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Election 1864. 150 years ago...
Voting Rites in 1864: Messy and Unfair, but Rough Justice
By Frank Reeves / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Click Here to Visit the Original Article at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Michael Kraus, historian at the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall and Museum in Oakland, holds an envelope with instructions for handling a soldier’s proxy vote in the 1864 presidential election. The envelope is part of Mr. Kraus’ private collection.
When Pennsylvanians go to the polls Tuesday to chose a governor and members of Congress, they will participate in an election far different from the one in November 1864 that resulted in Abraham Lincoln’s re-election as president.
Then half of the state’s adult citizens were denied the right to vote. There was no secret ballot, so that election officials, party operatives as well as one’s friends, family and boss could know how one voted.
If one was away on Election Day, there were no provisions in the law for absentee voting, unless you were a member of the U.S. armed forces.
At a massive parade in Pittsburgh, thousands showed support for President Abraham Lincoln in 1864. But would he win reelection? Voters made one of the most important decisions in the nation's history. (Video by Steve Mellon; 10/31/140
Most Americans today likely would regard an election held according to these rules as at best strange; at worst, unfair and a scam.
Yet, by the standards of the mid-19th century, the election probably did justify Lincoln’s claim that it was “the most reliable indication of the public purpose in this country.”
Lincoln, running on the National Union Party ticket, as the Republicans rebranded themselves that year, defeated his Democratic challenger, Gen. George B. McClellan, by winning 55 percent of the popular vote nationwide. In Pennsylvania, the race was tighter: Out of the nearly 574,000 votes cast, Lincoln garnered about 52 percent of the vote, carrying the state by almost 19,000 votes. Nearly half of the president’s winning margin in Pennsylvania came from Pittsburgh and Allegheny County, where out of the nearly 34,000 votes cast, Lincoln beat Gen. McClellan by over 9,000 votes.
The right to vote: a white man’s world
By the Civil War, nearly all white men in Pennsylvania who were citizens at least 21 years old and could show they had paid a small tax were guaranteed by the state constitution the right to vote.
But this also meant that probably a majority of the people — white women and all African-Americans — were barred from the polling place.
Prior to 1839, black men were permitted to vote in Pennsylvania, so long as they met the qualifications prescribed by law. But when a new state constitution was ratified, blacks were excluded — despite the protests of African-Americans and their white allies.
Black men in Pennsylvania would not vote again until 1870, when the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was adopted. It guaranteed the right to vote regardless of “race, color or previous condition of servitude.”
As early as July 1848, at the first Women’s Rights Convention held in Seneca Falls, N.Y., 100 delegates signed a Declaration of Sentiments protesting the denial of a woman’s “inalienable right to the elective franchise.” Many of the delegates, including abolitionists Lucretia Mott of Philadelphia and Frederick Douglass, thought that by depriving women of the right to vote, other abuses followed in its wake, including: unfair marriage and divorce laws, lack of access “to a thorough education — all colleges being closed to her,” and denial of the right to own property, “even to the wages she earns.”
Women were still hobbled by many of these problems during the Civil War. The Pittsburgh Evening Chronicle reported on Nov. 4 — four days before the 1864 election — that a group of prominent citizens were raising money in order to create “a school of design” for women. The organizers noted that many of the city’s women were living in poverty, “arising from the exclusion of women from nearly, if not quite to all, of the well paid employment, by which they might support themselves independently.” The school, it was hoped, might teach them the skills to compete for these well-paid jobs.
Although women could not vote, they were not absent from the campaign trail. Some were writers and lecturers. Pittsburgh’s Jane Grey Swisshelm had pioneered the way in the decades before the war.
One of the most popular figures on the political lecture circuit in 1864 was Anne E. Dickinson, a 22-year-old Quaker abolitionist from Philadelphia. She campaigned heavily for the Republicans, especially in New York and New England, according to historian Robert J. Dinkin. She was also the first woman to address the House of Representatives in Washington.
