Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-r6qrq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-29T20:40:25.488Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Party Matters

Racial Closure in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Wesley Hiers
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

For nearly two centuries the United States was a democracy that institutionalized in law inequality between racially defined segments of the population. This article shows that such racial closure was causally linked to the workings of a party system in which one party was organized as an interregional alliance for the principles and practices of white supremacy. It does so through a detailed analysis of three historical outcomes: (1) variation in the establishment of racial closure laws across the North during the antebellum period, (2) the elimination of racial closure laws in the North after the Civil War, and (3) the failed attempt in the postbellum South to overcome racial closure in voting. Throughout the analysis of these three outcomes, the article shows that the party model conforms to the empirical record better than three major alternatives that emphasize the causal power of public opinion (electorate model), elite bargaining and consensus (elite model), and the racial preferences of the white working class (class model).

Type
Articles
Information
Social Science History , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , Summer 2013 , pp. 255 - 308
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aarim-Heriot, Najia (2003) Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848-1882. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Abbott, Richard H. (1986) The Republican Party and the South, 1855-1877. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
American Annual Cyclopaedia (1862-75) The American Annual Cyclopaedia and Register of Important Events Embracing Political, Civil, Military, and Social Affairs, Public Documents, Biography, Statistics, Commerce, Finance, Literature, Science, Agriculture, and Mechanical Industry. New York: Appleton.Google Scholar
Aminzade, Ron (2000) “The politics of race and nation: Citizenship and Africanization in Tanganyika.” Political Power and Social Theory 14: 53-90.Google Scholar
Ashworth, John (1995) Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Baker, Jean H. (1983) Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Benedict, Michael Les (1972) “The rout of radicalism: Republicans and the elections of 1867.” Civil War History 18 (4): 334-44.Google Scholar
Berger, Raoul (1977) Government by Judiciary: The Transformation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Berwanger, Eugene H. (1967) The Frontier against Slavery. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Bilotta, James D. (1992) Race and the Rise of the Republican Party, 1848-1865. New York: Lang.Google Scholar
Blum, Edward J. (2005) Reforging the White Republic. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Bonacich, Edna (1975) “Abolition, the extension of slavery, and the position of free blacks: A study of split labor markets in the United States, 1830-1863.” American Journal of Sociology 81 (3): 601-28.Google Scholar
Brandwein, Pamela (2007) “A judicial abandonment of blacks? Rethinking the ’state action’ cases of the Waite court.” Law and Society Review 41 (2): 343-86.Google Scholar
Brandwein, Pamela (2011) Rethinking the Judicial Settlement of Reconstruction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Burke, Albie (1970) “Federal regulation of congressional elections in northern cities, 1871-94.” American Journal of Legal History 14 (1): 17-34.Google Scholar
Burstein, Paul (1998) “Bringing the public back in: Should sociologists consider the impact of public opinion on public policy?” Social Forces 77 (1): 27-62.Google Scholar
Calhoun, Charles W. (2006) Conceiving a New Republic: The Republican Party and the Southern Question, 1869-1900. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.Google Scholar
Commons, John R. (1931) “Institutional economics.” American Economic Review 21 (4): 648-57.Google Scholar
Cox, LawandaCox, John (1967) “Negro suffrage and Republican politics: The problem of motivation in Reconstruction historiography.” Journal of Southern History 33 (3): 303-30.Google Scholar
Crofts, Daniel W. (1968) “The Blair Bill and the Elections Bill: The congressional aftermath to Reconstruction.” PhD diss., Yale University.Google Scholar
Dahl, Robert A. (1956) A Preface to Democratic Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
De Leon, Cedric (2008) “‘No bourgeois mass party, no democracy’: The missing link in Barrington Moore’s American Civil War.” Political Power and Social Theory 19: 39-82.Google Scholar
De Leon, CedricDesai, ManaliTuğal, Cihan (2009) “Political articulation: Parties and the constitution of cleavages in the United States, India, and Turkey.” Sociological Theory 27 (3): 193-219.Google Scholar
Desai, Manali (2002) “The relative autonomy of party practices: A counterfactual analysis of left party ascendancy in Kerala, India, 1934-1940.” American Journal of Sociology 108 (3): 616-57.Google Scholar
