Shifting Our Focus on New York's Rural History: Politics, Prisons, and Social Reform

Abstract

Shifting Our Focus on New York's Rural History:Politics, Prisons, and Social Reform Jeffrey A. Mullins (bio) In 1839, a bitter partisan battle broke out in the central New York town of Auburn, the modest market town serving as the seat of Cayuga County, with conditions at the state penitentiary there constituting the core of the controversy. Following reports of squalid living conditions and a series of physical abuses, the death of Louis Von Eck at the hands of prison guards prompted a full-scale investigation. The controversy was politically charged, with the newly empowered Whigs leading the attack against those prison officials still in place from the recent Democratic administration. In some ways, the dispute might reasonably be understood as a matter of state-level politics, with Democrats and Whigs each picking up on any issue that they could use to assail their opponents. More broadly, one might justifiably cast the controversy in national terms, as simply an embodiment of broader conversations on social reform, and the proper role and limits of government in supporting such endeavors. Indeed, this has overwhelmingly been how historians have treated such matters. In contrast, this essay argues that this episode—and many like it—was decidedly local, rural, and regional. Specifically, two arguments are forwarded here. First, in addressing state-level politics in the first half of the nineteenth century, historians have largely ignored the extent to which political dynamics percolate up from the local and rural to the center and metropolitan. Interestingly, historians of politics on the national level generally have been more sensitive to this. It is still possible, of course, to find leading historians describing the key period of the 1830s in a top-down vision of the "emergence of national parties with tentacles extending into states and localities." For the most part, though, historians stress the extent to which the 1830s and 40s political groupings on the national scale began as little more than loose alliances, and even at their height were more of [End Page 427] a disparate amalgam than a unified whole. In describing this process, historians often point to states and national regions as the building blocks of political ideology. The Whigs, for example, had to hold together members with abolitionist sympathies in the North and those with pro-slavery sentiments in the South.1 The localized process of building state politics, however, gets little attention. For New York, historians certainly have emphasized statewide ideological schisms, but these are generally treated as if the texture of such partisan divisions lay uniformly across the land. Thus in studies of New York during the 1830s and 40s we know a lot about the "radical" and "conservative" factions of the Democratic Party (wholly splitting into two different state conventions in 1847), and the "hard-shell" and "soft-shell" Whigs. In terms of specific locales, the most one tends to read about is that the western part of the state was more Whig leaning. By focusing on Cayuga County in the 1830s, we can begin to reveal the dynamics by which rural politics shaped the larger statewide discussion.2 Furthermore, by paying attention to the ways in which politics played out beyond the major urban centers, a second finding emerges. Although the standard narrative of the emergence of the "second party system" in the 1830s—giving rise to the Democratic and Whig parties—overwhelmingly prioritizes economic issues such as the struggle over whether to re-charter the Bank of the United States, other factors contributed to the ideological [End Page 428] differences between the two major parties. Indeed, in accounts of the more fully formed Whig Party of the 1840s, historians routinely mention the Whig emphasis on humanitarian reform movements that gave rise to such institutions as mental hospitals, penitentiaries, and schools for the blind and deaf. Treatment of this commitment, however, is almost always done in passing, and generally nothing is said about how Whigs came to embrace this position as part of their political platform. While historians have scrutinized the pathways by which contemporary concerns about slavery and racial inequality entered into and transformed political dialogue, little has been done to offer analogous explanations for the wide...