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The 150 years between Elbridge Gerry’s famous salamander district in early nineteenth-century Massachusetts and the Warren Court’s reapportionment revolution of the 1960s, which swiftly ushered in the era of the modern gerrymander, were marked with isolated instances of the practice. In 1816, for example, Maryland’s Electoral College districts were successfully gerrymandered by the Democratic-Republican Party. Their efforts were sufficient to turn a 6–5 Federalist majority from the previous presidential election into an 8–0 romp in favor of their candidate, who happened to be none other than James Monroe. Why only eight electoral votes when in 1812 the state had returned eleven? The three Federalist electors, no doubt disheartened by the gerrymander, not to mention the landslide defeat of their candidate, Rufus King, failed to show up in Annapolis for the vote. The Federalist Party itself would cease to exist soon thereafter, and the void left in its place ushered in a period of relative calm known as the Era of Good Feelings. In the absence of partisan rivalries, gerrymandering too entered into a decade-long slumber, broken only when the presidency of Andrew Jackson brought about a split in the Democratic-Republican hegemony, and the Second Party System began.
Many of these early elections had made use of a twin set of practices known as at-large or multimember districting, particularly for the U.S. House of Representatives. In contrast to single-member districts, where, as the name suggests, each individual district elects only one member of the legislature, multimember systems involve districts that elect two or more representatives. At-large systems abolish the use of districts entirely, allowing the majority party in the state to control the entire congressional delegation. This itself was a form of gerrymandering, albeit a variation stemming from the complete or partial absence of district lines, rather than political shenanigans in their drawing.
The elections clause of the Constitution gives the states control over “the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives” while allowing Congress to “at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.” This permitted the states to take the lead in administering federal elections while also providing a congressional backstop if they were perceived to be abusing or mismanaging their power. Congress had been hesitant to avail itself of these checks in the Republic’s early years, leaving state governments free to rig the results of their congressional elections in favor of their preferred party. According to a study by the University of Florida political economist Stephen Calabrese, more than half of the individual congressional elections administered by the states between 1788 and 1831 made use of some combination of at-large or multimember districting. In those elections, the majority party in the state won every single seat on offer more than 84 percent of the time. In the states that used single-member districts to choose their members of Congress, the number was only 27 percent. All of this, however, was about to change.
In response to the practice of at-large and multimember district gerrymandering, Congress passed the 1842 Apportionment Act, which attempted to impose a mandate on the states that their representatives be chosen from single-member districts. But the move was met with immediate resistance from advocates of states’ rights. When President John Tyler signed the law, he attached a memorandum in which he openly expressed doubts about whether the legislation was constitutional. Many historians believe this to be the very first example of the use of presidential signing statements that have become so popular with recent chief executives. “That Congress itself has power by law to alter State regulations respecting the manner of holding elections for Representatives is clear,” Tyler wrote in his memo to the House of Representatives, “but its power to command the States to make new regulations or alter their existing regulations is the question upon which I have felt deep and strong doubts.”
In the debates over the proposed bill, Representative William Payne of Alabama summed up the sentiments of many of his colleagues. “Can it be reasonably expected that Georgia, under such circumstances, will quietly submit to your assumption of power, and obey your mandamus?” he asked the assembled congressmen. “No, sir, never; nor will New Hampshire, Mississippi, or any other State which has heretofore elected her Representatives under the general ticket system. They will rebuke your assumption of power, by treating your mandamus with contempt; and, as heretofore, will elect and send Representatives to Congress. Well, sir, what will you do next?” The former president John Quincy Adams, now also serving in the House of Representatives, denounced the bill too, declaring it “pernicious in its immediate operations, and imminently dangerous in its tendencies.”