Douglas, Davison M. (2005) Jim Crow Moves North: The Battle over Northern School Segregation, 1865-1954. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Dykstra, Robert R.Hahn, Harlan (1968) “Northern voters and Negro suffrage: The case of Iowa, 1868.” Public Opinion Quarterly 32 (2): 202-15.Google Scholar
Erickson, Leonard (1973) “Politics and repeal of Ohio’s black laws, 1837-1849.” Ohio History 82: 154-75.Google Scholar
Field, Phyllis F. (1982) The Politics of Race in New York. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Finegold, KennethSkocpol, Theda (1995) State and Party in America’s New Deal. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Finkelman, Paul (1985-86) “Prelude to the Fourteenth Amendment: Black legal rights in the antebellum North.” Rutgers Law Journal 17 (3-4): 415-82.Google Scholar
Fishel, Leslie H. Jr. (1954) “Northern prejudice and Negro suffrage, 1865-1870.” Journal of Negro History 39 (1): 8-26.Google Scholar
Fishel, Leslie H. Jr. (1963) “Wisconsin and Negro suffrage.” Wisconsin Magazine of History 46 (3): 180-96.Google Scholar
Foner, Eric (1970) Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Foner, Eric (1988) Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Ford, Lacy K. (1999) “Making the ‘white man’s country’ white: Race, slavery, and state-building in the Jacksonian South.” Journal of the Early Republic 19 (4): 713-37.Google Scholar
Formisano, Ronald P. (1971) The Birth of Mass Political Parties: Michigan, 1827-1861. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Fredrickson, George M. (1971) The Black Image in the White Mind. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Frymer, Paul (1999) Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Gerring, John (1994) “A chapter in the history of American party ideology: The nineteenth-century Democratic Party (1828-1892).” Polity 26 (4): 729-68.Google Scholar
Gillette, William (1965) The Right to Vote: Politics and the Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Grossman, Lawrence (1976) The Democratic Party and the Negro. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Haines, Michael R., and Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (2004) Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790-1920 [computer file]. ICPSR02896-v2. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor].Google Scholar
Harris, Norman Dwight (1904) The History of Negro Servitude in Illinois, and of the Slavery Agitation in That State, 1719-1864. Chicago: McClurg.Google Scholar
Hinsdale, B. A. (1880) The Republican Textbook for the Campaign of 1880: A Full History of General James A. Garfield’s Public Life, with Other Political Information. New York: Appleton.Google Scholar
Hirschman, Albert O. (1970) Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Hirshson, Stanley P. (1962) Farewell to the Bloody Shirt. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Holt, Michael F. (1992) Political Parties and American Political Development. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Holt, Michael F. (1999) The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Howe, Daniel Walker (1979) The Political Culture of the American Whigs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Ignatiev, Noel (1995) How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Jaenicke, Douglas W. (1995) “The rupture of the antebellum Democratic Party.” Party Politics 1 (3): 347-67.Google Scholar
James, Scott C.Lawson, Brian L. (1999) “The political economy of voting rights enforcement in America’s Gilded Age: Electoral College competition, partisan commitment, and the federal election law.” American Political Science Review 93 (1): 115-31.Google Scholar
Johnson, Franklin (1979 [1918]) The Development of State Legislation concerning the Free Negro. Westport, CT: Greenwood.Google Scholar
Keyssar, Alexander (2000) The Right to Vote. New York: Basic.Google Scholar
King, Desmond S.Smith, Rogers M. (2008) “Racial orders in American political development,” in Lowndes, JosephNokov, JulieWarren, Dorian T. (eds.) Race and American Political Development. New York: Routledge: 80-105.Google Scholar
Klinkner, Philip A., with Smith, Rogers M. (1999) The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Kousser, J. Morgan (1974) The Shaping of Southern Politics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Kousser, J. Morgan (1992) “The Voting Rights Act and the two Reconstructions,” in Grofman, BernardDavidson, Chandler (eds.) Controversies in Minority Voting: The Voting Rights Act in Perspective. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution: 135-76.Google Scholar
Kousser, J. Morgan (2002) “‘The onward march of right principles’: State legislative actions on racial discrimination in schools in nineteenth-century America.” Historical Methods 35 (4): 177-204.Google Scholar
Litwack, Leon F. (1961) North of Slavery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Loveman, Mara (1999) “Is ‘race’ essential?” American Sociological Review 64 (6): 891-98.Google Scholar
Mahoney, James, Kimball, ErinKoivu, Kendra L. (2009) “The logic of historical explanation in the social sciences.” Comparative Political Studies 42 (1): 114-46.Google Scholar
