Slavery or Sheep?
The Antebellum Realignment in Vermont 1840-1860
Christopher H. Achen
Department of Politics
Princeton University
achen@princeton.edu
Prepared for presentation at the Midwestern Political Science Association Annual Meeting,
Chicago, IL, April, 2012. An earlier version was given at the Center for the Study of Democratic
Politics weekly seminar, Princeton University, May 26, 2011. Copyright by the author.
Abstract
Political scientists and historians have long debated the causes of the dramatic partisan shifts
occurring in realignments. Antebellum Vermont provides an excellent test case. In the 1850s,
Vermont become the most Republican state in the Union, a position it held for a century.
Vermonters were anti-slavery, and in the conventional view, this honorable stance led them to
the GOP. Yet in this period, Vermonters were also anti-Catholic, anti-liquor, and above all, protariff on behalf of their enormous flocks of sheep. These issue positions, too, were shared by the
Republicans. Using population data, agricultural censuses, referendum results, and election
returns from Vermont, this paper dismisses temperance and anti-Catholicism as important
influences on the Vermont vote. It then carries out a test of whether the pre-Civil War
realignment in Vermont was derived from abolitionist sentiment or wool prices. It turns out that
neither economics nor moral views alone sufficed. Instead, it was their dynamic interaction,
with economic interest making anti-slavery sentiment an effective force at the polls, that led to
the Republican realignment.
1
Antebellum Political Historiography1
The rise of the Republican Party in the 1850s had immediate and profound consequences for
American politics. “The surge of Republican power,” culminating in the election of Lincoln in
1860, was the proximate cause of the American Civil War. (The phrase is Silbey’s 1985, chap.
9.) Thus disentangling the Republican voting coalition is central to understanding why the war
came.
Antebellum historians have identified several groups as constituting the initial GOP electorate
(for example, Gienapp 1987, chap. 11). The first and best-remembered are the foes of slavery,
who came to supply the popular understanding of the terrible war that followed. But antiimmigrant and anti-Catholic sentiment also mattered in many places. Indeed, the American
Party (“Know-Nothings”), whose central interest was anti-Catholicism, bid fair in many states to
outcompete the Republicans as the Whigs’ replacement. Temperance advocates, too, often
became prominent GOP spokesmen. Lastly, North-South divisions over economic policy,
including the tariff, internal improvements and other disputes generated by the divisions between
free and slave labor, helped fuel the rise of the purely sectional Republican party.
By emphasizing one or another aspect of the GOP coalition, historians arrive at different causes
of that cataclysm. In the decades after the war, prominent historians focused on slavery: “The
meaning of the [1860] election was that the great and powerful North declared slavery an evil”
(Rhodes 1906, 502). In the interwar period, Progressive historians like the Beards (1930) argued
that the differences in Northern and Southern economic systems, exacerbated by tariff battles and
financial panics, were more central. Others argued that the war was avoidable, brought on by
sectional fanaticism and blundering politicians (Randall 1940; Craven 1942 and 1953). Postwar
revisionists pointed to local ethno-cultural divisions, especially along religious lines, as
providing a more powerful explanation of antebellum voting, with the rhetoric about slavery and
tariffs less important (for example, Holt 1969). Historical research suggests that no one answer
fits every state, and that somehow all these causes must be consequential. However, especially
since the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the historical consensus has moved back to the
view that attitudes toward slavery were the central aspect of the Republican appeal (for example,
Sewell 1976, chap. 14). Thus McPherson’s (1988, 158; chap. 7) widely respected study of the
Civil War period says of the 1856 presidential campaign that “the salient issues were slavery,
race, and above all Union”; and his discussion of the 1860 campaign is similar. The best known
political science study of party realignments takes the same view (Sundquist 1983, chaps. 4, 5).
Most historians of the antebellum era rely on the qualitative analysis of documents—party
platforms, speeches, newspaper editorials, and private letters. Their sure-handedness at sorting
1
I am grateful to the staff of the Vermont State Archives in Montpelier, especially Scott Reilly, for their assistance
in finding and copying a great many pages of handwritten antebellum election reports. Gregory Sanford, the
Vermont state archivist, gave me detailed comments on an early draft, saved me from some errors, and directed me
to important sources. I also thank Larry Bartels, John Geer, Michael Donnelly, Karen Jusko, and participants in a
seminar at Princeton’s Center for the Study of Democratic Politics for their helpful suggestions. Masha Krupenkin
carefully turned the handwritten township voting returns and population figures into machine-readable data, and I
am deeply grateful to her for her hard work and professionalism.
2
reliable witnesses from the forgetful, partisan, or dishonest, and then entering the minds of
people whose conceptual world may be quite different from that of the current era, results in a
depth of sympathetic understanding unattainable with other methodological tools. This approach
is the foundation of most historiography on antebellum elections and the primary source of the
current near-consensus about why the Republicans won.2
Yet the classic historical method has important limitations when election outcomes are central to
the argument. The documents tell us primarily what political elites thought. But between
activists and ordinary citizens often falls a chasm. The last half century of survey research has
demonstrated unequivocally what thoughtful observers like Lippmann (1922) had spelled out
earlier, namely that what appears in party platforms, newspaper editorials, and the letters of
politicians and political operatives often has little or no resonance in the minds of the voters,
even in times of crisis (Converse 1964; Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996). The citizenry may adopt
the high-flown rhetoric as their own, but their motives for party choice are often quite different.
And if that is true of the relatively well-educated voters of the twenty-first century, then it is at
least a plausible hypothesis for the isolated, mostly rural, and often only partially literate people
of the mid-nineteenth century.