Of course, many women played less prominent roles in the campaign. Some packed Republican rallies, hosted barbecues and marched in that hallmark of GOP campaigns, the torchlight parades by groups known as “Wide-Awakes,” according to Mr. Dinkin, who has studied political activism among 19th-century women.
The drive for women’s suffrage would begin again in earnest after the Civil War. Many of the abolitionists, like Lucretia Mott, Anne Dickinson, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Julia Ward Howe now turned their energies to fighting for women’s rights. Having helped end slavery and secure some rights for blacks, they now thought it was women’s turn to claim their constitutional rights.
It would be a long struggle. Only after the adoption of the 19th Amendment in 1920, did women in Pennsylvania and across the nation win the right to vote.
Police were on the alert
The day after the November 1864 election, Pittsburgh’s newspapers reported with obvious relief that the voting had gone smoothly, with hardly any reports of brawls and disorderly conduct. But Pittsburgh Mayor James Lowry Jr. had taken no chances. Police were deployed near polling places. Mr. Lowry had also authorized the swearing-in of 80 deputy officers, conspicuous by the satin badges they wore, emblazoned with word “police.”
The mayor had also requested that all bars and taverns close during the polling hours from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., trusting that the owners of these establishments would see the wisdom of his request.
Those who did venture out to vote on Election Day found a scene strikingly different from “the masoleum-like quiet” that often pervades polling places today, said Richard F. Bensel, a government professor at Cornell University, who has studied 19th-century elections and politics extensively.
Most voting places were in private buildings — livery stables, churches and often bars, where a sheet was hung up to separate the voting area from where patrons were drinking, Mr. Bensel said.
Polling places were a magnet for large and often rowdy crowds. It was not uncommon to find candidates or their backers delivering last-minute stump speeches to rally support.
This was an era before printed ballots, listing all the candidates vying for a particular office, were provided and certified by state election officials.
In 1864, Republican and Democratic party operatives were responsible for passing out tickets listing their candidates. The Democratic-leaning Pittsburgh Post and the Republican-leaning Pittsburgh Gazette each printed their party’s tickets in the newspaper, so they would be familiar to potential voters. In some cases, the tickets printed in the newspaper could be cast on Election Day.
As the election neared, the Post urged Democratic Party workers to make sure they were on hand early at polling places to distribute party tickets to Democratic voters. The Post complained that at congressional elections in October, Democratic operatives had been tardy, costing the party votes.
Both newspapers also warned voters to be aware of fraudulent tickets, suggesting, of course, that their opponents were low enough to resort to such dirty tricks.
Those wishing to vote had to get a ticket from one of the partisan operatives — leaving little doubt as to whom they were going to vote for.
Before the transaction could be completed, the voter essentially had to run a gantlet in order to reach the voting place. He might be jostled and heckled by supporters of an opposing candidate. In some cases, he might be physically intimidated, Mr. Bensel noted.
At the voting place, he would slip his party’s ticket through a slot in the wall to the judge of elections waiting inside. This official would take the ticket and deposit it in the ballot box.
That is unless a party operative, standing to one side of the voting slot, challenged his right to cast a ballot. This, as the Evening Chronicle noted, was often a flashpoint, leading to fights and brawls.
Soldiers voted by proxy
The Civil War saw an unprecedented mobilization of Northern troops in a very short time. The U.S. Army had about 16,000 men and officers when the war began in 1861, but soon this fighting force was augmented by hundreds of thousands of state volunteers and later by conscripts.
At the beginning of the war, only Pennsylvania permitted men fighting in the U.S. armed forces to vote while away from home. By November 1864, 19 Northern states permitted soldiers to vote, either in the camps where they were stationed or by proxy. If he voted by proxy, the soldier would mail his sealed ballot to a voter in his town who would cast it on his behalf by Election Day. In some cases, the party operatives collected the proxy ballots and saw that they were cast on Election Day.
The Republicans pushed hard to get soldiers the right to vote in the field. From Lincoln on down, they were convinced that Republican losses in 1862 and 1863 had been due in part, as the president put it, that “the democrats were left in a majority [at home] by our friends going to the war.”
They were also convinced that soldiers would likely support the Republican Party and its war aims.