Payne’s warning turned out to be a prescient one. In the 1842 election, New Hampshire, Georgia, Mississippi, and Missouri all chose to defy the law without consequence, and this early gerrymandering mechanism would be allowed to endure for another 125 years. While subsequent reapportionment acts did make mention of members of Congress being elected from “districts composed of contiguous territory, and containing as nearly as practicable an equal number of inhabitants,” the single-member district mandate was not explicitly, or permanently, reinstated until Congress passed the Uniform Congressional District Act of 1967. At that time, only Hawaii and New Mexico still elected their representatives at large. One of the states that decided not to defy the 1842 Apportionment Act was Ohio, and later that same year it became the site of one of the most obscure yet fascinating gerrymandering attempts of the nineteenth century.
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The panic of 1837 began in London. In fact, to be even more precise, it began with the 1835 eruption of the Cosigüina volcano in western Nicaragua, which spewed a massive cloud of volcanic ash into the Central American skies. Traces of the blast have since been discovered in samples taken halfway around the globe. According to an analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, the ash cloud that blanketed the earth in the wake of the Cosigüina eruption was responsible for a 0.75 degree Celsius decrease in average surface temperatures over the subsequent year.
While this global cooling event was no more than a temporary blip in the long-term average, it was sufficient to cause a devastating failure of the 1836 European wheat crop. With the British forced to borrow significant amounts of money to fund the import of a large percentage of their food that year, the Bank of England suddenly noticed that its monetary reserves were running low. Following the conventional economic wisdom of the time—which held that declining reserves should be met with increased interest rates, to disincentivize borrowing and allow the replenishment of the money supply—the bank announced a gradual rate increase from 3 to 5 percent. Across the pond, the U.S. banking system happened to be uniquely vulnerable to a sudden hike in interest rates.
Five years earlier, President Andrew Jackson had vetoed a bill to recharter the Second Bank of the United States. The bank had been created in the aftermath of the War of 1812 to regulate the printing of currency and the issuing of government bonds. This meant that the central bank, whose twenty-year charter had originally been issued in 1816, would cease to exist when it expired in 1836, and so began to wind down its activities. But Jackson, ever the firebrand, was not content merely to sit on his hands and wait for the bank to destroy itself. He announced that the federal government would be withdrawing every penny of its $10 million in deposits, distributing them instead across numerous smaller institutions, known as pet banks. Many of these were located in the western regions of the country, including nine in Ohio.
Then several events occurred in short order that precipitated a full-blown panic. Real estate and commodity prices collapsed, caused in part by Jackson’s “Specie Circular” executive order mandating that western lands be purchased only with gold and silver coin, which most could not afford. The price of cotton, the mainstay of the southern economy, fell by 25 percent. Rampant inflation led to currency devaluation as banks lent out more and more money to satisfy the demand, stretching reserves in the major financial centers of the East Coast to their limits.
Just when foreign investors began calling in their loans before the value of the dollar plummeted further, and Americans themselves flocked to the banks to withdraw the necessary funds to pay off their own obligations, the Bank of England decided to raise interest rates, and major New York financial institutions quickly followed suit. Suddenly unable to fulfill demand, more than eight hundred banks were forced to close their doors. Economic growth was stifled, businesses failed, unemployment soared to as much as 25 percent in some localities, and the nation entered a deep recession from which it would not emerge for another seven years.
Nowhere were the effects of the crisis felt more acutely than in Ohio. Thousands of people lost their life savings as the pet banks collapsed. Stores stopped accepting currency that wasn’t backed by silver or gold, and with unsecured notes representing a large percentage of those printed by the smaller Ohio banks before the panic, thousands of people discovered that the cash they carried in their pockets was suddenly worthless. Some Ohioans resorted to printing their own money, hoping against hope that they could find a business somewhere that would accept it, so that they could buy food. The crisis also divided the major political parties in the state, the Whigs and the Democrats, and one of the key issues in the lead-up to the 1842 election was the question of banking reform.
The Whigs were still railing against Andrew Jackson, blaming his shortsightedness for the numerous bank failures that had occurred in Ohio during the panic. They favored establishing a central bank in the state, one that had enough power to be able to weather subsequent economic downturns. The Democrats, eager to shift the blame away from Jackson and his Democratic successor, Martin Van Buren, instead argued that elitist bankers in New York and other big cities had been responsible for the crisis. They pushed a populist agenda that called for Ohio to instead establish smaller local banks, but to limit their authority, keeping them on a short leash so that they could not again overextend themselves. As summer approached, political tensions threatened to reach a boiling point. Then Congress passed the Reapportionment Act on June 25, forcing the state legislature to convene a special session to come up with a new district map that could be used for the November elections.