Altschuler and Blumin (2000, chap. 4) show that a selection of antebellum men’s diaries exhibit
little engagement with politics. One third never mention it at all (p. 143), and others report
voting without mentioning for whom or what the issues were, even when they go on at length
about other topics closer to home. As Michael Holt 1992, 319) has argued, when a distinguished
historian writes, “Congress would become for fifteen years the arena of a continuous battle
watched by millions of aroused sectional partisans” (Potter 1976, 49), he is making a strong and
doubtful claim. Bassett (1952, 19, cited in Bigelow 1970, 74) more plausibly concludes from his
study of the antebellum Vermont farmer:
His communication was as simple and limited as his travel….Perhaps one out of
three managed to pay for a weekly local newspaper….Yet farmers did not take
much time to read and were suspicious of indirect secondhand booklearning.
Even Gilmore’s (1989, 126) detailed study of Vermonters’ reading in this period, which
takes a more optimistic view, nevertheless notes that the reading that did occur consisted
mostly of
the family’s yearly almanac, some of the contents of a rural [weekly] newspaper,
and other basic books and pamphlets, especially the Bible, hymnals, songbooks,
devotional tracts, schoolbooks, elementary geographies, histories, some light
fiction, poetry, short essays, and popular tracts of various sorts.
Hence to resist the dangers of a misguided “Civil War synthesis” based solely on the thinking of
elites, we need not just the close analysis of documents, but detailed study of disaggregated
election returns as well, as the “new political historians” have long emphasized (Benson 1957,
1967-1968; Silbey 1964). Yet even now, it is striking how small a role the modern study of
Of course, some disagree. For example, Egnal (2009) defends the Beards’ economic interpretation of the
Republican surge.
2
3
election returns has played in historical explanations of the antebellum period. For example,
Sewell’s (1976) impressive study of anti-slavery parties, entitled Ballots for Freedom, makes
only passing mention of actual ballots, and it undertakes no detailed analysis of them. Even for
1860, perhaps the most consequential election the country has ever faced, the literature is thin,
and many states have never been studied at all. If one asks, “Who voted for Lincoln?” or “Why?”
the only defensible answer for most places is that we have only one or two initial studies, and
more often no studies at all.3
In an attempt at partial remediation, this paper takes up the electoral analysis of one small state.
Vermont has been so little studied that it is usually given only glancing mention, or even omitted
entirely, in antebellum political historiography. Gienapp’s (1987) magisterial, multi-state textual
and statistical analysis of the rise of the GOP mentions Vermont on just four pages, and very
briefly in each case. Yet the state was unsurpassed in the speed and enthusiasm of its conversion
to the Republicans in the 1850s. Moreover, as I hope to show, the state had certain unusual
social and economic characteristics that illuminate how ideological and economic factors came
together to generate the dramatic Republican realignment. Thus this paper attempts to speak to
antebellum historiography, but also to the literatures on realignments and on the development of
partisanship. To do so, it proposes a unified conceptual framework for thinking about the
electoral forces that brought on the war.
Politics in Antebellum Vermont
The Vermont Republican Party came into being at a Montpelier convention in the summer of
1854 (Hand 2002, 6-7). That fall, Republicans captured the governorship with 63% of the vote.
Two years later, the state voted Republican for president by a 78-21 margin, the most one-sided
Republican victory in any state. From then until the gubernatorial election of 1962, Vermont
never voted for a single Democrat for either office, a span of more than a century. Famously,
Vermont and Maine were the only two states to vote for Alf Landon in 1936, but lopsided GOP
victories in Vermont extended throughout the period. For example, in 1896, McKinley carried
Vermont 80-17, his largest margin. In 1924, Calvin Coolidge took the state 78-16, also his
largest margin. And in 1956, Eisenhower won Vermont 72-28, his largest margin as well.
Vermont Democrats were strictly an afterthought until Philip Hoff squeaked into the governor’s
chair with 50.5% of the vote in 1962.
Nineteenth century Vermont is an attractive laboratory for studying the rise of a new
partisanship. The Republican conversion was rapid, widespread, and long lasting, so that trivial
aspects of contemporary politics can be set aside as explanations. For this was not a state where
longstanding partisan loyalties slowed the absorption of a new alignment. The Antimasonic
Party carried Vermont in the presidential election of 1832, the only state they won. The
Antimasons then won the governorship through 1835, when they were absorbed into the Whigs.
That party then dominated Vermont politics at the national and state level for the next decade,
although gubernatorial elections were usually very competitive. After that, the successive
Liberty and Free Soil insurgencies took votes from both Whigs and Democrats, routinely leaving
3
For the critical 1848, 1856, and 1860 presidential elections, see Luebke (1971); Gienapp (1986, especially 482551); Huston (1987, chap. 6); and Holt (1999, 377 and passim).
4
the major parties below 50% in gubernatorial elections and throwing the decision into the
legislature (McCormick 1966, 69-76; Carter 1989, 240-246).4
By the 1856 election, when the Republicans first entered the presidential lists, the Whig and Free
Soil parties that had captured 70% of the Vermont presidential electorate just four years earlier
no longer existed. Even the ongoing (Jacksonian) Democrats were creatures of less than 30
years’ standing, while the Antimasonic, Whig, Liberty, and Free Soil parties had been born,
lived, and died in even less time. The rapid turnover of parties and the ease with which new
parties attained substantial vote shares suggest strongly that, for most Vermonters, partisanship
had only shallow roots before the rise of the Republicans. Turnout rose rapidly in this period
after the 1830s, too, so that many voters were relatively new to politics in the 1840s and 1850s.5
Certainly, generation-to-generation party loyalties, which provided a powerful brake on later
realignments in the U.S., did not exist in 1850s Vermont. The Republicans could, if not quite
write on a blank slate, at least get an immediate hearing for their party’s point of view.
