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Legend tells us that the gerrymander originated in early nineteenth-century Massachusetts. There, the eponymous governor Elbridge Gerry, desperate to maintain his own power, crafted a somewhat bizarrely shaped state senate district that snaked around the western borders of Essex County, site of the Salem witch trials many generations before. Amid these sleepy Boston suburbs, a political coup d’état was silently brewing. Gerry, frustrated by the obstructionism of his Federalist foes, or so the story goes, hatched a plan to rig the results of the commonwealth’s upcoming 1812 elections. Catching wind of the plot, an enterprising New England newspaper editor decided to blow the whistle, lampooning Gerry in the pages of his tabloid. His cartoon depicting Essex County’s meandering, misshapen seat as a somewhat sad-looking salamander went viral and was republished across the nation, in one of the very earliest examples of the political meme.
If Google Ngrams had existed at the time, they would have revealed the portmanteau of “Gerry” and “salamander” taking on a life of its own. The #gerrymander was the trending topic of 1812, appearing in more than eighty newspaper articles nationwide in the nine months following the original reporting by the Boston media. By October, Maryland even had its own version, because Baltimore Democrats sought to replicate Gerry’s playbook in their own state. “So adroitly have the districts been carved in the true Gerrymander style,” wrote the Federal Republican, a Washington, D.C., paper, “that the number of democratic members is in an inverse ratio to the relative number of democrats in the state.” And so, it came to be that this most pernicious of election-meddling tactics was birthed, amid the partisan bickering and postrevolutionary rancor of the early republic. And the rest, or so we’ve been led to believe, is history.
This is the story of the first gerrymander, or at least the one that we’ve always been told about. But what the history books leave out, and what only a deep dive into the colonial records of the early eighteenth century reveals, is that gerrymandering was occurring long before Elbridge Gerry signed his salamander into law. It was happening before the Constitution Gerry had helped to write was ratified, or even conceived of, before the winds of independence had first begun to blow.
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Though the term “gerrymander” would be Elbridge Gerry’s cross to bear, at least in posterity, the 1812 Massachusetts redistricting was by no means the first time in history that political boundaries had been manipulated for political gain. In fact, the true origins of the practice predate Columbus sailing the ocean blue in 1492. These historical antecedents to the American gerrymander may be found in the centuries-long British tradition of the rotten borough.
Rotten boroughs originated in the thirteenth century, when the Parliament of England was created to replace the royal council, or king’s court, that had existed prior to the drafting of the Magna Carta in 1215. Under this new system, each historical borough sent two burgesses, or representatives, to Parliament. But as time went by and populations shifted, the boundaries of these ancient boroughs often no longer corresponded very much to the settlements they purported to represent.
In many areas, borough populations became so small that they contained only a handful of eligible voters, and so a small group of landowners were able to exert a dramatically outsized influence on the workings of Parliament. By corruptly controlling both the voters and the MPs through bribery or patronage, these medieval aristocrats, the one-percenters of their time, maintained their stranglehold on the levers of power. Hence the name, “rotten borough.” One famous example was the populous city of Manchester, one of the powerhouses of the Industrial Revolution. Despite the dramatic expansion of its population, Manchester did not elect its own MPs until the nineteenth century, instead being subsumed by the larger constituency of Lancashire, itself a rotten borough. On the flip side, the historical constituency of Old Sarum, once a bustling cathedral city and site of the famous Old Sarum Cathedral, of which only the foundations survive today, retained the right to elect two members of Parliament, even as the construction of nearby Salisbury Cathedral decimated the town’s population.
By 1831, of the 408 elected members of the House of Commons, 152 were chosen by fewer than 100 voters, and 88 by fewer than 50. After centuries of crippling inequality, the practice finally came to an end with the passage of the Representation of the People Act of 1832, also known as the Reform Act, which pledged to “take effectual Measures for correcting divers Abuses that have long prevailed in the Choice of Members to serve in the Commons House of Parliament.”
But these historical English boroughs, no matter how rotten, do not a gerrymander make. Our working definition of the term requires not only the effect of valuing the votes of some constituents more highly than those of others but also the intentional redrawing of district boundaries themselves. The proper term for electoral inequality that arises from a failure to redraw the electoral lines, rather than a deliberate attempt to manipulate them, is “malapportionment.” Malapportionment was not merely a unique and antiquated feature of the pseudo-gerrymanders of yore. It would also be central to the “creeping gerrymanders” that arose in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, where numerical inequality came about not through the overt redrawing of boundaries for political advantage but from the unwillingness to redraw those lines in response to changes in district populations. Such creeping gerrymanders formed the basis of the very first legal challenges to redistricting that played out before the Supreme Court during the reapportionment revolution of the 1960s, and so they will be discussed in greater detail in later chapters. And while the quest to discover the first uniquely American gerrymander will now take us across the pond, it turns out that we’re not quite done with the British just yet.