Eighteen forty had been a very good year for the Whigs. Fueled by voter backlash against the Van Buren administration for its mishandling of the economy, the Whig challenger, William Henry Harrison, had upset the incumbent president in his bid for reelection, earning the party what would be their first of only two terms in the White House. Harrison’s victory was extremely hard earned. His Democratic opponents immediately went on the attack, portraying him as elderly (he was sixty-seven), infirm, provincial, out of touch, and more at home sipping cider in his log cabin than attending to matters of state. Harrison and his running mate, fellow Virginian John Tyler, flipped the script and turned the Democratic attacks into a badge of honor. They adopted the log cabin and hard cider as their campaign symbols, even going so far as to produce banners and posters depicting log-cabin-shaped bottles of cider that they distributed to supporters. After an Ohio jeweler named Alexander Coffman Ross performed a song he had written, “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too,” at a Whig rally in New York, it would go on to become the slogan of the entire campaign, effectively reminding voters of Harrison’s role as the hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811.
Though the Harrison-Tyler ticket earned a narrow victory in the popular vote, they dominated the Electoral College 234–60, winning a large number of states, including Ohio, by relatively small margins. The Whig Party also swept into power in Congress, picking up thirty-three seats in the House, four of which came from Ohio, good for a twelve-to-seven majority in the state’s delegation, and also taking control of the Senate. So it was that, as the summer of 1842 rolled around in Columbus, significantly more than just Ohio’s banking system was on the minds of the Whig delegation in the state capital. With the Democrats in control of the state legislature and the November 1842 midterms rapidly approaching, the future control of Ohio’s twenty-one congressional seats, and the jobs of the Whig representatives who currently held them, not to mention the continuing viability of the overall Whig majority in the House, were all at stake.
Things did not get off to a good start. It became immediately clear that the Democratic leadership, whom the Whigs derisively referred to as the Locofocos, were hell-bent on gerrymandering the state to within an inch of its life. Armed with far better-quality election data than had been available to Patrick Henry in 1788, namely the county-level returns from the 1840 election for governor, they set about crafting a gerrymander that enraged even many of their own backbenchers. This heavy-handedness can be seen most clearly in their attempts to browbeat their own members into submission. Unable to secure a broad consensus on redistricting within their own caucus, the leadership convened a select committee to take on the task of crafting the gerrymander. They also pressured their members into pledging to vote for the plan before any of them were even allowed to see it. Many Democrats were left feeling that their previously safe districts were being sacrificed to promote the interests of the national party, rather than what was best for Ohio.
The specifics of the legislation were laid out in some detail in contemporaneous news accounts appearing in the Ohio State Journal, a Whig-affiliated publication. One Democratic representative is quoted as describing the proposed plan as “perfectly ridiculous, indefensible and atrocious,” but concedes that he was nevertheless forced to vote for it “under instructions.” “Members were dragooned,” wrote the paper on August 12, “a gross disrespect to a co-ordinate House, the like of which cannot be found in the history of legislation.” And while the surrounding commentary is certainly partisan, bordering on hyperbolic, as the above quotation aptly illustrates, their coverage also included meticulous data on the political makeup of the proposed districts.
Under the Democratic plan, which underwent several revisions as it moved through committee, the state’s twenty-one congressional districts were so arranged that twelve contained comfortable Democratic majorities. Whig voters were packed into seven gerrymandered supermajority districts, where their candidates were expected to triumph by large margins, while the remaining two were sufficiently balanced so as to leave the result at least somewhat in doubt. “Were the Whigs to carry the State by ten thousand,” wrote the Journal, “they could elect only seven members of Congress, while the minority would elect fourteen. This at first-blush demonstrates that the bill proposes to disenfranchise one-half of the Whigs in the State.” One Whig house member minced even fewer words when expressing his sentiments regarding the Democratic leadership: “Mr. Taylor denounced the venerable Senator from Fairfield as an old bald-headed traitor to the democracy.”