What caused the abrupt conversion in the North to Republican hegemony? One frequently cited
cause was anti-Catholicism, which was rampant in this period (Billington 1938), and which had
the clear effect of producing GOP votes in some locales (Holt 1969; Silbey 1985, chap. 9).
Heavily Protestant Vermont was undoubtedly no more enthusiastic about Catholic doctrine than
other states, but the issue was much less relevant there than elsewhere. Vermont had only
modest economic opportunities and thus few immigrants, Catholic or otherwise; indeed, several
counties and many towns in this period were losing population (Arnold 1980). Catholics from
Quebec and Ireland were present, but only in a handful of towns and in small numbers. Often
they had no priests (Feeney 2006).
The result was that the Know-Nothings ran only once for governor, in 1855, receiving just 8% of
the vote. Their areas of relative strength bore no relationship to Free Soil or Republican
sentiment, or even to the presence of Catholics. In Addison county, the most Republican in the
state, the Know-Nothings took 12 votes out of nearly 3000. 6 In Lamoille county, the principal
hotbed of Liberty Party and Free Soil sentiment, the Know-Nothings received 37 votes among
more than 1600. In Chittendon county, home of the major city, Burlington, and the place with
the most Catholics in Vermont (Feeney 2006, 108-113), the Know-Nothings received a grand
total of 4 votes among more than 3000. Fillmore’s American Party candidacy for the presidency
4
On the Anti-Masonic party in Vermont, see Ratcliff (1995). That party in New England generally is ably
discussed in Goodman (1988). On the Liberty Party in Vermont and nation-wide, see Johnson (1979; 2009). Free
Soil is treated in Rayback (1970), Mayfield (1980), and Alexander (1990). Vermont elections without the required
majority winner are discussed at: http://vermont-archives.org/govhistory/governance/Majority/summary.htm..
5
Vermont’s population grew by just 12% from 1830 to 1860, while the number of voters rose by 45% from 1836 to
1856 (Arnold 1980, 14; Burnham 1955, 814).
6
References to county-level vote returns in presidential years are taken from ICPSR file 08611, provided by the
Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan, accessed September
17, 2010. Aggregate gubernatorial returns are from Carter (1989). County and town returns for presidential and
gubernatorial elections and for referendums are reported by the author from the original records in the Vermont state
archives in Montpelier. The Vermont State Archive lists statewide returns at http://vermontarchives.org/govhistory/elect/index.htm. Gubernatorial results are at http://vermontarchives.org/govhistory/elect/results1/pdf/stoff1gov.pdf.
5
in 1856 was an even bigger failure: He attracted 21.5% nationwide, but just 1% in Vermont. In
the near-absence of Catholics, anti-Catholicism was too abstract an issue to become politically
potent in the Green Mountain State.7
Similar remarks apply to the impact of temperance on the rise of Vermont Republicanism.
Widespread drunkenness made temperance a powerful issue in the U.S. during this period
(Rorabaugh 1979; Tyrrell 1979). Vermont was no exception. Like abolitionist parties before
them, Republicans were anxious to capture the votes of temperance advocates. Undoubtedly,
some moralizing voters saw temperance, anti-slavery, and Republican loyalty as all of a piece.
However, it turns out that overall, there is no relationship between temperance votes and support
for the Liberty, Free Soil, or Republican parties.
Vermont voted five times on temperance between 1845 and 1853, generally at town meetings.
Only the last of these decisions, a complete ban on consumption and production of alcohol, was
put to a conventional statewide referendum. It drew the largest turnout, and thus is the most
representative measure of Vermont opinion. It passed by a very narrow margin.
Figure 1 shows the county-level plot of the Republican presidential vote in 1860 against 1853
temperance support. The absence of a relationship is apparent (r = -.06).8 The plots for the 1844
Liberty Party vote, the 1848 and 1852 Free Soil votes, and the 1856 GOP vote are similar. The
corresponding correlations are small and erratic: -.16, .18, .09, and .20, respectively. As usual,
with more disaggregated data, the relationships are even weaker. Bigelow (1970, 84) studied the
earlier temperance votes and their relationship to Liberty Party votes, using town-level returns.
The correlation coefficients were always near zero, and never more than .02.9
Thus whatever the relationship between temperance and abolitionism among political elites, the
evidence is strong that the ordinary Vermonters who supported temperance were no more likely
to vote for anti-slavery parties than their tippling neighbors. Whatever forces drove the
temperance movement, they bore little relationship to abolition sentiment or to GOP voting
among Vermonters as a whole.10 Indeed, after being burned by the issue initially, Republican
7
The Know-Nothings did capture the Vermont Council of Censors in 1855, the body responsible for amendments to
the state constitution, but this one-time victory was never repeated for any statewide office. The Council was
elected at town meetings, where the Know-Nothings’ secretive and well organized party was at an advantage, not in
a regular election (Hand 2002, 7-9).
8
All correlations in this paper are Pearson r’s, with county observations weighted by the total votes cast in the
election being explained. Thus the correlation between the 1860 vote and the 1853 referendum is weighted by the
votes in 1860.
9
The successive temperance votes in each town were more volatile and less tied to party than might be expected
(Bigelow 1970, chap. 4), perhaps because pragmatic Vermonters were learning from experience what worked and
what did not, and because the initial four votes were taken at annual town meetings, whose attendance was variable.
For further discussion, see http://vermont-archives.org/govhistory/governance/Referendum/ref.html.