Democrats generally opposed moves to allow soldiers to vote in the field or by proxy. They contended that the men could be easily intimidated by their officers or susceptible to peer pressure from their comrades.
The Pittsburgh Post reported heavily on the tricks Republican commanders were allegedly using to skew the soldier vote toward Lincoln and his running mate, Gov. Andrew Johnson of Tennessee: Democratic soldiers were sent out on patrol or foraging duties on Election Day, so as to miss the vote; no elections were held in companies that were strongly Democratic; military officers refused to certify the votes of soldiers voting for Gen. McClellan and his running mate, U.S. Sen. George H. Pendleton of Ohio.
As in the home elections, party operatives rushed to get party tickets distributed to the men in the field, so they could cast them in camp. Often the men voted by company, sometimes depositing their tickets in the captain’s upturned hat, which served as a ballot box. Party operatives might also take to the camp materials a soldier would need to cast a proxy vote.
In the end about 78 percent of the 136,000 soldiers who voted in the field backed Lincoln.
But historians should be cautious in interpreting what this figure means about the sentiments of the North’s fighting men, said Jonathan White, an assistant professor of American studies at Christopher Newport University. “It doesn’t mean that the soldiers were as committed to emancipation as the numbers suggest.”
As in so many elections, turnout was probably a big factor in determining the outcome. Mr. White, who has written extensively on the soldier vote, suggests that “some white soldiers were not willing to vote for Lincoln because they thought he was an abolitionist; others were unwilling to vote for McClellan because they thought he was a Copperhead,” the derisive term for Democrats and other Northerners who sympathized with the South. Instead of voting for “the lesser of two evils,” they refused to vote at all.
Few doubt that the election of 1864 was one of the most important in American history. No one knows how important Tuesday’s election will be seen in the long sweep of the nation’s life. But the two elections, separated by 150 years, do offer a vantage point from which to take a measure of our democracy and to judge for ourselves whether it still merits to be called, in Lincoln’s words, “the last best hope of earth.”
Frank Reeves: freeves@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1565.
Voting Rites in 1864: Messy and Unfair, but Rough Justice
By Frank Reeves / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Click Here to Visit the Original Article at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Michael Kraus, historian at the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall and Museum in Oakland, holds an envelope with instructions for handling a soldier’s proxy vote in the 1864 presidential election. The envelope is part of Mr. Kraus’ private collection.
When Pennsylvanians go to the polls Tuesday to chose a governor and members of Congress, they will participate in an election far different from the one in November 1864 that resulted in Abraham Lincoln’s re-election as president.
Then half of the state’s adult citizens were denied the right to vote. There was no secret ballot, so that election officials, party operatives as well as one’s friends, family and boss could know how one voted.
If one was away on Election Day, there were no provisions in the law for absentee voting, unless you were a member of the U.S. armed forces.
At a massive parade in Pittsburgh, thousands showed support for President Abraham Lincoln in 1864. But would he win reelection? Voters made one of the most important decisions in the nation's history. (Video by Steve Mellon; 10/31/140
Most Americans today likely would regard an election held according to these rules as at best strange; at worst, unfair and a scam.
Yet, by the standards of the mid-19th century, the election probably did justify Lincoln’s claim that it was “the most reliable indication of the public purpose in this country.”
Lincoln, running on the National Union Party ticket, as the Republicans rebranded themselves that year, defeated his Democratic challenger, Gen. George B. McClellan, by winning 55 percent of the popular vote nationwide. In Pennsylvania, the race was tighter: Out of the nearly 574,000 votes cast, Lincoln garnered about 52 percent of the vote, carrying the state by almost 19,000 votes. Nearly half of the president’s winning margin in Pennsylvania came from Pittsburgh and Allegheny County, where out of the nearly 34,000 votes cast, Lincoln beat Gen. McClellan by over 9,000 votes.
The right to vote: a white man’s world
By the Civil War, nearly all white men in Pennsylvania who were citizens at least 21 years old and could show they had paid a small tax were guaranteed by the state constitution the right to vote.
