Abstract
Abstract On election day 1860 state geologist, traveler, and diarist Benjamin L. C. Wailes noted his vote for Constitutional Union nominees John Bell and Edward Everett and carefully prepared a small table in his journal to tally the returns. A successful planter and historian, he had recently returned from a long trip that included Philadelphia and Washington. If anyone in antebellum Mississippi could qualify as cosmopolitan, it would be Wailes. Yet his outlook on the presidential election was inevitably local: “At this precinct,” he wrote, “Bell & Everitt received [blank space] votes.” Like his less sophisticated neighbors, Wailes’s perspective on politics began in his home precinct within a neighborhood community that sustained the state’s antiparty political culture.
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