10
Some interpretations of this period lay emphasis on Protestant evangelical revivalism and moral fervor as the
sources for temperance and abolitionism (Cawardine 1993; Strong 1999). But as those sources note, local
conditions mattered. Since the two movements are unrelated in county- or town-level voting, it is difficult to see
how they could have a common cause in Vermont. Similarly, efforts to tie either one to denominational differences
at the town level find no substantial relationships. Quakers seem to have been disproportionately for abolition and
Episcopalians disproportionately not, but the great majority of Vermonters belonged to neither denomination
6
leaders nationwide were generally anxious to soft-pedal temperance in favor of a focus on their
central issue, anti-slavery, in hopes of attracting both drinkers and abstainers to their cause
(Gienapp 1987, 190, 206-208, 227-228).
65
70
75
80
85
Vermont 1860 GOP County Vote vs. Temperance
40
45
50
55
temperance1853 percent
60
65
Figure 1.
Thus in assessing the causes of the 1850s Republican surge, Vermont presents a simpler
inferential problem than most states. Temperance and anti-Catholicism can be set aside as major
forces. That leaves to be considered the two powerful factors that dominate most treatments of
Civil War causation—slavery and economics.
Anti-Slavery and Tariffs in Early Antebellum Vermont
In Vermont memory, the cause of its fondness for the Republican party is simply a deep aversion
to slavery. In the main hall of the capitol in Montpelier, engraved on granite, one may read this
inscription, taken from a Vermont Senate Report of 1855:
Born of a resistance to Arbitrary Power—her first voice a declaration of equal
rights of man—how could her people be other than haters of slavery—how can
(Bigelow 1970, 19-44, chap. 4). The key distinction may have been “Old Light” versus “New Light” theologies,
and those divisions were intra-denominational, and thus are not easily measured (Roth 1987; Bassett 2000).
7
they do less than sympathize with every human being and every community
which asserts the rights of all men to blessings like their own?
Condemnations of slavery and the South from religious leaders and other activists were a
commonplace of Vermont life, beginning in the 1830s (Ludlum 1939, chap. 5). Indeed, so
flagrant and frequent were Vermont denunciations that the Georgia state senate reportedly passed
the following motion at the time of Kansas-Nebraska agitation (Graffagnino 1977, 31):
Resolved, That His Excellency, President Pierce, be requested to employ a
sufficient number of able-bodied Irishmen to proceed to the State of Vermont, and
to dig a ditch around the limits of the same, and to float “the thing” into the
Atlantic.
No doubt overcome by the emotions of the moment, the senators failed to explain how “the
thing” was to float across New Hampshire and Maine.11
General histories of Vermont invariably recount the earliest-in-the-nation prohibition of slavery
in the first state constitution in 1777, the abolition societies, the enfranchisement of AfricanAmericans, the anti-slavery petitions to Congress (Carpenter 2011), the prominence of their
elected representatives in anti-slavery battles in the nation’s capital (Miller 1995, chap. 6 and
passim), and the comparatively large vote for the Liberty and Free Soil parties as evidence that
Vermonters focused their antebellum politics around opposition to slavery and a love of liberty
for all. “Vermont enjoyed the reputation of being the most antislavery state in the nation”
(Johnson 1979, 258). Attachment to the Republican Party then seems to have followed in the
natural course.
The difficulty with this argument is that northern whites were comfortably racist in this period
(Litwack 1961, Woodward 1962), and that Vermonters were no exception (Graffagnino 1977).
Abolitionist speakers were often shouted down in 1830s Vermont, for example, and after very
rough treatment during an 1843 speaking tour, Frederick Douglas remarked that Vermont was
“surprisingly under the influence of the slave power” (Lovejoy 2001, 61). Much of antebellum
Vermonters’ sympathy for blacks “was paternal or designed to make a point, and it was far
overshadowed by the malicious attentions of other white Vermonters” (Roth 1987, 272-273). As
late as the Civil War, Vermont soldiers’ letters home were peppered with negative, even vicious
remarks about African-Americans, often the first they had ever seen (for examples, see Marshall
1999, 5, 142; of course, some soldiers had the opposite view--see Manning 2007). In this
respect, Vermont was no different from other states that were soon to become hotbeds of
Republican sentiment. Both Wisconsin in 1847 and Michigan in 1850 voted down
enfranchisement of blacks by 65% or more (Smith 1897, 332-335).
Vermonters had lived with Southern slavery from the time of their entry into the Union, and
without worrying much about it. The Liberty Party received just 319 Vermont votes in the 1840
11
Gregory Sanford reports that some years ago, the Georgia archivist was unable to find a copy of the motion in the
state legislative records, which raises the sad possibility that the story is apocryphal. The original source in Vermont
historiography appears to be Crockett (1921, 444), which quotes other colorful remarks about Vermont by
antebellum Southerners, but without giving formal citations.
8
presidential election. During the next dozen years of constant agitation, neither Liberty nor Free
Soil ever came close to winning a statewide Vermont election.
Like other northerners, what Vermonters opposed was not slavery, but the Slave Power (Davis
1969; Gara 1969; Richards 2000). Antipathy toward the South had early roots in Vermont.
Southerners opposed Vermont statehood in the late eighteenth century, since it would add two
additional anti-slavery senators (Richards 2000, 46). Vermont sent unofficial delegates and
observers to the Hartford Convention during the War of 1812, a convocation called to consider
New England secession as a response to an economically inconvenient war conducted by a
Virginian president, “Mr. Madison’s war” (Horsman 1969, 211-214; Sherman et al. 2004, 163164).
