Voting for Minor Parties in the Antebellum Midwest Ray M. Shortridge" During the two decades preceeding the Civil War, three important minor parties contested presidential elections in the Midwest. These parties raised issues which the major parties, the Democrats and Whigs, chose to ignore. Two of the minor parties, the Liberty party and the Free Soil party, injected antislaveryism into presidential elections in 1844, 1848, and 1852; the third, the American party, campaigned on nativist principles in 1856. Although the Democrats and Whigs were strongly entrenched in the region, the minor parties exerted significant influence in midwestern politics. Midwesterners played important roles in the development of antislavery doc- trines and in the organization of the antislavery parties.' The electorate in the region responded to these efforts by the lead- ers: from 2.2 percent to 7.6 percent of the estimated eligible electorate in the Midwest voted for the Liberty or Free Soil parties in the presidential elections from 1844 to 1852.2 Al- though the major strength of the nativist Know Nothing movement lay elsewhere, Know Nothing or American party candidates garnered votes from 6.9 percent of the Midwest's estimated electorate in 1856. Moreover, in 1860 both the anti- * Ray M. Shortridge is a managing partner of Shortridge Farms, Medora, Indiana, and adjunct assistant professor of political science, University of Louisville. He wishes to acknowledge the helpful criticism of Jerome Clubb, Paul Kleppner, and Erik Austin. For example see Dwight L. Dumond, Antislavery: The Crusade for Free- dom in America (Ann Arbor, 1961); Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York, 1970), 73-102. 2The number of voters was obtained from Walter Dean Burnham, Presi- dential Ballots, 1836-1892 (Baltimore, 1955). The eligible electorate consists of the white adult males aged twenty or more enumerated in the United States Census for 1840, 1850, and 1860. Estimates for intercensus years are computed by linear interpolation. 118 Indiana Magazine of History slavery people and the nativists were crucial groups within the Republican party’s winning electoral ~oalition.~ Political histories have dealt with the nuances of the ideologies propounded by these minor parties, painstakingly traced the maneuverings of the leaders, and offered intriguing explanations for the social, economic, and cultural pressures underlying their appearance. By and large, however, little is known about the place of the minor party in the flow of the vote from one election to another. Did the minor party draw its support disproportionately from one or the other of the major parties, or did it mobilize its voters from among those who hitherto had not voted? And, what choices did these voters make when the third party’s organization ultimately collapsed? A close inspection of the midwestern electoral support for these three minor parties helps clarify the role they played in the antebellum electoral system. Answering these questions entails following the flow of the minor party vote from one presidential election to another. Ideally, one would wish to employ information regarding the choices made by the individual voters in successive elections and the level of turnout attained by the parties in the geographic units within which the individuals resided. Incorporat- ing both levels of data enables the analysis to gauge the influ- ence of both individual and group level effects on voting for a third party.* Unfortunately, the full array of data required for a multilevel analysis is not available for the antebellum period. The group level voting information is readily found, aggregated at the county level. The deficiency lies in the absence of records indicating the voting choices made by individual voters. A few such records survive in the form of poll books which contain the publicly announced choice of each voter. Voting by ballot su- perseded viva voce voting, however, and, by the 1840s, the use of poll books was no longer a common practice in the Midwest. As a consequence, an inquiry into the flow of the vote for the midwestern electorate must rest solely upon an examination of the aggregate election data. This study draws upon the election data aggregated at the county level for all of the counties in the four most populous 3Ray M. Shortridge, “The Voter Realignment in the Midwest during the 1850’s,” American Politics Quarterly, IV (April, 1976), 215, 218-22. Gudmund R. Iversen, “Contingency Tables without Cell Entries” (mimeo- graphed, University of Michigan, 1970); Lawrence Hugh Boyd, Jr., “Multiple Level Analysis with Complete and Incomplete Data” (Ph.D. dissertation, De- partment of Political Science, University of Michigan, 1971). Voting for Minor Parties 119 states in the Midwest-Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. About three hundred counties are used in the analysis, a num- ber large enough to ensure that a few