The newspaper also published a series of cartoons designed to illustrate the “monstrous character” of the proposed scheme. In an homage to The Boston Gazette’s famous salamander drawing, various beasts, from the mundane to the grotesquely imaginary, are depicted as stand-ins for the most contorted districts.
Perhaps the least inspiring of these is District 17, whose appending of Summit County onto the shoulders of Wayne and Holmes is animalized as the “Quail,” although a fairly substantial leap of imagination is required in order to see the resemblance. The adjacent caption goes to the trouble of explaining that “the above is a representation of a ‘BIRD,’ which a man named Spalding accidentally got ‘in his hand’ a short time ago.” I’m glad we cleared that one up. But despite enduring the “pressure of Mr. Spalding’s fingers upon its throat,” the wily bird “darted out of his hand and flew away.”
The cartoon for District 7 depicts the “Richland Roarer,” an abomination of “Half Hoss, half Alligator” that would make Dr. Moreau take a step back and wonder if perhaps this time he’d gone too far. “The Roarer is an animal, which was formerly well known in the Western country,” elaborates the caption, “but which has been growing more and more scarce, until it is doubtful whether it will not become entirely extinct.”
Bad news on that particular front: “The specimen figured above was caught by the Ohio Menagerie Association,…but with their usual ill fortune, they were not able to keep it alive a whole day.” And with that, the Nobel Prize in cryptozoology remained agonizingly out of reach.
District 11 also puts in an appearance as the “Scioto Sea-Horse,” which, somewhat confusingly, appears to be a walrus. Conveniently arranged to isolate several Whig-majority counties from the neighboring district of Mr. Latham and Mr. Byington, this particular specimen of the species Megalatham byingtonius is native to the frozen Northern Ocean, but made its way inexplicably to the valleys of south-central Ohio “by some subterraneous salt-water channel.” “How the creature should be found on dry land,” the caption muses, “at a great distance from any ocean, and in a comparatively southern clime, and that too at the hottest season of the year, is nobody’s business.” The Scioto Sea-Horse regrettably met the same fate as the hapless Richland Roarer: “Some bystanders…on looking at the animal, perceived that the hot weather was too much for him, and declared that he was ‘a gone hoss; his eyes were sot.’ Their judgement was verified by the event. The unfortunate creature stretched out its hind flipper and breathed its last in the early part of the next day.” Tough stuff.
The body count rises still further in the form of the most mystifying of all the beasts in the Midwest Menagerie: the Gerrymander of District 16. In a somewhat baffling departure from the established theme, it bears by far the closest resemblance to the district it purports to represent. Snaking along the Ohio River and hugging the West Virginia border in a manner eerily reminiscent of Governor Gerry’s salamander, the Gerrymander, “an uncommon animal,…was discovered in that part of the state…commonly called the Coal Region.” Expecting “to make very large profits” by capturing the brute alive, Mr. Byington and his friends give chase but are thwarted by Mr. Schenck, who, the caption takes pains to point out, “did not belong to the menagerie association.” Wounded by Mr. Schenck, who apparently “dislik[ed] the savage look and dangerous character of the varmint,” and clearly also hindered by the evolutionary train wreck of its ridiculous wing appendages, the Gerrymander falls victim to a shocking display of unlicensed poaching. “As soon as they got sight of it,” Mr. Schenck and his “select committee of bold sportsmen” brutally slaughter the now possibly extinct wild Gerrymander: “They fired a general volley and the ugly varmint dropped dead in its tracks.” Even death would not spare the poor beast from further indignity; “its skin was immediately taken off and stuffed, and it will be exhibited through the state for the gratification of the curious.”