Thus what gave anti-Southern outbursts resonance was not the depth of positive feelings toward
the slaves themselves, but rather the impact, or imagined impact, of the South on the economic
fortunes of Vermonters. Initially, the focus was the tariff, which was, apart from slavery, the
central issue in American politics throughout most of the 19th century. The federal government
drew the bulk of its revenues from the tariff, so that debates about the level of duties were also a
debate about the size of government and its role in the domestic economy. When times were
bad, out-parties blamed the state of the economy on the in-party’s tariff policies (Taussig 1889;
Stanwood 1903; Hofstadter 1938; Bolt 2009).
In Vermont, tariffs were closely related to the sheep-growing industry. George Washington at
one point owned 800 sheep, and he once wrote in a letter that he had “no doubt as to the good
policy of increasing the number of sheep in every State” (Carman 1892, 54, 57). Vermont took
him at his word. Beginning in the late 1820s, a “sheep mania” overtook the state. By 1836,
Vermont had one million sheep; by 1840, the state contained just under 1.7 million head, nearly
six per capita. Addison County had eleven sheep for every man, woman, and child.12 Other
New England states joined the sheep-raising industry, but no other state had the same density of
the wooly creatures. (For overviews of the wool industry in this period, see Wright 1910; Cole
1926; Wilson 1935; Wilson 1936). Vermont’s governor remarked in his annual message of
1842, “Our citizens have become so dependent upon the growing of wool that this article may be
said to be the staple of the state” (Wilson 1936, 81).
Unfortunately for Vermonters, competition from British woolens was stiff. Thus Vermonters all
over the state had a special reason to care about the tariff on wool. This uniformity of economic
interest makes it easier to assess economic effects on politics in Vermont than in virtually any
other states in this period.
Alexander Hamilton as Secretary of the Treasury had reported to Congress as early as 1791 to
encourage a tariff on imported wool and other products to help support American industry
(Carman 1892, 119-120). Tariff agitation began in earnest in the mid-1820s, resulting in the
Tariff of 1828--the “Tariff of Abominations” to its opponents (Wright 1910, 47-51). It was
modified slightly by the Tariff of 1832.
12
Sheep counts are taken from the U.S. Agricultural Census of 1840. See also Benton and Barry (1837) for 1836
figures. The two county-level counts correlate very strongly (r = .99).
9
The South was an exporting area, and it had no interest in paying duties on imports, which it
regarded as a subsidy to the North and to New England in particular.13 In addition, when
American tariffs were high, the British retaliated by buying less cotton, further damaging the
South. Feelings ran high. Newspapers and books were filled with dramatic essays condemning
the tariff and its Northern supporters (notably, Turnbull 1827) . It is sometimes forgotten that
John C. Calhoun’s development of nullification theory was directed at the 1828 tariff. His
arguments on behalf of nullification mention only the tariff, not slavery. Tensions rose high
enough that in November of 1832, South Carolina’s special Nullification Convention declared
the Tariffs of 1832 and 1828 unconstitutional. South Carolina came close to mobilizing troops
over the issue and seceding (Freehling 1965). Nor were Northern interests in the tariff merely
perfunctory: “The debates over the tariff were not trivial or subsidiary to northerners, but went
to the heart of northern concerns over the nation’s future” (Grant 2000, 44).
The tariff also funded “internal improvements” such as roads and canals. The South had little
need of either, while the Northeast needed tariffs and the “Northwest” (that is, what is now the
upper Midwest) needed internal improvements. The parties divided. Whigs favored tariffs and
improvements, while Democrats opposed. In the early antebellum period, party lines held and
were usually strong enough to overcome sectional forces (Silbey 1985, chap. 3). But with time,
the sectional division over economic policy came to line up with attitudes toward slavery, with
fateful consequences.
Vermont knew where its economic interests lay. Its newspapers in this period are filled with
intense discussions of tariff questions. By 1832, early in the sheep mania, the correlation of
county Democratic vote with sheep per capita was already -.4. The correlation grew to -.6 by
1836 and 1840. (The Democratic vote is used because of the third-party vote in this period, and
because the Democrats held the presidency from 1828-1840.) Figure 2 gives the relationship for
1840, a high turnout election more representative of Vermont sentiment than the earlier years. In
the wake of the Panic of 1837, wool prices had fallen.14 No part of the state was very
enthusiastic about the Democrats, but their tariff policies were blamed for declining wool prices,
so that Democrats became hopelessly uncompetitive in the counties most reliant on sheep.15 Put
the other way, the more sheep, the better the pro-tariff Whigs did at the polls.
13
Of course, not everyone in the North favored tariffs, and not everyone in the South opposed them. Merchants
engaged in north-south trade were particularly resistant to sectional feelings. See Freehling (1965, 274) on
Charleston, and O’Connor (1968, 166-167) on Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.
14
Wool prices are taken from Wright (1910, 347-349). Connor (1921, 193-194) extends the series further into the
twentieth century. I have followed other authors in quoting medium grade prices to illustrate changing price levels,
as in Taussig (1889, 152) and in the ditty on the following page. U.S. production was confined mostly to middle and
lower grades because it was not competitive with the British on higher grades (Taussig 1889, 144-152; Cole 1926,
vol. 1, 300-302). Adams (1944, 140-144) gives wool prices in index numbers and in purchasing power indices, but
they do not seem to track nominal prices closely, and I have chosen to set them aside. He also gives tariff rates on
wool at various time periods (p. 155). To measure general economic conditions, antebellum wholesale prices are
used. They are much more volatile than in the current era, and they track the Panics of 1837 and 1857, as well as
newspaper reports of other hard times. A weighted index of wholesale price levels in this period appears in Smith
and Cole (1935, 158, 167).
