The civic “world we have lost”: Reflections on the first generations of democratic self‐rule in America

Abstract

Historians have customarily celebrated the expansion of electoral democracy during the post‐Jacksonian era of high voter turnout, developing political parties, and increasingly vibrant election campaigns. This essay qualifies this view by focusing on the limits of popular engagement in the partisan processes of nominating candidates, conducting campaigns, and bringing out the vote during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The nominally more democratic system of local party caucuses and pyramiding nominating conventions was generally controlled by small numbers of party activists, and generally avoided by less active citizens. Campaigns were similarly controlled, and given more the appearance than the substance of popular participation. Parties were particularly active in bringing voters to the polls on election day, combining transportation with various forms of enticement to and intimidation of voters who, in numerous documented instances, did not know who they were voting for. The varied array of nineteenth‐century political commitments and understandings does not differ as strikingly from that of the twentieth century as is generally believed.