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  • The Illinois Political Realignment of 1844-1860:Revisiting the Analysis
  • James L. Huston (bio)

In Illinois as well as the rest of the nation, parties underwent continuous upheavals between the inaugurations of James K. Polk and Abraham Lincoln. The Free Soil Party flared into existence in 1848, the Know-Nothing Party (American Party) ruled numerous states for several years in the mid-1850s, the northern Democrats confronted a humiliating decline in numbers, and ultimately the Republicans came to dominate the northern landscape. Quantitative political historians between 1962 and 1990—the new political history—investigated this phenomenon extensively, referred to it as the realignment of the second-party system, and offered an interpretation that has since gone statistically uncontested. They argued that by 1850 the major political parties began to look alike on economic issues, and both the Whigs and Democrats underestimated the forces of temperance agitation and immigration that were upsetting the northern public. At the same time, the slavery issue came to a head in the Kansas-Nebraska Act, simultaneous with, to the eternal frustration of historians, the emergence of the American Party. These forces pulled a goodly portion of northern Democrats away from their party, brought new voters into the system, and realigned group party preferences. By 1860, the Republicans had eliminated the Know-Nothings as an alternative opposition party to the Democrats; the Republicans became the party of evangelical/pietists and especially New Englanders, while the Democrats represented immigrants/non-Yankees and liturgical/non-evangelicals—the latter reflecting the famous ethnocultural interpretation of nineteenth-century politics.1

Since 1990, only a few studies using the statistical apparatus of the new political history have appeared, and instead historians have drifted away from quantitative analysis and have focused instead on the multiple ramifications of the slavery issue by using literary sources. Historians have retreated from quantitative analysis too quickly, however, for the interpretation of the realignment of the 1850s had some holes and omissions. This [End Page 506] essay intends to explore those omissions by scrutinizing the experience of the state of Illinois between 1844 and 1856.

Interpretation of the events of Illinois's antebellum politics comes in three versions. The first, and the traditional one, is that the slavery issue generated the upheaval of the party system.2 The second comes from the quantitative school in the form of the famous ethnocultural interpretation, most notably propagated by Paul Kleppner. The ethnocultural school belittled issues (e.g., slavery, tariff, internal improvements) and instead insisted that religious affiliation and ethnic identification determined party affiliation—evangelicals versus non-evangelicals, Anglo-Saxons versus Irish.3 The third interpretation of antebellum Illinois politics derives from the works of Stephen Hansen and William E. Gienapp. Hansen's monograph, explicitly rejecting ethnocultural considerations, posited that the state had an especially strong North-South division, and the greatest predictor of party strength was geography: the Democrats' stronghold was in southern counties and waned as politics moved northward; the Republicans were the reverse. Hansen detailed the realignment of the 1850s, and, although he dealt with the sudden appearance of the Know-Nothings, he emphatically emphasized the issue of slavery as the generator of the upheaval. Following ideas worked out by Michael F. Holt, Gienapp offered a different version of the ethnocultural interpretation for northern politics. As one of the molders of the new political history interpretation of the realignment of the 1850s, he held to its central propositions of the decline of economic issues and the emergence of the cultural issues of nativism and temperance. In Illinois Gienapp found a weakened nativist movement, but he held that both nativism and the slavery issue enticed Yankees of New England descent to desert the Democrats and become pillars of the Republican Party by 1856, an outcome that reflected Hansen's North-South party division. However, Gienapp summarized that new and young voters flooded into the Republican ranks and that the gateway to their final destination was the Know-Nothing Party.4

These studies had omissions that deserve attention. First, they failed to investigate the Democrats, focusing most attention on the Republicans and nativists. Second, the analyses commenced in 1848 or 1850, but the timing needs to be extended back...

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