“I’ll slit his nose, crop his ears, and lay him in irons!” exclaimed the Governor, as he hammered away at the ornate front doorway of the Chief Justice’s Edenton home. “I want satisfaction of you, come out and give it to me!” But the Chief Justice, himself a veteran explorer who had survived more than his fair share of standoffs during his many expeditions into hostile Indian territory, would not be intimidated. The door remained firmly closed.
The year was 1724, and His Excellency George Burrington, only recently arrived in the colonies from England—the recipient of a royal commission from the lords proprietors that appointed him the third governor of the Province of North Carolina—was on the warpath. Burrington’s short tenure as governor had been extremely eventful. He had a reputation, according to a colorful 1896 biography by Marshall De Lancey Haywood, for being thin-skinned and intemperate: “He could tolerate no opinion that was not in accord with his own, and deemed every one a personal enemy, if not a villain, who differed with him.” This translated into an unfortunate habit, as documented in the colonial records of the time, of having his detractors criminally indicted for criticizing him. These included one man, Joseph Castleton, who opined that His Excellency was “a damn Rogue & villain, and that there was not a worse Rogue & villain in the world.” For his trouble, Castleton “was sentenced to stand in the pillory, on the public parade of Edenton, for two hours, and to beg pardon, on his knees for the offense.” He left, according to one historical account, “a less talkative, if not wiser, man.”
When the Chief Justice failed to answer his calls for satisfaction, the Governor only became further enraged. “I’ll lay him by the heels, I’ll have him by the throat, and burn his house or blow it up with gun-powder!” he opined, stepping back for a moment, his anger boiling. The Governor raised his foot and attempted repeatedly to kick his way through the front doorway. His face, already bright red amid the rising crescendo of his rage, began turning an even deeper shade of crimson with the exertion. The door, however, sturdy and well-built from the finest Carolina oak, refused to yield.
Burrington had arrived in the New World with the best of intentions. An educated man whose royal appointment as governor had been made in repayment for an unspecified favor that his father had performed for King George I, he harbored dreams of developing the province for the betterment of all its subjects. And his well-documented truculence aside, Burrington did achieve several notable things during his stint in the colonies. These included opening up the Cape Fear peninsula to new settlement and overseeing the construction of new highways to connect the lower reaches to the more populous northern areas. He also traveled tirelessly around North Carolina on foot, conducting surveys of rivers and harbors, checking in frequently with even the most isolated settlements, and doing whatever he could to ensure the smooth operation of his colony. And, displaying a generosity of spirit that belied his frequent violent outbursts, he was also observed during his many travels distributing money from his own pockets to colonists who were struggling, for which he developed a reputation as something of a man of the people. None of these qualities, however, were on display that day in Edenton.
After swearing a great many oaths, none of which had any effect on the steadfastly unyielding oak door, the Governor turned his attention to the window. Raising his club, he brought it crashing down through the large glass pane, the early evening sunlight glinting off the shards as they shattered to the ground at his feet. The Chief Justice, somehow maintaining his composure in the face of this onslaught, retreated to a back room. Taking out a quill and parchment, he began, in typical lawyerly fashion, to calmly document the Governor’s many threats and epithets.
Later that same year, on a visit to London, Christopher Gale—a British attorney from Lancashire who had immigrated to Carolina in his early twenties and had been appointed chief justice of the province by Burrington’s predecessor in 1703—would describe this encounter with the governor in exquisite detail in a deposition that was submitted to the High Court. His account was corroborated by the testimony of seven members of the Provincial Council, and his character was considered above reproach. Less than a year into the job, His Excellency George Burrington was unceremoniously dismissed from his position by the lords proprietors.
He lingered in the colony for more than a year after his firing, stirring up enmity against Gale, who was, in Burrington’s words, “an ungrateful, perfidious scoundrel and an egregious sot,” as well as his successor as governor, Sir Richard Everard, whom he termed “a Noodle and an ape” and a “numbskull head.” He even attempted to challenge Everard to a duel in late 1725 and, once again failing to receive satisfaction, “physically attacked at least two other houses in the neighborhood,” threatening to run the occupants through with his sword. Under criminal indictment for his rampage, Burrington finally returned to England in 1726.
The George Burrington historical marker in Pender County, North Carolina.
For most politicians, threatening to murder a sitting judge would probably have been a swift career ender. But whatever services his father had rendered for the king were apparently extremely well received, for less than six years later Burrington was back, royal commission in hand, reappointed to the office that he had previously held. And this time he had his sights set on destroying the political power and influence of those who had previously defied him. He would utilize every weapon in his arsenal to exact his revenge, including the as-yet-unnamed gerrymander.
George Burrington was born in Devonshire, England, sometime in the early 1680s. That idyllic south-coast county was also the home of Sir Walter Raleigh, for whom the state capital of Raleigh, North Carolina, would later be named. The son of Gilbert Burrington, George grew up on the family estate at Ideford, in the parish of Chudleigh. In a preview of the turbulent relationships to come, he quickly became estranged from his father, having “disobliged” him at an early age. One of his relatives, Charles Burrington, is credited by historians as being among the earliest supporters of William of Orange, who invaded England and seized the British crown during the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Another relative, John Burrington, was a member of Parliament from Okehampton and an influential figure within the British navy.