But this also meant that probably a majority of the people — white women and all African-Americans — were barred from the polling place.
Prior to 1839, black men were permitted to vote in Pennsylvania, so long as they met the qualifications prescribed by law. But when a new state constitution was ratified, blacks were excluded — despite the protests of African-Americans and their white allies.
Black men in Pennsylvania would not vote again until 1870, when the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was adopted. It guaranteed the right to vote regardless of “race, color or previous condition of servitude.”
As early as July 1848, at the first Women’s Rights Convention held in Seneca Falls, N.Y., 100 delegates signed a Declaration of Sentiments protesting the denial of a woman’s “inalienable right to the elective franchise.” Many of the delegates, including abolitionists Lucretia Mott of Philadelphia and Frederick Douglass, thought that by depriving women of the right to vote, other abuses followed in its wake, including: unfair marriage and divorce laws, lack of access “to a thorough education — all colleges being closed to her,” and denial of the right to own property, “even to the wages she earns.”
Women were still hobbled by many of these problems during the Civil War. The Pittsburgh Evening Chronicle reported on Nov. 4 — four days before the 1864 election — that a group of prominent citizens were raising money in order to create “a school of design” for women. The organizers noted that many of the city’s women were living in poverty, “arising from the exclusion of women from nearly, if not quite to all, of the well paid employment, by which they might support themselves independently.” The school, it was hoped, might teach them the skills to compete for these well-paid jobs.
Although women could not vote, they were not absent from the campaign trail. Some were writers and lecturers. Pittsburgh’s Jane Grey Swisshelm had pioneered the way in the decades before the war.
One of the most popular figures on the political lecture circuit in 1864 was Anne E. Dickinson, a 22-year-old Quaker abolitionist from Philadelphia. She campaigned heavily for the Republicans, especially in New York and New England, according to historian Robert J. Dinkin. She was also the first woman to address the House of Representatives in Washington.
Of course, many women played less prominent roles in the campaign. Some packed Republican rallies, hosted barbecues and marched in that hallmark of GOP campaigns, the torchlight parades by groups known as “Wide-Awakes,” according to Mr. Dinkin, who has studied political activism among 19th-century women.
The drive for women’s suffrage would begin again in earnest after the Civil War. Many of the abolitionists, like Lucretia Mott, Anne Dickinson, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Julia Ward Howe now turned their energies to fighting for women’s rights. Having helped end slavery and secure some rights for blacks, they now thought it was women’s turn to claim their constitutional rights.
It would be a long struggle. Only after the adoption of the 19th Amendment in 1920, did women in Pennsylvania and across the nation win the right to vote.
Police were on the alert
The day after the November 1864 election, Pittsburgh’s newspapers reported with obvious relief that the voting had gone smoothly, with hardly any reports of brawls and disorderly conduct. But Pittsburgh Mayor James Lowry Jr. had taken no chances. Police were deployed near polling places. Mr. Lowry had also authorized the swearing-in of 80 deputy officers, conspicuous by the satin badges they wore, emblazoned with word “police.”
The mayor had also requested that all bars and taverns close during the polling hours from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., trusting that the owners of these establishments would see the wisdom of his request.
Those who did venture out to vote on Election Day found a scene strikingly different from “the masoleum-like quiet” that often pervades polling places today, said Richard F. Bensel, a government professor at Cornell University, who has studied 19th-century elections and politics extensively.
Most voting places were in private buildings — livery stables, churches and often bars, where a sheet was hung up to separate the voting area from where patrons were drinking, Mr. Bensel said.
Polling places were a magnet for large and often rowdy crowds. It was not uncommon to find candidates or their backers delivering last-minute stump speeches to rally support.
This was an era before printed ballots, listing all the candidates vying for a particular office, were provided and certified by state election officials.
In 1864, Republican and Democratic party operatives were responsible for passing out tickets listing their candidates. The Democratic-leaning Pittsburgh Post and the Republican-leaning Pittsburgh Gazette each printed their party’s tickets in the newspaper, so they would be familiar to potential voters. In some cases, the tickets printed in the newspaper could be cast on Election Day.
