The Virgin Vote: Young Americans in the Age of Popular Politics
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The Virgin Vote: Young Americans in the Age of Popular Politics Jon Grinspan Philadelphia, Pennsylvania M.A. History, University of Virginia, 2012 B.A. Liberal Arts, Sarah Lawrence College, 2006 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Corcoran Department of History University of Virginia August, 2013 Abstract Young people played a central role in nineteenth-century American democracy. From 1840 to 1900, young Americans joined in a boisterous political culture, to guide their nation and announce their identities. Women, minorities, and underage males – usually banned from voting – also followed politics closely, ratcheting up excitement. In an age of extreme partisanship and close elections, political parties sought young men’s “virgin votes,” making voting the central rite of passage of American masculinity. Each stage of youth, from childhood through young adulthood, is explained in a successive chapter, demonstrating the building involvement in public democracy as Americans aged. Finally, when young people lost interest in politics in the 1890s, overall turnout dropped precipitously. This dissertation uses accounts of children, adolescents, first-time voters, and politicians to explore the personal and structural ways young people sustained nineteenth-century democracy. 1 Table of Contents Introduction: Democracy out of Doors 2 Chapter One: Violent Little Partisans 36 Chapter Two: The Go-Ahead Principle 69 Chapter Three: My Virgin Vote 104 Chapter Four: How Easily Persuaded I am 139 Chapter Five: Every One is Fifty 172 Conclusion: Things ain’t what they used to be 208 Appendices 241 Acknowledgments 247 Bibliography 249 Clockwise from top left: Oscar Lawrence Jackson, unknown South Carolina mill girl, Susan Bradford, Mattie Thomas, Uriah Oblinger, and unknown Iowa Wide Awake club member. 2 Introduction Democracy out of Doors The night before he turned twenty, Oscar gave his first big speech. His friends called him up before the rural Ohio meetinghouse. Oscar starred out at the packed pews, crowded with fidgeting boys, respectable ladies and old farmers. He felt embarrassed by the attention. A stranger smiled. Someone called his name. Warmed by the support, Oscar launched into his talk on the coming election. He built momentum, stomping the low stage, endorsing Abe Lincoln, and mocking the Democratic Party. He went on like that for nearly two hours. When the skinny nineteen-year-old schoolteacher was through, the crowd boiled over with applause.1 Five days later Oscar gave his second talk, this time shouting over a raucous outdoor assembly, his lean frame swaying on the back of a wagon. His handsome face – with its falcon nose, curious eyes, and frame of floppy brown hair – bobbed above the throng. Oscar hollered with more confidence this time, his rhetoric arcing over the roar of five hundred cheering partisans. No longer embarrassed, he went home and bragged, in his usually self-effacing diary, that his sudden fame tickled his vanity.2 Before these speeches Oscar was nothing special. In fact, he was strikingly ordinary, as statistically average as an American could be. He stood 5’8” and weighed 1 Oscar Lawrence Jackson, The Colonel’s Diary; Journals kept Before and During the Civil War, Ed. David P. Jackson, (Sharon, PA: Privately Published, 1922), 27-8. 2 Ibid., 28, 27. 3 135 pounds, typical for a northern man in 1860.3 He lived in south-central Ohio, at the dead center of U.S. population, according to the Census Bureau.4 And he was nineteenth years old, going on twenty, exactly average for an American in 1860.5 Oscar meandered into the center of American life. He left his Pennsylvania home a few years earlier, after caring for his consumptive mother. When she died, he packed a carpetbag with a diary, a bible, and a bowie knife, and set off on an aimless “wander year.”6 He tramped across Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Ohio, lodging with strangers, drinking and dancing with local youths, and keeping track of which towns had the prettiest young ladies.7 Oscar finally settled in Hocking County, Ohio, where he found work teaching school. Someone invited him to join the debating society in town, made up of a mix of youths and grown men. Soon he was there almost every night, arguing about slavery, temperance, or women’s rights. At one meeting he and an Abolitionist preacher debated whether George Washington was in hell for owning slaves. Oscar loved to argue, with a sometimes entertaining, sometimes irritating faith in his own unbending logic. His passion won the attention of well-connected local Republicans, who pushed him forward 3 Jackson, The Colonel’s Diary, 9; Robert William Fogel, Without Consent of Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery, (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1989), 141. 