Portrait of Thomas Pelham-Holles, 1st Duke of Newcastle, painted by William Hoare, circa 1750.
Already politically well connected, George saw his station in life rise even further in 1711 when his close friend, Thomas Pelham, inherited the title of Duke of Newcastle from his uncle. It was Pelham’s patronage that proved influential in earning Burrington an army commission in 1715, where he eventually rose to the rank of captain. And Pelham’s connections with the lords proprietors, particularly John Carteret, later Earl Granville, who was a close political associate of the duke’s, might also have played a role in securing his first appointment as a provincial governor in the New World.
Things did not get off to a good start. When he attempted to throw his weight around by directing an official order to William Reed, the council president who had served as temporary governor prior to Burrington’s appointment, the order was returned to him “with comments not altogether refined.” Indignant at being deprived of his office, Reed began spreading rumors, based on hearsay, that Burrington had “been in prison, before leaving England, for beating an old woman.” And thus Reed became the first in a long line of political opponents to be indicted for criticizing His Excellency. The depositions recounting these events would join that of Christopher Gale on the desks of the lords proprietors and contribute in no small part to his first dismissal (yes, first—more on that later).
Ever willing to call in favors, Burrington secured his second commission as governor directly from the king, much to the chagrin of Gale, who had campaigned strenuously against the appointment. He returned to Edenton in February 1731, and his temper had certainly not cooled in the intervening years. His second term was marred by a violent attack against the attorney general of the colony, John Montgomery, “a man of innumerable villainies,” according to Burrington, who he believed was involved in a conspiracy to undermine his authority. “After attacking him with a chair,” writes Haywood, “the Governor had thrown him to the floor and punched him in such a manner, with his knee, that he would probably have been killed, or seriously injured, had not bystanders interposed.” Predictably, having been pulled off his erstwhile adversary in the throes of battle, Burrington challenged Montgomery to “meet and fight him in Virginia.” Once again, though, satisfaction would elude him. Seeking a license to return to England, quite wisely fearful for his life, Montgomery was denied by His Excellency Burrington, who informed him that he would instead “give him a license to go to the Devil, if he desired it.”
“The next episode in which we see our hero recorded,” recounts Haywood, “is a controversy between [his successor] Governor Everard and the Rev. Thomas Bailey, a missionary to whom Sir Richard had denied the use of the public house of worship.” Sensing an opportunity to embarrass the man who had replaced him, Burrington organized a posse to march on the Edenton Court House. Breaking down the door, the congregation entered and the Right Honorable Reverend proceeded to hold services, delivering his Sunday sermon from the bench. Burrington, for his part, is described as being “a Churchman in theory, though not in practice,” so the stunt appears to have been driven less by genuine ecclesiastical concerns and more by the long-running feud with his successor.
It was not only his political rivals who felt the wrath of the governor’s temper. Returning one day to his sprawling five-thousand-acre Cape Fear estate, Stag Park, and finding that an impoverished family had erected a log cabin on the edge of his property, Burrington instructed his servant to burn it to the ground. “It is a very common Practice for the People in this Province to burn their Houses,” he wrote in his defense, apparently in all seriousness, “as being a cheaper way than pulling them down.” Other alleged crimes included “throwing [a] colonial official’s written defense of his judgeship into the fire, horse theft, and stealing the council’s secretary’s commissioning seals.” I think you’re beginning to get the picture at this point.
Burrington’s retribution against his many perceived enemies was political as well as personal. He realized, amid the turmoil of the colony’s fractured politics, that he could use his power as governor to secure a colonial legislature that was, shall we say, more amenable to his requests. At the time, the legislature consisted of a council, staffed with representatives of the crown who were appointed by the governor himself, and an assembly, elected by the people to represent the interests of the colonists. Chief among Burrington’s targets were Nathaniel Rice, John Baptista Ashe, and Edmund Porter, three members of the legislature who he believed were plotting a coup against him. Their presence in Edenton came by virtue of Martin Bladen, a political rival of Burrington’s benefactor, the Duke of Newcastle, who had personally intervened in their appointment, further stoking the governor’s paranoia.
Nevertheless, things had been all smiles when Burrington had first returned to Edenton in 1731, because both the members of the assembly and the governor took pains to express the “esteem and regard” with which they held each other. “But this love feast,” writes Haywood, “was of short duration.” It was the issue of taxes, rather than the governor’s many personal indiscretions, that first forged division between the legislature and the executive, and things very quickly went south after the assembly passed a resolution condemning the “charging [of] exorbitant fees by public officials.” You can probably guess which public official they had in mind.