15
Of course, some towns were exceptions. For example, Bristol is located near the center of sheep-raising, fervently
pro-Whig Addison County, but against the mountains, giving it a waterfall. It had mills and forges from its early
days (Potash 1991, 104; Munsill 2009, 103-115), and it clung to the Democrats through most of the antebellum
period.
10
20
30
40
50
Vermont 1840 County Presidential Vote vs. Sheep Populations
4
6
8
sheep per capita 1840
10
12
Figure 2.
The 1840 election brought the Whigs to power (“Tippecanoe and Tyler, too”), and with them
went the hopes of Vermonters for better wool prices. “No group celebrated Harrison’s victory
more optimistically than Vermont’s sheep farmers. They hoped to be rewarded for their votes
with tariff relief” (Sherman et al. 2004, 199). However, the 1833 Compromise Tariff Act,
arranged by Calhoun and Kentucky Senator Henry Clay, had replaced the Tariff of 1828. It had
a sunset clause that led to rapidly declining rates in 1842. For that or other reasons, wool prices
fell dramatically. The Whigs raised rates again in 1842 over Democratic opposition, but
recovery was slow. Sometime in this period, John Saxe (ca. 1841) of Burlington, a Democratic
party activist, wrote “The Whig’s Lament”:
In old Vermont-mont-mont
We’re in a dreadful state.
Instead of fifty cents for wool
We can’t get thirty eight.
They promised if we’ed vote for Tip
That wool would surely rise;
But all they’ve done with wool has been
To pull it o’er our eyes.
11
By 1844, only a weak recovery had taken place, and on average, Vermont moved a few
percentage points against the incumbent administration and toward the Democrats, particularly in
counties with relatively few sheep. Only in two counties did voters continue to shed Democratic
votes. (See Figure 3.) Addison County, buried in sheep and evangelical fervor (Potash 1991),
did so. Strongly abolitionist Lamoille also dropped a bit in its support for the Democrats for
reasons unrelated to wool.16
-2
0
2
4
6
Vermount Counties Presidential Vote Change, 1840 to 1844
-4
Lamoille
4
6
8
sheep per capita 1840
10
12
Figure 3.
As Figure 3 shows, the changes in 1844 voting strengthened the already strong relationship
between sheep densities and presidential voting into even closer alignment in Vermont. (The
zero-order county-level correlation with the 1844 Democratic vote is -.7, higher than ever before;
graph not shown.) Thus by 1844, Vermont had become a Whig state where the Democrats were
competitive only in about half the counties. Voting patterns were closely tied, not to slavery
issues, but to the presence of sheep and their need for tariff protection.17
Lamoille was the boyhood home and frequent adult residence of Joseph Poland, the editor of the state’s leading
abolitionist newspaper from 1840-1844, which was published in Lamoille (Ullery 1894, 321-322). In consequence,
Lamoille was the only county where the Liberty Party ran well in 1844 (25%), taking substantial votes from the
Whigs and a few percentage points from the Democrats as well. No other county gave the Liberty Party as much as
11%.
17
In a brief cross-sectional comparison of a few counties in 1844, Benson (1961, 158-159) doubts this association
for New York State. I hope to take a closer look at those counties over time in a subsequent draft. Freehling (1965)
16
12
The 1848 Election and After
In 1848, the two principal parties nominated candidates opposed to New England interests. The
incumbent Democrats had passed the Walker Tariff in 1846, reducing rates drastically. The new
Democratic candidate, Lewis Cass of Michigan, was not only a foe of tariffs, but also an avowed
opponent of the Wilmot Proviso, the never-passed bill to ban slavery from the territories
acquired in the Mexican War. The Whig candidate, Zachary Taylor, was a substantial slave
owner. Under Democratic president James Polk, the economy was slipping badly, and sheep
prices were as low as they had been after the expiration of the Tariff of 1833. Sheep in Vermont
dropped from almost 1.7 million in 1840 to about 1 million in 1850, as farmers sold their flocks.
“It appeared more obvious to Vermonters than it has to subsequent generations of economists
that the Democratic tariff policy had destroyed the state’s wool industry and denied farmers their
well-deserved prosperity” (Hand 2002, 4). The slave-owning Whig candidate was precisely the
sort of man who had blocked tariffs in the past. Thus there was every reason to look for an
alternative to the two main parties. New Yorker and former Democratic president Martin Van
Buren, running as the candidate of the Free Soil Party, provided just that.
At the level of party leaders, Free Soil was an amalgam of former Liberty Party members plus
disaffected Whigs and Democrats. (In New York, it was more closely related to factional
disputes between “Hunkers” and “Barnburners.”) In addition to opposing slavery, the party
platform endorsed internal improvements and a “moderate” tariff to support them.
In spite of being a new party, Free Soil ran well in Vermont. Votes for the party were
remarkably little related to former party shares.18 (See Figure 4.) They were also unrelated to
sheep densities, just as Liberty Party votes had been. However, votes for the two abolitionist
parties were closely related to each other in Vermont, more so than one might expect from their
very different origins and the struggles of Liberty activists to see Van Buren as one of their own
(Sewell 1976, chap. 7). (See Figure 5.)
argues that the tariff issue mattered for Southerners, but that (to oversimplify his argument) the debate was really
about slavery. Among other evidence, he cites a private letter from Calhoun in 1830 making that point (p. 257).