Finally, there’s the “Licking Water-whelp,” which sees the head of District 9’s Licking County precariously attached to the body of Perry and Morgan. A fish or not a fish? Zero clarity may be derived from the cartoon depiction, whose half-leg half-flipper protuberances appear uniquely unsuited to both walking and swimming. Mr. Taylor, whose district the whelp steadfastly protects from its neighboring Whig strongholds, only adds to the confusion. “You call that a fish do you?” he exclaims upon first sighting the creature. “Why, it is an infernal WATER-WHELP!” “It resembles you around the head,” Mr. Byington helpfully informs Mr. Taylor, “and has a most awful red mouth.” Readers seeking closure regarding the whelp’s fate are left on a nail-biting cliff-hanger. “Next morning the Tin Pan was seen knocked into a cocked hat,” the tale cryptically concludes, “and the Water-whelp was gone.”
The Whigs, despite lacking the votes to obstruct the Democrats’ designs, were nevertheless determined to not go gentle into that good night of electoral oblivion. And in a move reminiscent of the futile attempts of the Democratic members of the Wisconsin state senate to obstruct Scott Walker’s union busting, albeit a considerably more successful one, the Whig representatives in the Ohio legislature resigned en masse in order to deprive the majority of a quorum to pass the gerrymander. “It was designed to remain in force for ten years, and for that length of time to perpetuate the political power of this reckless faction,” wrote the Whigs, in a lengthy letter explaining their actions that was published in the Journal. “Under these circumstances, we thought that our duty as representatives required of us to return to the people again that power, which we could no longer exercise for their benefit, but which was used by others to their lasting injury.”
Lamenting that the “iron despotism” of the leadership had prevented the special session from even considering the pressing issue of banking reform, the Whigs drew a line in the sand. “Their business is destruction,” bemoans the letter, “other men must re-build the ruins of their legislation.” Fuming at what they saw as the Whigs’ dereliction of duty, the Democrats took to the press and accused their opponents of “absquatulation,” an absurd made-up pseudo-Latin term popular in the 1830s meaning to abscond, decamp, or swiftly get the hell out of Dodge. And so it was that the Licking Water-whelp, the Richland Roarer, the Scioto Sea-Horse, the Gerrymander, and even the elusive Quail never saw the light of day. The special session came to an end without a redistricting plan being passed, and the congressional elections would be delayed until 1843 to allow a new legislature to take up the mantle.
There was still time for one last parting shot in the great Ohio almost gerrymander of 1842, with both sides attempting to use the dispute to their advantage in the campaign for the November state elections. “They [the voters] will place their iron heel upon the men who resort to such partisan machinery,” warned the Whigs in the conclusion to their resignation letter, “and once more fill the halls of legislation with those who will alone regard the highest interests of the state, the prosperity of the people, instead of offering up both at the altar of this Moloch of a party.” But their appeal fell on deaf ears. The voters returned another Democratic majority to Columbus, the Whig governor Thomas Corwin lost his reelection bid by the narrow margin of eighteen hundred votes, and a new congressional district map was subsequently passed without incident. In the elections the next fall, the Democrats won twelve of the state’s twenty-one U.S. House seats, enough to win back their overall control of the chamber, in a landslide rebuke of the unpopular Tyler administration.
The Ohio near gerrymander of 1842 stands out not because it failed but because of the unusually sophisticated nature of the attempt. Gone were Patrick Henry’s ham-fisted efforts to graft the partisanship of the state’s ratification delegates onto the counties they represented, a key reason why his bid to gerrymander Madison out of the First Congress was doomed to failure. Had the proposed redistricting plan been allowed to go into effect, and it was only the mass exodus of the Whigs from Columbus that prevented this from happening, they surely would have been consigned to minority status for the remainder of the decade. The Ohio plan bears by far the closest resemblance of all the gerrymanders so far considered to the REDMAP plans of the twenty-first century, making use as it did of the now ubiquitous twin gerrymandering strategies of “cracking” and “packing.”