Burrington, in typical tone-deaf fashion, responded that “whoever the person might be who wrote this resolution, he was doubtless guilty of such abuses himself.” He then further opined that the assembly’s conduct “brought to mind the stratagem of a thief, who would hide himself in a house, for the purpose of robbery, and then set it on fire to escape in the smoke.” He also pointed out, not entirely helpfully, that the colonial officials in Virginia levied even more extortionate fees against their constituents. But the assembly members, for their part, “did not seem to think the usages of a sister colony germane to the difficulty.” The fragile peace in the province had lasted a matter of months. In May 1731, frustrated with the “divisions, heats, and indecencies” of the assembly, Burrington issued an order of prorogation, canceling the remainder of the legislative session in a fit of pique. Left open, however, was the question of who would fill the chamber’s ranks when it reconvened the following year.
Having already been “constrained to put an end to their deliberations” in 1731, the governor set as his goal for the 1732 session, as is colorfully described in the colonial records of the time, “to prepossess people in a future election according to his desires, his desires herein being (as we verily believe), to endeavor by his means to get a majority of his creatures in the lower house.” In other words, merely sidelining the legislature by prorogation was not enough; Burrington wanted to control it. And never one for half measures, he quickly set about flexing the muscles of his gubernatorial power.
He achieved this goal by artificially creating new districts for the lower house of the colonial legislature out of whole cloth, while also arbitrarily altering the boundaries of the existing ones, remaking the electoral map into one that would ensure the election of those who supported his agenda. This gerrymander would have the effect of bringing the chamber more in line with the upper house, which was already packed with said creatures. By manipulating the districts, some of which ended up containing “not more than thirty families,” he was decisively able to bring the colony under his personal political control.
The historical record is somewhat unclear as to from where exactly Burrington derived the authority to do this. In a letter dated November 17, 1732, Rice, Ashe, and Montgomery lay out the details of the gerrymander, concluding that Burrington “proceeded with the advice & consent of such of the Council as are of his own Appointment, & never oppose his schemes be they ever so absurd, to divide old Precincts established by Law, & to enact new Ones in Places.” It seems likely, then, that Burrington used the influence he had gained over the upper house through his own appointments to force through a resolution that gerrymandered the districts of the lower house.
Support for this may be found in the minutes of the council’s November 1 meeting, which reference the addition of territory to the Edgecombe precinct: “His Excelly the Governour by and with the advice and consent of His Majestys Council doth Establich and Confirm the Limits before recited to be within Edgecombe precinct.” The minutes also describe the creation of a new precinct, Bladen, in the Cape Fear region, stating that Burrington and the council “doth Erect and make the before mentioned bounds into a precinct to be hereafter Distinguished & called Bladen precinct with all such rights and Privilidges as other precincts within this province have and Enjoy.”
The paucity of details in the council’s minutes may be explained by Burrington’s heavy-handed approach to running the business of that chamber. But there is evidence in the record that the governor’s actions were not without opposition. “These Considerations moved Mr Rice & Mr Ashe to offer in Council Objections and Reasons against this Method,” contends the aforementioned November 17 letter, “which (as we have much reason to suspect,) he will not suffer to be entered in the Council Journal.” The surviving minutes certainly suggest that he indeed did not suffer such. The letter also references opposition from the assembly itself, describing “the Governor & Council appointing Precincts, where no Precincts before were (the legality of which, more especially of late years, has been by the Assemblys deny’d).”
In another undated memorandum from Ashe and Rice, they further allege that Burrington’s gerrymander was accomplished “by the Govr & Council alone without the Concurrence and Assent of the Assembly,” in a manner that flagrantly circumvented the ordinary legislative procedures in the colony. These required bills to be passed by both chambers before being enacted into law. “We are of opinion that this method of erecting Precincts,” the memorandum concludes, in an obvious appeal to Burrington’s superiors to put a stop to his abuses of power, “is not only illegal and may be attended with many evil consequences; but is also not warranted by his Majesty’s Royal Instructions which forbids erecting new Judicatures without His Majestys Licence.” For the time being, though, the governor had achieved his goal, which, according to Griffith, was “to secure a majority in the lower house strong enough radically to oppose the people.”
But this triumph would prove to be short-lived, a Pyrrhic victory that only hastened the end of his career, for the many enemies he had made along the way were about to come home to roost. And this time, he would not be able to rely on his friend the Duke of Newcastle to bail him out. With Burrington temporarily absent from the colony in 1734 on a visit to inspect his holdings in South Carolina, his opponents sensed an opportunity to turn the tide of opinion in London against him, at a time when he would be unable to respond in his defense. Numerous petitions flowed into the offices of the Board of Trade, alleging that Burrington’s actions with respect to the legislature were in violation of his royal charter, which of course they were.
George Burrington’s signature on a 1732 colonial record. No likeness of the man himself survives to the present day.