cases with extraordinary values do not unduly influence the estimates. The actual vari- ables consist of the proportion of the estimated eligible elector- ate which voted for each party-called party turnout-and the proportion which did not vote in the presidential elections from 1840 to 1860. Party turnout was computed by dividing the number of votes cast for a party by the number of eligible voters estimated to have been living in a county during the election. Public records report the number of ballots cast for each party in an election, but they do not contain a count for the size of the eligible voting population. Consequently, the number of white adult males enumerated by the federal census was used as the estimate for the eligible voting population for the census years, with the number for intercensus years calcu- lated by linear interp~lation.~ Part of the analysis infers individual level patterns from aggregate level information and, in so doing, encounters the cross-level inference problem called the “ecological fallacy.” The ecological fallacy entails assuming that the zero-order correla- tion calculated for a distribution of geographic or other units along two variables is an accurate measure of the association between the variables among the individuals within the units6 Several procedures for obtaining less specious estimates have been posited;’ this study employs the coefficients obtained by the “ecological regression” procedure to estimate the individual level patterns.s For example, a party turnout variable is re- 5The data utilized in the analysis were made available in part by the Inter-university Consortium for Political Research. The Consortium bears no responsibility for either the analysis or the interpretations presented here. 6 W. S. Robinson, “Ecological Correlations and the Behavior of Individuals,” American Sociological Review, XV (June, 1950), 351-57;Hayward R. Alker, Jr., Mathematics and Politics (London, 1969), 101-106. ‘Otis Dudley Duncan and Beverly Davis, “An Alternative to Ecological Correlation,” American Sociological Review, XVIII (December, 1953), 665-66; Philip E. Converse, “Survey Research and the Decoding of Patterns in Ecologi- cal Data,” in Quantitative Ecological Analysis in the Social Sciences, edited by Mattei Dogan and Stein Rokkan (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), 459-85. 8 Leo A. Goodman, “Ecological Regressions and the Behavior of Individu- als,” American Sociological Review, XVIII (December, 1953), 663-64;Leo A. Goodman, “Some Alternatives to Ecological Correlation,” American Journal of Sociology, LXIV (May, 1959), 610-25;J. Morgan Kousser, “Ecological Regres- sion and the Analysis of Past Politics,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History (Autumn, 19731, 237-62. FIGURE A Illustrations of Aggregate Level Effects* 1. Positive Group Level Effect 0.00 I WO 100% 2. Negative Group Level Effect l.OO I 0.00 I 0% 1owc 3. Interactive Group Level Effect 0.00 I WO 100% *Horizontal Axis-Turnout Level for Party X in t, Vertical Axis-Probability of Voting for Party Y in tz -X-Group Casting Party X Ballots in t, X-Group not Casting Party X Ballots in tl Voting for Minor Parties 121 gressed upon the turnout variable for a party in the preceeding election. Equation (1) presents this regression model: (1) P = b, + bxj + bfTIy + Ej - Y is a party’s turnout level for a presidential contest in the j-th county; b, is the intercept; be is the regression coefficient for x, a party’s turnout in the j-th county for the preceeding election; bf is the coefficient for X2,the square of the party’s turnout for the preceeding election in the j-th county; and E is the residual. An ecological regression, however, cannot obtain separate measures for the aggregate and individual level effects. The individual level effect is the difference in the likelihood of voting for party Y between those who voted for party X in the previous contest and those who did not (the difference between the probabilities X and TI in Figure A). The aggregate level effect is the impact of the strength of the vote for party X in a county on the likelihood of voting for party Y in the following campaign. This effect could be positive (Figure AJ, or negative (Figure A2), or interactive (Figure AJ. The last possibility, interaction, can be tested for by introducing an exponential term into the regression, such as w2 in equation (1). A non- differential aggregate or group level effect, such as those de- picted in Figures A, and A2, cannot be directly detected by a coefficient in the equation. One can, however, infer the pres- ence of a group level effect when the ecological regression estimates exceed unity-that is, when more than 100 percent of those voting for X are estimated to have also voted for Y in the subsequent ele~tion.~These sorts of statistical evidence provide clues to the character of the subtle, aggregate level pressures at work influencing voter choice.