However, without denying that farsighted people saw a connection between the tariff and slavery, nor that it formed
a useful rhetorical point (“You wait: The tariff is just the beginning.”), I find it difficult to read and dismiss as
window-dressing the very lengthy discussions and elaborate calculations about the tariff in Southern writers at this
period, for example, Turnbull (1827). Calhoun himself in his well known and lengthy Senate “speech on the force
bill” on 15 February 1833 makes no mention of slavery (Cheek 2003, 411-441). Nor is that surprising: Slavery
faced no serious threats in the 1830s. Parallel skepticisms apply to Anbinder’s (1992) argument that the KnowNothings were often attractive due to their subsidiary stands on temperance or slavery rather than to what they spent
nearly all their energy on--their shrill anti-Catholicism. However, all these claims deserve careful consideration, and
their impact on mass electorates seems researchable using election returns.
18
The same is true for the Whigs. The Democrats lost between 10 and 20 percentage points almost everywhere; the
Whigs lost between 3 and 10 percentage points almost everywhere. The pattern is closer to a uniform swing against
both parties than to the conventional ecological regression assumption, in which each old party’s defection rate to a
new party is constant across geographic units.
13
10
20
30
40
50
Vermont Counties 1848 Free Soil vs. 1844 Democrat
20
30
40
1844 Democratic vote
50
Figure 4.
If the Free Soil vote is not related to sheep and tariffs, how is a voting pattern of this kind to be
interpreted? The simplest interpretation is sectionalism. By 1848, the earlier disputes over
economics had become intensified by the Mexican War and the acquisition of new territory.
Whether those territories were slave or free would help determine the economic prospects of the
many Vermont emigrants in this period. It would also tilt the balance of power in Washington
(Nichols 1961). Shrill criticism of all kinds, including fantasies of sexual immorality, became
more common North and South, and sectional nationalism increased. Emerging from the tariff
debates of the 1830s, the perceived threats spread to include Northern and Southern livelihoods
(Owsley 1941; Simms 1942, chap. 7; Davis 1969; Grant 2000, 42, 46). Southern slaveholders
needed slavery for their personal incomes, white non-slaveholders enjoyed racial dominance, and
all white Southerners feared slave revolts (Wish 1939; Channing 1974, chap. 1). Northerners
unaffected by tariffs saw in slavery a threat to “free labor” and the white working man (Foner
1970). Newspapers on each side fanned the flames (Grant 2000, chap. 3; Ratner and Teeter
2003). On these issues, a great many people in Vermont and in the North were on the same side.
The result in Vermont was a quasi-uniform swing away from the two main parties and toward a
purely sectional party that represented their interests.
14
10
20
30
40
50
Vermont Counties 1848 Free Soil vs. 1844 Liberty
0
5
10
15
1844 Liberty vote
20
25
Figure 5.
Thus by 1848, there were two almost orthogonal forces at work in Vermont politics, each
tending to the same outcome. The first was the tariff, the second was sectionalism. Both
represented economic threats rather than anti-slavery impulses, as election participation shows.
For in 1840 and 1844, when the central issues were economic, Vermont’s turnout was 73% and
67%.19 In 1848, 1852, and 1856, when the slavery issue was central, turnout fell to 63%, 56%,
and 64%, respectively. And in the critical election of 1860, with slavery debate at a fever pitch,
just 56% of Vermont voters got to the polls, a full 17 percentage points fewer than in 1840
(Gienapp 1982, 18-19). Slavery and sectionalism simply did not engage the Vermont citizenry
the way the tariff had.
In 1852, national politics calmed somewhat in the wake of the Compromise of 1850. In
Vermont, the Free Soil vote fell off. The Democrats remained damaged by repeated association
with tariffs and hard times. Hence the Whigs carried Vermont by a large margin. Nationwide,
the Democrats won the presidency with sectional divisions relatively weak.
The calm was soon shattered. Wool prices took another plunge in 1854, focusing Vermont’s
attention on the tariff and on sectional threats. Disputes over slavery weakened the Whigs’
cohesion as a national party, as did the Know-Nothing surge in many states. “Bleeding Kansas”
and the Kansas-Nebraska Act re-opened sectional wounds. The idea of a “North” began to gain
19
Texas annexation and the question of whether it would be slave or free also figured in the 1844 election. But
tariffs mattered in a way that slavery did not. Vermonters had no difficulty choosing Henry Clay, a slaveholder and
author of “the American system” of high tariffs (55%) in place of the single-issue abolitionist candidate of the
Liberty Party, James Birney (8%).
15
strength in 1854 as Northern politicians effectively invoked Northern nationalism and read the
South out of the civilized world (Grant 2000, chap 6).
In July of 1854, Vermont became one of the first states to create a Republican party on a
platform of anti-slavery, temperance, strong tariffs, and internal improvements (Burlington Free
Press 1854). They swept to victory in the gubernatorial race in the fall as the Whigs and KnowNothings collapsed and were absorbed into the party. By the 1856 presidential election, the
realignment had happened in Vermont. In spite of the horrors of the Panic of 1857, which
mattered mightily elsewhere (Huston 1987; Egnal 2009, 238-246), there was no subsequent
increase in Vermont GOP percentages in the presidential races of 1860, 1864, 1868, or 1872.20
65
70
75
80
85
Vermont Counties 1860 GOP vs. 1852 Whig + Free Soil
50
60
70
1852 Whig plus Free Soil vote
80
90
Figure 6.
In most Vermont counties, the Republican vote in 1860 was closely approximated by the sum of
the 1852 votes for the Whigs (51%) and Free Soil vote (20%). (See Figure 6.) Only in formerly
more Democratic counties did the Republicans gain. Thus the Republicans simply incorporated
the two electoral forces that dominate this period of Vermont politics, the tariff constituency and
the sectional-antagonism constituency. Both continued to matter.21 Both were economic
concerns at base, but not in a reductionist way. Accurately or not, perceptions of slavery and its
20
In the five presidential elections from 1856 to 1872, GOP votes shares in Vermont were 78%, 76%, 76%, 79%.,
and 78%.