And so in April 1734, with the accusations mounting, the board decided to replace him with Gabriel Johnston, a Scottish physician, political writer, and professor of oriental languages at the University of Saint Andrews. Burrington, true to form, did not take the decision to remove him a second time particularly well. In a petition to the king appealing his dismissal, he railed against his opponents, and “their endeavors to defame him, by inventing and spreading scandalous stories.” He also lamented his “deplorable misfortune to be so misrepresented to Your Majesty as to be removed, without ever knowing the causes that brought upon him an undeserved disgrace & dismal ruin.” But by this time, he had burned too many bridges in London, and his desperate appeals to Newcastle to intervene went unanswered.
Not content to merely castigate the underhanded actions of his opponents with respect to his ouster, Burrington also went on to allege the existence of a conspiracy to assassinate him, orchestrated, he claimed, “by directions from some person in England.” This was a clear reference to Bladen, who he had long believed was also behind the efforts to obstruct his agenda in the colony. Bladen’s agents, including Rice and Montgomery, “with some others their confederates, did contrive and attempt to assassinate your petitioner, then actual Governor there by shooting him with pistols, from which danger he was rescued by the sudden and unexpected interposition of some courageous men who came to his assistance.” This alleged murder plot is not documented in any historical sources outside Burrington’s own writings, and so seems more likely to be a product of his mounting paranoia and invention than a genuine attempted coup against the crown’s representative in North Carolina. Although, as one 1886 historical account notes, “if a tithe of what his enemies said about Burrington be true, the wonder is that he got away from the colony alive, and not that an attempt was made to kill him.”
In his later years, after once again returning to London in disgrace, Burrington mellowed at least somewhat, trading in his sword for that proverbial mightier of weapons, the pen. He wrote extensively for Henry Fielding’s satirical political journal The Champion under the pseudonym Janus the Elder, publishing frequent diatribes against the first prime minister of Great Britain, Sir Robert Walpole. But after a career marred by violent rhetoric, not to mention actual violence, Burrington himself would meet a violent and tragic end. On February 22, 1759, some twenty-five years after his return to England, his bruised and battered body was discovered in a canal in St. James’s Park, London, the apparent victim of a robbery gone wrong. The crime was never solved.
“Yesterday was taken out of the Canal in St. James’s Park, the Body of an elderly Man well dressed,” wrote The Public Advertiser the next day. “His Pockets were turn’d inside out, and his Stick in his Hand, which was clinched and bruised.” Ever feisty, the seventy-seven-year-old Burrington had apparently put up a spirited fight against his assailants, but not enough to escape with his life. He was buried at St. John the Evangelist Church in the City of Westminster, following an extravagant and expensive funeral. “Far from the land of his labors and turmoils the old Governor is now laid at rest,” concludes one historical epitaph. “Never will that slumber be broken by political animosity or the fiercer discords of private life that marred his earthly career.”
The Burrington coat of arms.
Would that it had been so. Maintaining his long list of enemies even in death, Burrington suffered further indignity when it was falsely reported, in a story that made its way into numerous historical sources, that “rioting in his usual manner, he fell a sacrifice to his own folly, [and] was found murdered, in the morning, in the Bird Cage Walk.” In his will, Burrington left his estate, flush with cash from the sale of his holdings in the New World, to his nephew, his children apparently having “disobliged” him in much the same way as he had his own father many decades before. “He died, and left the world behind; His once wild heart is cold,” concludes an eighteenth-century English poem excerpted by Haywood in his biography of Burrington. “His once keen eye is quelled and blind; What more?—His tale is told.”
The French film director Jean-Luc Godard once said that “a story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.” And so it is with the story of the first gerrymander. By accident of history, the naming of the gerrymander would derive not from the practice’s actual origins in colonial North Carolina but from an off-the-cuff discussion that took place in a Boston newsroom in the early nineteenth century.
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Elbridge Gerry had a problem. The year was 1812, and the politician whose name would go on to become synonymous with the practice of manipulating legislative districts for partisan gain was being thwarted by the Federalist majority in Massachusetts at every turn. Seemingly always a bridesmaid in the commonwealth’s politics during the founding era, Gerry spent most of his career in the shadow of titans like John Adams and Samuel Adams. He bounced around between various different political offices, flirting with periods of semiretirement, never quite able to follow through on the promise of greatness that his talent seemed to warrant. Gerry’s career had been tainted by scandal, both political and personal, most seriously in the XYZ Affair, which brought the nation to the brink of all-out war with France.
Occurring early in the presidency of John Adams, the XYZ Affair presented the first major diplomatic crisis of the newly established United States. The letters represent the code names given to several French diplomats in documents circulated within the administration: Jean-Conrad Hottinguer (X), Pierre Bellamy (Y), and Lucien Hauteval (Z). Hostilities between the two nations had begun to ramp up in the wake of the French Revolution in 1789, with the United States maintaining its neutrality in the subsequent war between France and several other European powers. Things devolved further after the Washington administration negotiated the Jay Treaty with Great Britain in 1795.