As the election neared, the Post urged Democratic Party workers to make sure they were on hand early at polling places to distribute party tickets to Democratic voters. The Post complained that at congressional elections in October, Democratic operatives had been tardy, costing the party votes.
Both newspapers also warned voters to be aware of fraudulent tickets, suggesting, of course, that their opponents were low enough to resort to such dirty tricks.
Those wishing to vote had to get a ticket from one of the partisan operatives — leaving little doubt as to whom they were going to vote for.
Before the transaction could be completed, the voter essentially had to run a gantlet in order to reach the voting place. He might be jostled and heckled by supporters of an opposing candidate. In some cases, he might be physically intimidated, Mr. Bensel noted.
At the voting place, he would slip his party’s ticket through a slot in the wall to the judge of elections waiting inside. This official would take the ticket and deposit it in the ballot box.
That is unless a party operative, standing to one side of the voting slot, challenged his right to cast a ballot. This, as the Evening Chronicle noted, was often a flashpoint, leading to fights and brawls.
Soldiers voted by proxy
The Civil War saw an unprecedented mobilization of Northern troops in a very short time. The U.S. Army had about 16,000 men and officers when the war began in 1861, but soon this fighting force was augmented by hundreds of thousands of state volunteers and later by conscripts.
At the beginning of the war, only Pennsylvania permitted men fighting in the U.S. armed forces to vote while away from home. By November 1864, 19 Northern states permitted soldiers to vote, either in the camps where they were stationed or by proxy. If he voted by proxy, the soldier would mail his sealed ballot to a voter in his town who would cast it on his behalf by Election Day. In some cases, the party operatives collected the proxy ballots and saw that they were cast on Election Day.
The Republicans pushed hard to get soldiers the right to vote in the field. From Lincoln on down, they were convinced that Republican losses in 1862 and 1863 had been due in part, as the president put it, that “the democrats were left in a majority [at home] by our friends going to the war.”
They were also convinced that soldiers would likely support the Republican Party and its war aims.
Democrats generally opposed moves to allow soldiers to vote in the field or by proxy. They contended that the men could be easily intimidated by their officers or susceptible to peer pressure from their comrades.
The Pittsburgh Post reported heavily on the tricks Republican commanders were allegedly using to skew the soldier vote toward Lincoln and his running mate, Gov. Andrew Johnson of Tennessee: Democratic soldiers were sent out on patrol or foraging duties on Election Day, so as to miss the vote; no elections were held in companies that were strongly Democratic; military officers refused to certify the votes of soldiers voting for Gen. McClellan and his running mate, U.S. Sen. George H. Pendleton of Ohio.
As in the home elections, party operatives rushed to get party tickets distributed to the men in the field, so they could cast them in camp. Often the men voted by company, sometimes depositing their tickets in the captain’s upturned hat, which served as a ballot box. Party operatives might also take to the camp materials a soldier would need to cast a proxy vote.
In the end about 78 percent of the 136,000 soldiers who voted in the field backed Lincoln.
But historians should be cautious in interpreting what this figure means about the sentiments of the North’s fighting men, said Jonathan White, an assistant professor of American studies at Christopher Newport University. “It doesn’t mean that the soldiers were as committed to emancipation as the numbers suggest.”
As in so many elections, turnout was probably a big factor in determining the outcome. Mr. White, who has written extensively on the soldier vote, suggests that “some white soldiers were not willing to vote for Lincoln because they thought he was an abolitionist; others were unwilling to vote for McClellan because they thought he was a Copperhead,” the derisive term for Democrats and other Northerners who sympathized with the South. Instead of voting for “the lesser of two evils,” they refused to vote at all.
Few doubt that the election of 1864 was one of the most important in American history. No one knows how important Tuesday’s election will be seen in the long sweep of the nation’s life. But the two elections, separated by 150 years, do offer a vantage point from which to take a measure of our democracy and to judge for ourselves whether it still merits to be called, in Lincoln’s words, “the last best hope of earth.”
Frank Reeves: freeves@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1565.
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