Malone, Christopher (2008) Between Freedom and Bondage: Race, Party, and Voting Rights in the Antebellum North. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Martis, Kenneth C. (1989) The Historical Atlas of Political Parties in the United States Congress, 1789-1989. New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Marx, Anthony W. (1998) Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of South Africa, the United States, and Brazil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
McAdam, Doug (1982) Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
McPherson, Edward (1972 [1871]) The Political History of the United States during the Period of Reconstruction: April 15, 1865-July 15, 1870. New York: Da Capo.Google Scholar
Messina, Anthony M. (1989) Race and Party Competition in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Miles, Robert (1989) Racism. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Olbrich, Emil (1912) The Development of Sentiment on Negro Suffrage to 1860. Madison: University of Wisconsin.Google Scholar
Pearson, C. C. (1916) “The Readjuster movement in Virginia.” American Historical Review 21 (4): 734-49.Google Scholar
Perman, Michael (1984) The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869-1879. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Porter, Kirk H.Johnson, Donald Bruce, eds. (1970) National Party Platforms, 1840-1968. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Reams, Bernard D.Wilson, Paul E., eds. (1975) Segregation and the Fourteenth Amendment in the States. Buffalo: Hein.Google Scholar
Republican Congressional Committee (1880) The Republican Campaign Text Book for 1880. Washington, DC: Republican Congressional Committee.Google Scholar
Republican National Committee (1884) The Republican Campaign Textbook for 1884. New York: Republican National Committee.Google Scholar
Richards, Leonard L. (2000) The Slave Power. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Roediger, David R. (1991) The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Sartori, Giovanni (1969) “From the sociology of politics to political sociology,” in Lipset, Seymour (ed.) Politics and the Social Sciences. New York: Oxford University Press: 65-100.Google Scholar
Saxton, Alexander (1990) The Rise and Fall of the White Republic. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Schattschneider, E. E. (1960) The Semisovereign People. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.Google Scholar
Schwalm, Leslie A. (2009) Emancipation’s Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Silbey, Joel H. (1977) A Respectable Minority. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Silbey, Joel H. (1985) The Partisan Imperative. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Smith, Rogers M. (1997) Civic Ideals. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Stewart, James Brewer (1998) “The emergence of racial modernity and the rise of the white North, 1790-1840.” Journal of the Early Republic 18 (2): 181-217.Google Scholar
Tocqueville, Alexis de (2003) Democracy in America, trans. Bevan, Gerald E.. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Valelly, Richard M. (1995) “National parties and racial disenfranchisement,” in Peterson, Paul E. (ed.) Classifying by Race. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 188-216.Google Scholar
Valelly, Richard M. (2004) The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Valelly, Richard M. (2009) “The Reed rules and Republican party building: A new look.” Studies in American Political Development 23 (2): 115-42.Google Scholar
Voegeli, V. Jacque (1970) Free but Not Equal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Wang, Xi (1997) The Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans, 1860-1910. Athens: University of Georgia Press.Google Scholar
Ware, Alan (2006) The Democratic Party Heads North, 1877-1962. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Watson, Harry L. (1990) Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America. New York: Hill and Wang.Google Scholar
Wawro, Gregory J.Schickler, Eric (2006) Filibuster: Obstruction and Lawmaking in the U.S. Senate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Weber, Max (1978 [1922]) Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Roth, GuentherWittich, Claus, trans. Fischoff, Ephraim. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Wikipedia (2006) “List of governors of xxxxx,” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Governors_of_xxxxx (accessed February 15, 2006; “xxxxx” represents the name of the state, properly capitalized).Google Scholar
Wilson, Kirt H. (2002) The Reconstruction Desegregation Debate: The Politics of Equality and the Rhetoric of Place, 1870-1875. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.Google Scholar
Wilson, William Julius (1980) The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Wimmer, Andreas (2008) “The making and unmaking of ethnic boundaries: A multilevel process theory.” American Journal of Sociology 113 (4): 970-1022.Google Scholar
Wood, Forrest G. (1968) Black Scare. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Woodward, C. Vann (1966) “Seeds of failure in radical race policy.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 110 (1): 1-9.Google Scholar
Woodward, C. Vann (1974) The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Woolley, JohnPeters, Gerhard (1999-2013) “Presidential elections data,” The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/elections.php.Google Scholar