With war seemingly on the horizon, Adams sent a diplomatic envoy to Paris consisting of Gerry, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and John Marshall. Their mission ended in failure. The nations would go on to fight several naval skirmishes in the Caribbean in what historians call the Quasi-War, before hostilities ultimately came to an end with the signing of the Convention of 1800. That Gerry took the PR hit for the breakdown in diplomatic relations is particularly ironic, not to mention spectacularly on-brand, because he remained in France for several months after the other two commissioners had left, and his informal negotiations with the French foreign minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, ended up laying much of the groundwork for the later accord. The XYZ Affair also led to allegations of pro-French sympathies that would dog him for the remainder of his career.
But perhaps even more embarrassingly, the disastrous decision to guarantee a loan for his brother, a chronic bungler of monetary affairs, also ruined Gerry financially. He and his two brothers had inherited from their father a successful shipping business that exported dried codfish to Barbados and Spain. But years of neglect and mismanagement by his brother, during which time Gerry was often preoccupied with his political career, left the firm heavily in debt and Gerry himself on the proverbial hook, so to speak. The man who had represented Massachusetts at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia now found himself in a state of relative poverty that he considered unbefitting a statesman of his caliber.
As a member of the Democratic-Republican Party, Gerry had aligned himself with the presidencies of Thomas Jefferson and his successor, James Madison, who advocated for the cutting back of federal power with respect to the states. This placed him on opposite sides from the commonwealth’s most famous politician, John Adams, who along with other Federalists like Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall desired to strengthen the authority of the national government. Gerry now had the opportunity to stick it to those critics by presiding over the passage of a strong Democratic-Republican legislative agenda in a state that had to that point been dominated by his political opponents. The only thing standing in his way was the lingering Federalist majority in the state senate. The Massachusetts state constitution, however, required new state legislative boundaries be drawn that year, and it would be from the debates over the redrawing of those district boundaries that Gerry’s infamy would spring.
It had been a long and arduous road to the governor’s mansion for the man whose lasting political legacy was one he had never courted or desired. Born in 1744 in Marblehead, Massachusetts, Gerry was the son of a wealthy merchant seaman who had immigrated to the United States from England fourteen years prior. A precocious young man who benefited from the finest private tutors money could buy, he was admitted to Harvard College at age thirteen and earned both undergraduate and graduate degrees before his twentieth birthday. His initial foray into national politics came when he successfully sought election to the First Continental Congress in 1774, the colonial legislature that had assembled in Philadelphia in the wake of the Boston Tea Party. But, still grieving the death of his father earlier that year, Gerry declined to take up the post.
Instead, he would come to play a key role in the colonial resistance to British rule in Massachusetts, stockpiling weapons and ammunition at Concord, which he funneled in through his hometown of Marblehead after Parliament closed the port of Boston. These activities earned him significant plaudits from his fellow Founding Fathers, including John Adams, who wrote in 1776, “If every Man here was a Gerry, the Liberties of America would be safe against the Gates of Earth and Hell.” On the night of Paul Revere’s famous ride, Gerry was staying at the Menotomy Tavern in Arlington, along with two patriot colonels. As a patrol of redcoats entered and searched the tavern en route to Lexington, Gerry and his pals, still clad in their nightshirts, only escaped capture by hiding out in a nearby cornfield.
Gerry first ran for the office of governor in 1788, almost a full year before the Constitution that he had helped to draft would go into effect. The campaign did not go well for him. To his misfortune, he found himself facing off against John Hancock, the wealthy merchant and patriot whose signature famously, and eponymously, graced the Declaration of Independence. Hancock had already been overwhelmingly elected as the very first governor of the newly established commonwealth back in 1780 and enjoyed the unbridled support of the Boston political establishment. Gerry had represented Massachusetts at the Philadelphia convention, and his input proved vital to the drafting. Of particular influence were his views on federalism, where he advocated a strict delineation between federal and state powers, and elections, where he championed the indirect selection of federal officers. Nevertheless, he remained concerned about the lack of protection of civil liberties in the Constitution and was ultimately one of only three delegates to vote against it, predicting that it would create “as complete an aristocracy as ever was framed.”
Though Gerry was clearly mismatched against the gregarious Hancock, the scope of his loss was still spectacular to behold. His landslide defeat, which saw him garner only 19 percent of the vote to Hancock’s 81 percent, would also not be his last. While the ratification in 1791 of the Bill of Rights, which added in those civil liberties protections whose absence had so sorely concerned him, produced a change of heart for Gerry about the wisdom of the founding document, it did not produce a corresponding improvement in his electoral fortunes. Four more unsuccessful bids for the governorship followed between 1800 and 1803, and each time Gerry was defeated by his latest political nemesis, the popular Federalist senator and fellow Philadelphia delegate Caleb Strong. Adding further embarrassment, he received a smaller share of the vote with each successive defeat to Strong, and once again in the political wilderness Gerry feared that his long career of public service might be drawing to a close.
Portrait of Elbridge Gerry, painted by James Bogle in 1861.