The logic proceeds thus: a gerrymander is most successful at disadvantaging the minority party when it distributes their support in the least efficient way possible across geographic space. On the flip side, the majority party’s support must be arranged in an optimally efficient configuration for them to maximally benefit. The best way to achieve this is to “pack” some of the supporters of the minority party into as few supermajority districts as possible, where they run up huge majorities with large numbers of wasted votes. Then those crafting the gerrymander must also “crack” their adversary’s remaining supporters into districts where they will lose by smaller margins, allowing the gerrymandering party to capture the bulk of the contested seats. At its core, gerrymandering is an exercise in maximizing the wasted votes of your opponents, while minimizing the wasted votes of your own supporters. Any votes cast in a losing effort are considered wasted, as are any surplus votes that are unnecessary for securing victory.
The Democrats created seven packed Whig districts, alongside twelve cracked districts that they would be able to secure by smaller margins. Even if the Whigs were to win the popular vote comfortably, they would be able to pick up only the two swing districts, and still find themselves on the end of a twelve-to-nine seat deficit. While not yet anywhere close to the level of sophistication exhibited by REDMAP, the 1842 Ohio plan at least contains the seed of what would eventually germinate into the modern gerrymander. And a decade later, the Whigs, this time in the state of Tennessee, exacted their revenge. As was the case with James Madison’s Henrymander, the intended victim would go on to be president of the United States.
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Nobody liked Andrew Johnson. Branded by the National Constitution Center as “the most-maligned president in U.S. history,” and jointly considered in a 2019 Siena College poll of presidential experts the worst man ever to occupy the Oval Office, he remains one of only three chief executives to be impeached by the House of Representatives. In his home state of Tennessee, he displayed a remarkable aptitude throughout his political career for alienating his supporters almost as effectively as he did his opponents. If Johnson, an unapologetic racist, white supremacist, and slave owner who was allegedly drunk at his own inauguration, had one redeeming feature, it might have been that he was the only Democratic senator from the South to remain loyal to the Union during the Civil War. This was almost certainly the reason why Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, selected Johnson, a Democrat, to be his running mate in the 1864 presidential election: a bipartisan gesture and call for unity amid the bloodiest conflict in the nation’s history.
What began as the first, and to date only, cross-party presidential ticket would less than a year later famously become something much more, when Johnson ascended to the presidency not on his own merit but by virtue of an assassin’s bullet at Ford’s Theatre. “Sic semper tyrannus!” exclaimed John Wilkes Booth as he entered the presidential box that April evening brandishing a .44-caliber derringer pistol, “thus always unto tyrants.” But what he could not have known is that the man he was elevating to the Oval Office would himself soon be branded a tyrant by the Radical Republicans in Congress during his impeachment hearings. The story of how Andrew Johnson became president of the United States began with a gerrymander.
Johnson was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1808. His father a town constable and his mother a laundress, the family struggled to make ends meet, and neither Johnson nor his two siblings were able to attend school during their childhoods. When Andrew was three, his father died suddenly, the victim of an apparent heart attack shortly after rescuing three other men from drowning. His death only worsened the family’s financial travails. At age ten, Johnson began serving as an apprentice to a local tailor, eventually learning to read and devouring the books that customers would bring to the shop. A lifelong love of reading would go on to serve as a substitute for his lack of formal education. He eventually settled in Tennessee after running away from his apprenticeship, establishing his own successful tailoring business in Greeneville before he had turned eighteen. After dabbling in local politics for several years, he sold his tailoring business upon winning election to the Tennessee state senate in 1841, with the financial windfall allowing him to focus on his political career full time. It also facilitated the purchase of several slaves, who worked his 350-acre farm outside Greeneville.
In an early preview of the later bipartisan presidential ticket, Johnson did not consistently vote with either the Democratic Party, of which he was a member, although not always in good standing, or the newly formed Whigs. He clashed frequently with other Democrats, including James K. Polk, whose 1844 presidential campaign he nominally supported but who later shunned his requests for patronage. By this time Johnson had been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, defeating his Whig opponent, John A. Aiken, by fewer than five hundred votes in their 1842 contest. The political maneuvers he engaged in during that campaign to consolidate Democratic support in his district, including the displacement of a Whig postmaster, drew particular ire from the Whig establishment in Nashville.
