Voting by Regions (Sectionalism)

A RECURRING TENSION in American history is that between state, local, or regional concerns and national ones. The nation began as distinct colonies, after all, and continued to maintain distinct cultural, ethnic, and religious differences from region to region. It has often proved difficult for voters of a region to consider national interests above the interests of their region. The debate over free silver cut across not only class lines but regional ones, as western farmers sided with William Jennings Bryan and the Populists for free silver, while easterners took the side of their bankers and the gold standard. Slavery and segregation obviously raised sectionalist issues, as they involved laws that primarily affected the south (and in the case of slavery, the territories).

The admission of Missouri into the Union prompted a sectionalist divide between north and south that would recur for the next century and a half. The territory had been acquired as part of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, and applied for statehood in 1819, seven years after the formation of the state of Louisiana. It specifically requested admission as a slave state; some American settlers in Missouri were slave-holding southerners and admission as a free state would mean giving up those slaves. With the country expanding westward, the question raised concerned more than just one state: at issue was the slave-or-free status of the western territories and future states. Northern voters wanted free states, southern voters wanted slave states: a delicate balance between the two existed in Congress, and the admission of more states would tip that balance one way or the other. The Missouri Compromise was designed to preserve that balance, designating new states as slave or free according to their latitude. Thus, Missouri entered the Union as a slave state, while Maine entered as a free state.

Not long after, the 1824 presidential election played out along lines of regional loyalties. Four favorite sons split the vote, none of them winning a majority: Secretary of State John Quincy Adams was a Bay Stater who carried the northeast, the war hero Andrew Jackson appealed to the agrarian south, and Speaker of the House Henry Clay's proposal of the Missouri Compromise won him significant support in the west. William Henry Crawford eventually dropped out of the race after suffering a stroke, but gained support in the Southeast before doing so—notably, though, Democratic-Republicans in the rest of the country ignored their party's support of Crawford and voted with their region instead. When Jackson and his supporters were dissatisfied with Adams's win and Clay's involvement in it, the 1828 election became a vicious rematch that saw mudslinging, Rachel Jackson's death by stress-induced heart attack, and a clear sectionalist bias: Adams won only the states that supported his father in 1800.

In 1832, the first national conventions for nominating party candidates were held, an innovation that was intended to focus the parties on national concerns rather than regional ones, in part to avoid indecisive elections such as that in 1824. The first party to hold a national convention, the Anti-Masonic Party, was also the first third party to operate on a national level, and perhaps had even more to lose to sectionalist disputes. The National Republican and Democratic parties followed suit. Each convention included delegates from all the states, who discussed—and argued over, and made deals regarding, and traded favors related to—the party's campaign platform and selected its candidate. Presidential primaries were instituted in a few states, but did not become de rigeur for more than a century.

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