For Elbridge Gerry, though, the sixth time proved to be the charm. Running again for governor in 1810, he defeated the incumbent, Christopher Gore, by the narrowest of margins, winning 51 percent of the vote in a bitterly contested campaign. Gerry was able to counter Gore’s characterization of him as a “French-partizan” with accusations of disloyalty against his opponent, bringing up the fact that Gore’s parents had remained loyal to the British crown during the revolution, negative campaigning apparently being as much a feature of elections in the early nineteenth century as it is in the twenty-first. Finally ensconced in the office that had for so long eluded him, Gerry found himself frustrated by divided government during his first term. But he also proved to be an unexpectedly savvy politician, charting a course of moderation in his political dealings and biding his time for a more fertile climate in which to push his policy priorities. This strategy served him well and allowed him to win reelection, this time with 52 percent of the vote, in an equally acrimonious rematch with Gore in 1811.
Gerry’s second, and what would prove to be final, term as governor was as contentious as his first had been uneventful. Losing patience with the obstruction of his agenda, Gerry undertook a systematic purge of Federalist appointees in the executive branch and created numerous state judgeships that he was able to successfully pack with Democratic-Republican cronies. But it was his activities with respect to the legislative branch that drew the ire not only of his political opponents but the media as well and, far more than his later service as vice president of the United States, came to define Gerry’s career and legacy.
The fundamental irony of what followed was that Gerry, who would be forevermore attached in history to the unseemly practice of partisan redistricting, was not even the architect of the infamous “salamander” district that bears his name. It was, in fact, the invention of his fellow partisans in the General Court, who, charged with the actual redrawing of state legislative boundaries, and frustrated with the continued obstructionism of the Federalists, viewed a continuing Democratic-Republican majority in the state senate as essential. By this time, the notion that the drawing of districts could be manipulated for partisan gain was nothing new. The practice that Burrington had pioneered in colonial North Carolina had been replicated on several occasions in the early republic, most notably in New York following the 1800 census and, as the next chapter discusses, in post-independence Virginia. The members of the General Court even attempted to frame their 1812 plan as a correction for earlier Federalist meddling in the drawing of district lines, although this justification was not especially convincing even at the time.
What is clear is that the line drawers in the General Court would stop at nothing to prevent the Federalists from undoing everything that they had been able to achieve following Gerry’s reelection. There were few electoral shenanigans to which they were unprepared to stoop in order to achieve that goal, and the resulting plan was quite rightly lampooned as a fairly naked and transparent power grab. At the time, Massachusetts’s eighteen state senate districts, from which forty members would be elected, were based not on population, as is the case in all state legislatures today, but on the amount of taxes that were paid in different localities. In theory, each senator represented at least $5 million worth of taxable property, or at least that was the way things had always been done. And while earlier districting plans had sometimes split counties between two or more senate districts to fit the communities of Massachusetts and the modern-day state of Maine (then part of Massachusetts) into eighteen districts, legislators had endeavored to keep these to a minimum.
The 1812 redistricting plan, however, utilized every tool in the book to manipulate the electoral playing field. Counties were split between two and even three districts with reckless abandon, Maine’s seat apportionment was arbitrarily increased from seven to ten to capitalize on the Democratic-Republican strength in that region, and the principles of compactness and regularity in district boundaries were jettisoned in favor of distorted irregular lines and bizarre shapes. But it must be noted that this infamous “original” gerrymander, while certainly an egregious manipulation of the levers of democracy, bears little resemblance to the gerrymanders of today, including the REDMAP-inspired plans discussed in the introduction.
Modern gerrymandering, by virtue of the constitutional mandate of “one person, one vote,” requires line drawers to distort the partisan composition of individual districts while preserving equality of population between districts across the entire electoral landscape. If unseating a Democratic incumbent necessitates moving a bloc of Republican voters into their district from neighboring localities, then a corresponding population of Democratic voters must be shifted the other way to preserve population equality. The creators of the historical gerrymanders discussed in this chapter were under no such constraints. By engaging in the kind of creative tax valuation described above, the Democratic-Republicans in the Massachusetts legislature were actually practicing a form of deliberate malapportionment, an American version of the rotten boroughs of English antiquity. While the effect was undoubtedly the same, it’s hard not to conclude that the redistricting plan that gave us the term “gerrymander” was not in fact a gerrymander at all, at least not as the term is commonly understood today.
That being said, even Gerry himself was uncomfortable with the obviously partisan nature of the proposed plan, with one biographer, quoting Gerry’s son-in-law, describing him as finding it “highly disagreeable” upon its unveiling. Despite his distaste, and likely harboring ambitions for higher office, Gerry nevertheless signed the legislation into law, and outrage swiftly ensued. Perhaps the biggest victims of the plan, aside from the unfortunate Federalists in the state senate, were the people of Maine. The expansion of their representation in the senate left them on the hook for $61,000 in taxes over the subsequent decade, far in excess of what would have been levied under a fair and equal apportionment of seats. These extra taxes were assessed on a town-by-town basis in a process known, quite appropriately given the circumstances, as dooming. This was a sharp departure from previous apportionment plans, which had been based on taxes actually paid, rather than those to be assessed in the future. Seven years later, the people of Maine voted to break away from Massachusetts and form their own state.