In a manner reminiscent of George Burrington more than a century before, Johnson built his political career as a populist advocate for the poor and downtrodden. This notably did not extend to his positions on slavery, where he remained an ardent anti-abolitionist. He won three more congressional elections between 1845 and 1849 and campaigned tirelessly, albeit unsuccessfully, for the passage of his pet project, the Homestead Bill, which would have opened up the government lands on the western frontier to new settlers. His fifth campaign for Congress in 1851 had also further divided him from his fellow Democrats, who rallied around an alternative candidate, Landon Carter Haynes, in a bid to unseat him. Though he won that election by sixteen hundred votes, with the Whigs, delighting at the interparty squabbling, not even putting up a candidate, Johnson could now no longer rely on the support of his own party.
Sensing an opportunity to capitalize on the Democrats’ internal divisions, the somewhat grandiosely named Gustavus Adolphus Henry, newly elected as the Whig leader of the Tennessee House of Representatives, sought to capitalize on the upcoming redistricting of the state’s congressional seats. On the chopping block were the last remaining vestiges of the Democratic political establishment, which had been largely swept out of office in the 1850–51 Whig landslide. Those elections had also seen the party take control of both houses of the state legislature and the governorship.
Henry first sought to gerrymander the boundaries of the state legislature, in a bid to cement Whig control for the remainder of the decade. He then set his sights on Johnson’s congressional district, bringing in numerous Whig enclaves that made his reelection close to impossible. The Henrymander, dormant for more than half a century since Patrick Henry’s machinations of 1788, had risen again. “The members of the legislature have, by virtue of the authority in them vested, amended the ancient word ‘Gerry-mander,’ so as to make the name harmonize with modern facts,” wrote the Nashville Union on February 28, 1852. “Henceforth it is to be set down in the political vocabulary as ‘Henry-mander.’ Whig papers will please note this alteration.”
Johnson was stunned and disheartened by the development. “I have no political future,” he lamented, “my political garments have been divided and upon my vesture do they intend to cast lots.” Facing, as the Union somewhat hyperbolically described it, “a majority fraudulently obtained, by an act of dishonest, unjust, unconstitutional, and tyrannical legislation,” Johnson opted not to run for reelection. He was not the only one. His fellow Democratic congressman Isham G. Harris, whose district had also been carved up by Henry, also declined to seek another term, and those two seats were enough to flip the six-to-four Democratic majority in the state delegation. The Whigs also captured sixteen of the twenty-three state senate seats, and scraped their way to a narrow thirty-nine-to-thirty-six edge in the state house. But Johnson’s political future, not to mention his garments, were about to become a whole lot brighter. Having been denied his House seat, he decided instead to run for governor. And in a plot twist that a Hollywood screenwriter might reject as too implausible to be believed, he found himself facing off against none other than his old nemesis: Gustavus Adolphus Henry.
Photograph of Andrew Johnson by Mathew Brady, circa 1875.
But first, he still needed to win the Democratic nomination. Even that small triumph, given the bridges he had burned within his own party, was an uphill battle. When the Democratic State Convention convened in Nashville in April 1853, the attorney Andrew Ewing was the preferred candidate of the majority of delegates. But believing that Johnson’s record made him better equipped to appeal to the Whig voters whose support would be necessary to win the general election, Ewing withdrew, and Johnson found himself unopposed for the nomination. He was also perfectly positioned to turn the Henrymander narrative against his opponent in the debates and the pages of the popular press. And, in a move to further bolster his bipartisan credentials, Johnson even endorsed a Whig, Nathaniel Taylor, for his former House seat. “After an exciting canvass,” writes the biographer Frank Moore, “Mr. Johnson was chosen Governor,” defeating his opponent in a close race, which saw him win 51 percent of the vote. Henry, stinging from his defeat at the hands of the man whose political career he thought he had just ended, retired from politics entirely.