21
From 1856 to 1860, Democratic vote shares gained proportionately by more than 25% in just two Vermont
counties—Rutland and Addison, the two counties with the most sheep. Wool prices were up in 1860 compared to
the Panic of 1857 period and its aftermath, and the Democrats were in office. By contrast, the economy as a whole
was somewhat down from the two preceding years.
16
future sharpened the economic threats to each side in a way nothing else could have.
Exacerbated by the Mexican War and given cultural resonance by the spiral of mutual
antagonism, New England moralism, and Southern haughtiness and fear, sectional feelings grew
at the expense of loyalty to the Union. When a president was elected on a purely sectional
platform and with a purely sectional vote in the winter of 1860-61, secession and war followed.
Conclusion
In what sense was the sheep mania responsible for Vermont’s long love affair with the
Republican party? In one sense, the answer is: “Not at all.” In the absence of slavery, sectional
tensions would never have reached the level they did, and there would never have been a
Republican party.
Yet sheep and tariffs played a central role. Most Northerners cared little about slavery or the
slaves. Yes, they regretted the institution, but they were busy with other things. It was instead
the bitter tariff battles that set off the spiral of hostility and continued to give it meaning.
Calhoun saw the danger early. He stated in his 1831 Fort Hill Address: “The Tariff has placed
the sections…in deep and dangerous conflict” (Cheek 2003, 329). Thirty years later, at the
Republican convention in 1860, the loudest cheers for a platform plank came when the tariff
commitment was read (Potter 1976, 423). As Horace Greeley phrased it, an “Anti-Slavery man
per se cannot be elected; but a Tariff, River and Harbor, Pacific Railroad, Free Homestead man,
may succeed although he is Anti-Slavery” (Huston 1987, 237). Tariffs, homesteads, and internal
improvements mattered.
Slavery entered because in such conflicts, stereotypes of the enemy flourish, and violence may
result if the stakes seem high enough (Allport 1954; Newcomb et al. 1965, 451; Kinder and
Kam 2009) Beginning in the 1830s, slavery or its absence increasingly become the marker for
friend and foe. The opposing economic interests were not just mistaken; they were immoral.
Rhetoric on both sides escalated over the next decades, and the new territories broadened the
conflict to “all of us” against “all of them” (Owsley 1941; Craven 1953).22
Lines hardened, leading by the late 1850s to violence in Kansas and at Harpers Ferry. It is hard
to believe that most Northerners would have cared seriously whether distant Kansas was slave or
free had not Southern economic interests threatened them directly over the tariff in the
beginning. The same Slave Power opponents then confronted the North in the sectional
controversies over who was to control the federal government and have better opportunities in
the territories. Thus tariff disputes and territorial acquisition made slavery relevant politically,
and once slavery attitudes and economic interests were combined in both North and South,
sectionalism followed.
Republicans simply took advantage of the electoral opportunity. The “free labor” ideology of
the Republicans appealed to Northern racism while it gave moral justification to the antagonism
of Northern business interests toward the South. Slavery became a genuine political issue in the
22
One need not soft-pedal the horrors of slavery, as Owsley and Craven are sometimes inclined to do, to recognize
that Northern abolitionists and Southern “fire-eaters” were locked into a shrill war of words.
17
minds of Northerners, and it had a genuine independent impact. But its origins owed more to
Northerners’ economic interests than to their moral codes.23 Tariffs and internal improvements
did not create abolitionism, but they gave it the force at the polls that it had long been unable to
create on its own.
Thus the cause of the Republican surge was neither economics alone nor slavery alone. Neither
would have had dramatic impact by itself. Without slavery, the tariff battles and disputes over
internal improvements were serious economic disputes, but not moral issues or life-threatening
challenges. Tariffs do not cause civil wars. That has led some to dismiss economic bases for the
war. At the same time, slavery in the absence of the tariff battle was a distant moral problem
largely irrelevant to most Northerners’ daily life. That has led others to dismiss the North’s
moral self-justifications as hypocrisy disguising their economic interests. Neither of these onesided arguments does full justice to the dynamic of antebellum politics. It was the joint presence
of tariffs and slavery that led to stereotyping, spiraling hostility and fear, Republican victory, and
civil war.
The last word may be left to that thoughtful and appealing Southern diarist, Mary Chestnut of
South Carolina. Anti-slavery but loyal to the South, she wrote in the early days of the war (June
28, 1861):
I think incompatibility of temper began when it was made plain to us that we get
all the opprobrium of slavery and they all the money there was in it—with their
tariff. (Woodward 1981, 84).
23
Some historians dispute this point, of course. Freehling (1965) argues that the tariff issue mattered for
Southerners, but that (to oversimplify his argument) the debate was really about slavery. He cites a private letter
from Calhoun in 1830 making that point (p. 257). Without denying that farsighted people saw a connection and that
it formed a useful rhetorical point (“You wait: The tariff is just the beginning.”), I find it difficult to read and dismiss
as window-dressing the very lengthy discussions and elaborate calculations about the tariff in Southern writers at
this period, for example, Turnbull (1827). Calhoun himself in his well known and lengthy Senate “speech on the
force bill” on 15 February 1833 makes no mention of slavery (Cheek 2003, 411-441). Nor is that surprising:
Slavery faced no serious threats in the 1830s. For similar reasons, I am skeptical of Anbinder’s (1992) argument
that the Know-Nothings were more attractive for their subsidiary stands on temperance or slavery rather than for
what they spent nearly all their energy on--their shrill anti-Catholicism. However, all these claims deserve careful
consideration, and their relevance to mass electorates seems researchable using election returns.
18
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