4 United States Census Bureau, “Mean Center of Population for the United States: 1790 to 2010,” Last modified April 19, 2013, http://www.census.gov/geo/reference/pdfs/cenpop2010/centerpop_mean2010.pdf. 5 Michael R. Haines and Richard H. Steckel, A Population History of North America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 702-4. Oscar was also white, Protestant, of Scotch and English descent, a northerner, and neither wealthy nor poor. He fit in with the majority of Americans in most categories. See Appendix One. 6 Jackson, The Colonel’s Diary, 9-10. 7 Ibid., 9-17. 4 as a “boy orator” in the heated 1860 race, calling him up before meetinghouses and town squares.8 Each exhilarating speech dragged Oscar deeper into the presidential campaign. One October day, Republicans organized the largest gathering their sparsely populated region had ever seen. Seven thousand poured into the small town of Logan, Ohio, from their villages dotting the foothills of the ebbing Appalachians. Squads of beaming young ladies, dressed in blue shirtwaists and red and white striped skirts, rode in on horseback. They mingled with companies of young men in shimmering black capes and martial caps, members of a new Republican club called the Wide Awakes. All sat at long tables to feast on four roasted bulls, their smoky meat garnet from a long night over wood coals, as well as two hundred chickens, loaves of dense white bread, pickles, relishes, jams, and two thousand homemade pies.9 As night fell, the crowd lit torches and the speeches began. Oscar gave a talk. Not his best, he felt, but certainly to the biggest crowd he had ever addressed.10 He was more excited about the speaker he followed. The main attraction that night was David Kellogg Cartter, a forty-eight-year-old former congressman credited with contributing the deciding vote at the Republican convention making Abraham Lincoln the party’s nominee.11 8 Jackson, The Colonel’s Diary, 16, 18-20, 34-36. For a useful study of debating and literary societies and their impact on young Americans’ place in public discourse, see Carolyn Eastman, A Nation of Speechifiers, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 9 “Great Republicans Barbeque at Logan,” Ohio State Journal, October 9, 1860; Jackson, The Colonel’s Diary, 32, 34. 10 Ibid., 34. 11 “Great Republicans Barbeque at Logan,” Ohio State Journal, October 9, 1860. Though the crowds in Logan believed that Cartter’s vote “nominated Mr. Lincoln,” in fact he only 5 How was it that Oscar Lawrence Jackson, too young to vote, new in town, with little money, few connections, and a spotty education, shared the stage with this kingmaker? Why was it that none of the thousands assembled seemed to think the presence of this boy orator at all unusual?12 So many aspects of Oscar’s life – his height, his region, and his age – were average, but was his political engagement was just as ordinary? Was Oscar Lawrence Jackson just another ambitious, partisan young American, striving and shouting in an age of popular politics? As the speeches ended, rockets illuminated the sky, and Oscar headed home, into the dark October night. He could hardly know how fevered the election would become, or that he might need that bowie knife of his. Rulers of the Land Lit by blazing torches, Oscar Lawrence Jackson seems gifted and precocious – “the smartest, brainiest, wide awake young fellow I ever met” a friend later wrote – but the rally in Logan reveals something else.13 Three other speakers shared the stage with Representative Cartter. Each was roughly Oscar’s age. Those ladies in red, white, and blue were even younger. Most were probably between fifteen and twenty-one, in that age when many young women took enthusiastic interest in politics before slamming into the immovable wall of disenfranchisement. The Wide Awakes marching back and forth were reported the shift of other members of the Ohio delegation to supporting Lincoln. (“The Four Votes,” Chicago Press and Tribune, May 19, 1860). 12 The article on the barbeque mentions Jackson, but does not consider his age worthy of note. “Great Republicans Barbeque at Logan” Ohio State Journal, October 9, 1860; Jackson, The Colonel’s Diary, 32, 34. 13 Ibid., 42. 6 younger still, many members were in their teens and their national leader was just twenty-three.14 When Oscar stood up to give his talk, a sea of youths stared back. Young people fueled America’s democracy at its most popular. From 1840 to 1900, generations dove into politics, providing new votes and making each race feel vital and fresh. An engaging political culture attracted young people, who, “impelled by the vehemence of youth,” amplified their democracy in turn.15 For nineteenth-century Americans, growing up meant going out. Out into the public square, out into boisterous marches and defiant countermarches, and out, for men at age twenty-one, to the voting window.