Despite the apparent success of the Whig gerrymander, it was Johnson who would have the last laugh. In the wake of the landslide defeat of their candidate Winfield Scott in the 1852 presidential election, the Whig Party itself swiftly dissolved, and the Democrats once again returned to power in Nashville. Johnson, still harboring designs on a return to Congress, then seized the opportunity created by an 1857 vacancy in one of Tennessee’s two U.S. Senate seats. At the time, senators were chosen not by a popular vote of the people but by the state legislature, a practice that Johnson had ironically attempted to end. Now, in the wake of the Whigs’ collapse, he was well poised to take advantage of the sizable Democratic majority in that body. And while the dwindling Whig minority denounced him as “the vilest radical and most unscrupulous demagogue in the Union,” his stature as the most prominent Democratic politician in the state made his election a near inevitability.
Less than four years into his Senate term, the Confederacy secession crisis kicked off. For Johnson, there was never any question of where he stood. “I will not give up this government…. No; I intend to stand by it,” he proclaimed in a passionate 1861 speech on the Senate floor, “and I invite every man who is a patriot to…swear by our God, and all that is sacred and holy, that the Constitution shall be saved, and the Union preserved.”
Returning to Tennessee, which was to hold a popular referendum on the question of secession that June, Johnson risked life and limb to campaign in favor of remaining in the Union. He endured numerous threats on his life, sometimes even positioning a gun on the lectern before him during speeches, but his efforts were in vain. After the people of Tennessee voted overwhelmingly in favor of secession, Johnson fled the state through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky, coming under fire from secessionists along the way and leaving his wife and children behind in Greeneville. But his very public displays of loyalty to the Union had earned him a new admirer in the form of Abraham Lincoln, who appointed him the military governor of Tennessee in 1862. The man who had long harbored dreams of the presidency, while never really holding out much hope that they would ever be realized, had now positioned himself at the top of the list to be Lincoln’s running mate in 1864. The unlikely chain of events that would lead to his ascension to the Oval Office had been set in motion, much to the chagrin of the enemies who had sought to destroy him, by a gerrymander.
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It is evident that prior to the 1970s, gerrymandering was very much the exception rather than the norm. The few isolated examples that stand out in the historical record are in stark contrast to the ubiquity of the practice in twenty-first-century America. Lacking the constitutional mandate to redistrict every ten years, politicians did so only when it was necessary or expedient. They lacked the incentives to fully embrace the gerrymander as an everyday, or at least every-decade, component of the political battleground. And, as was emphasized at the conclusion of the previous chapter, historical gerrymandering in the United States was not particularly effective. Not only was the political will often lacking within the gerrymandering party itself, as Patrick Henry and the Locofocos discovered to their detriment, but political norms cautioned against everything but the relatively mild forms of electoral distortion that have been highlighted so far.
Line drawers expressed far less willingness to depart from county, municipal, or community boundaries when crafting districts, and even the salamanders and water-whelps that were pilloried in the pages of the popular press were far more compact and regularly shaped than most of the districts in use today. But perhaps more significantly, the tools to implement an effective gerrymander were simply not available to the politicians of the nineteenth century. Effective gerrymandering requires not only detailed and granular data on prior electoral behavior to manipulate the district populations but also the ability to forecast how those districts will behave under a variety of hypothetical future electoral conditions. Otherwise, a gerrymander that works effectively for one or two elections might collapse under the weight of even relatively minor popular vote swings or turnout variations in subsequent contests. This was what occurred with the Whig gerrymander in Tennessee.
Gerrymandering originated as a macro rather than micro phenomenon, one that placed a thumb on the large-scale levers of democracy, rather than tinkering with its individual cogs and gears. It would not be until the middle of the twentieth century that the availability of detailed election data down to the individual city-block level allowed us to remove the cover from our democratic machine and expose its inner workings. And it was not until the twenty-first that computer technology became sufficiently advanced to permit us to hack into the system itself and alter the individual lines of code. All of these developments will be addressed in good time. But before leaving history in our wake and setting sail once and for all upon the seas of modernity, there’s one final example of nineteenth-century gerrymandering that demands attention. It stands out mostly because it concerns a type of gerrymandering that has not so far been considered, and will not be returned to again in this book: the gerrymandering of state boundaries themselves. It also stands out because of its devastating effectiveness.