and how it has changed very slowly in Virginia compared with the rest of the United States. Indeed, the era of Jacksonian Democracy was no longer in its infancy when Virginians finally considered universal white male suffrage with no property qualifications. Tarter is adept at discussing the significance of changes to redistricting in Virginia's various state constitutions. The use of gerrymandering first reared [End Page 514] its head in the state's 1776 constitution, and Tarter provides an insightful passage in which Thomas Jefferson excoriated the baneful representational bias of districting that disproportionately advantaged Virginia's eastern inhabitants. Tarter also advances our understanding of Virginia redistricting by offering an in-depth look at the 1830 plan, which he aptly dubs the Great Gerrymander. In this legislation, malapportionment advantaged inhabitants in the eastern half of the state by splitting senate districts geographically in half between east and west, while also partitioning the state for the lower chamber (House of Delegates) into four parts, so that the two eastern sections provided more representation to these residents. For one, the eastern portion of Virginia was the beneficiary because population growth was more rapid in the western half of the state. Additionally, representation factored in property ownership (and there were more of these citizens residing in the east), and districts (state legislative and congressional) did not split city and county boundaries for the furtherance of greater population equality. In fact, as Tarter points out, from 1871 to 1971 "no [state legislative] district boundary line ever divided a city or a county" (p. 11). The reluctance to make population equality the primary basis for representation explains why this principle loomed large in the redistricting criteria written into West Virginia's original constitution and also why the Mountaineer State came into existence in the first place, since its inhabitants were poorly represented under the districting precepts benefiting Virginia's slaveocracy. The more recent changes in Virginia redistricting are illuminating because, like the rest of the secessionist South, the Old Dominion experienced the remarkable disruptions of the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and finally the reapportionment revolution that ushered in the principle of one person, one vote in district-based elections. Throughout these notable eras, Virginia elites were exceedingly slow to embrace, advance, and implement districting plans that would further democracy and therefore undermine their own political clout. As the major parties have become increasingly polarized, Virginia is no exception to contentious redistricting battles. Tarter proves up to the task of documenting the numerous consequential court rulings that shape the parameters of redistricting jurisprudence and laws applicable to Virginia. Given the state's history of unequal representation, it is notable that in 2020 Virginians approved a bipartisan redistricting commission for redrawing state legislative and congressional boundaries. Ironically, this development transpired in a once-again Democratic-run state, but now with a ruling party that found a way to hold power by advancing equal representation rather than by denying it. Seth C. McKee Oklahoma State University Copyright © 2021 Southern Historical Association...