At the urging of the Federalists, a state house of representatives committee was empaneled to investigate the source of these inequalities but in a manner befitting the political argle-bargle of the entire process was then disbanded one hour before it was scheduled to deliver its report. “In this manner,” wrote one understated early twentieth-century historical account, “a very arbitrary scheme of assessment and apportionment was resorted to by the Democrats.”
Though Gerry himself had no direct involvement in the drawing up of the plan, and had signed it, if his son-in-law is to be believed, only grudgingly, the media went on to make him the poster child of its excesses. The most obviously distorted seat in the new senate map was that which split the Federalist stronghold of Essex County, producing a district that meandered around the western and northern county line in order to pack in as many majority Federalist towns as possible. The result was that in a county where the Federalists would have been expected to pick up all five seats under a fair plan, in the next election the Democratic-Republicans managed to win three of the five, not to mention twenty-nine of the forty seats in the senate overall, despite winning less than 50 percent of the popular vote.
In a now famous, and possibly apocryphal, exchange, a reporter for The Boston Gazette, alternatively Gilbert Stuart or Elkanah Tisdale, depending on whose version of events you believe, drew a head, wings, tail, and claws on a map of the Essex County district that was displayed on the wall of his editor’s office. “That will do for a salamander!” exclaimed the reporter as he stood back and admired his handiwork. “Better say a gerrymander” deadpanned the editor, and thus political history was made. The newspaper caption that accompanied the cartoon upon its publication proudly announces the discovery of “a new species of Monster, which appeared in Essex South District in Jan. 1812.” Its creator: none other than “his Excellency,” Governor Gerry.
The original “gerrymander” cartoon from The Boston Gazette, printed in March 1812.
In one final indignity that added injury to insult for Gerry, while the redistricting plan he had signed proved effective enough to preserve the Democratic-Republican majority in the state senate, they nevertheless lost control of the state house of representatives in the 1812 election. And, matching up for a fifth time with his old foe Caleb Strong, whom the Federalists had brought out of retirement for one last rodeo, Gerry himself lost an agonizingly close race for governor in the same election, by fewer than 1,400 votes out of more than 100,000 that were cast. Though he would die two years later at the age of seventy, while serving as vice president of the United States under James Madison, Gerry was at least able to earn enough from his federal salary to finally pay off the debts he had incurred from his brother’s financial folly. In the end, the map that defined his tenure as governor survived even less time than Gerry himself; it was repealed in 1813.
There’s one final linguistic postscript to the story of Gerry’s salamander. It turns out that the word “gerrymander” has been pronounced incorrectly for decades. Elbridge Gerry’s last name, and indeed the eponymous practice to which it became attached, was pronounced with a hard G, rather than the now ubiquitous soft one. The Wall Street Journal traces the origins of the confusion to at least 1850, when the topic was discussed by the delegates to the Indiana state constitutional convention. In a debate over a proposed clause that would have prohibited lawmakers in the state from participating in the drawing of their own districts, the delegate John Pettit opined, “You are constantly gerrymandering the State, or jerrymandering, as I maintain the word should be pronounced, the g being soft.” This more orthographically natural pronunciation would be the one that stuck, a fact the Journal credits to the print-only media of the era: “Prior to radio, you kind of winged it.”
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There is a concept in science known as Stigler’s law of eponymy. Popularized by the University of Chicago statistics professor Stephen Stigler in the early 1980s, it posits that very rarely is a scientific discovery actually named after its original discoverer. Some famous examples include Hubble’s law in physical cosmology, which was first derived by Georges Lemaître two years before Edwin Hubble received the credit; Pythagoras’s theorem in geometry, which was already well known to the Babylonian mathematicians of ancient Mesopotamia; and Halley’s Comet, which had been observed by astronomers as far back as 240 BC, centuries before Edmund Halley shocked the scientific world by accurately predicting its return to the skies. To that list can now be added the gerrymander, which, while ultimately named after the unfortunate Elbridge Gerry, originated long before the drawing of the infamous salamander district in Essex County. Interestingly, and clearly by design, Stigler’s law is itself an example of Stigler’s law, having been first chronicled by the sociologist Robert K. Merton, to whom Stigler himself awards the credit.
Burrington’s North Carolina gerrymander stands out as the only clearly documented example of the practice in colonial America, and some significant portion of the credit (or blame) for its development must surely reside with him. Nevertheless, Burrington’s scheme also relied on the creative use of malapportionment, and so at the very least an asterisk must be placed after any title that we might be inclined to award him. But in the quest to find the first gerrymander, one thing becomes clear: its creator was not Elbridge Gerry, nor was he even an American. And while it may be too late at this point to introduce the term “Burrimander” into the American political lexicon, the story of the bombastic, judge-threatening, attorney-assaulting colonial governor is one that deserves far more attention in the history books.