Joel H. Silbey

Race, campaign politics, and the realignment in the South

Since the Voting Rights Act of 1965, while Republican candidates have carried the South in presidential elections, the Democratic Party has persisted in winning southern congressional elections. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, this text examines this political phenomenon.

The History of American Electoral Behavior

Concentrating on the American historical experience, the contributors to this volume apply quantitative techniques to the study of popular voting behavior. Their essays address problems of improving conceptualization and classifications of voting patterns, accounting for electoral outcomes, examining the nature and impact of constraints on participation, and considering the relationship of electoral behavior to subsequent public policy.The writers draw upon various kind of data: time series of election returns, census enumerations that provide the social and economic characteristics of voting populations, and individual poll books and other lists that indicate whom the individual voters actually supported. Appropriate statistical techniques serve to order the data and aid in evaluating relationships among them. The contributions cover electoral behavior throughout most of American history, as reflected by collections in official and private archives.Originally published in 1978.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Delegates Fresh from the People: American Congressional and Legislative Behavior

Delegates Fresh from the People: American Congressional and Legislative Behavior Systematic quantitative research in congressional and state legislative history has the same virtues as similar research in other areas: the ability to examine the behavior of large masses of individuals with great precision and to uncover insights and relationships hitherto unknown or only partially understood. History of this kind attempts to refine crude generalizations and impressionistic hunches, to clarify old and contentious problems, and to open up new ideas and problems. If political history is only surface history, as researchers of the Annales school have suggested, that surface still needs to be clearly marked and understood for other purposes.1 Most students of legislative history would reject the Annales stereotype, however. Andrew Jackson once referred to members of a Democratic national convention as delegates fresh from the people. The same imagery with the same meaning reflects one of the prime motivations stimulating recent work in congressional-legislative voting behavior by historians. Most research has been guided by the idea that the study of Congress can be much more than the study of a political institution and its functions; it can also be a study of the political life of the entire society.2

Demythologizing an elite : American presidents in empirical, comparative, and historical perspective

Empirical Perspective: General Characteristics of American Presidents Comparative Perspective: Revolutionaries, Loyalists, and President: Comparative Patterns Revolutionaries, Loyalists, and Presidents: Discriminant Patterns Historical Perspective: Medical and Psychological Histories: Washington to Buchanan Medical and Psychological Histories: Lincoln to Hoover Medical and Psychological Histories: F. Roosevelt to Bush Conclusion Appendices Bibliography Index

The American Party Battle: Election Campaign Pamphlets, 1828-1876

The American Party Battle: Election Campaign Pamphlets, 1828-1876. Volume 1, 1828-1856. Volume 2, 1854-1876. Edited and with an introduction by Joel H. Silbey. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1999. Pp. xxvi, 284. Paper,

After "The First Northern Victory": The Republican Party Comes to Congress, 1855-1856

16.95, ISBN 0-674-02645-4; cloth,

Hegemony of the Market Questioned

39.95, ISBN 0-674-02642-X; Pp. xxvi, 272. Paper,

Liberty, Virtue, and Progress: Northerners and their War for the Union. The American Social Experience Series.

16.95, ISBN 0-674-02646-2; cloth,

The American Political Nation, 1838-1893

39.95, ISBN 0-674-02643-8.) Half a century ago, claptrap was the most popular academic word for American political rhetoric of the Jacksonian era. Scholars agreed that, beneath blasts of scorching invective Whigs and Democrats traded on the stump, they shared the trimming values of spoilsmen and men on the make who used empty insults for theatrical effect and electoral success for personal advancement. In the specific context of southern history Charles S. Sydnor summed up the prevailing views in the following often-quoted sentence: party conflict south of the Potomac, from nullification to the late 1840s, had the hollow sound of a stage duel with tin swords (The Development of Southern Sectionalism, 1819-1848 [Baton Rouge, 1948], p. 316). Contemporary specialists--trained by intellectual and cultural historians to take rhetoric seriously even, or especially, when it seems at its most hackneyed--are likely to read party rhetoric differently. Scholars of nineteenth-century politics now point to antebellum cliches to demonstrate the survival of classical republicanism in a supposedly liberal world and to tease out clashing world views from seemingly mundane party squabbles over tariffs, banks, and canals. Historians who concern themselves with the thoughts and passions of nineteenth-century white men see deep-rooted and abiding conflict where scholars once saw nothing but drab consensus. Joel H. Silbey has done an excellent job of collecting raw materials to document a sophisticated understanding of both consensus and conflict. Political history, ironically, was riding high when scholars dismissed partisan rhetoric as meaningless. Books, articles, and dissertations poured forth on the most obscure party hacks, and graduate students followed the cut-and-thrust of debates between Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and the consensus school as if the outcome really mattered. Today, just as specialists have decided that something was really at stake between the Democrats and the Whigs, the interest in politics has ebbed in American culture: politicians and the historians who study politicians both struggle to find an audience. Without actually saying so Silbey makes the case in this sampler of partisan rhetoric that the civic discourse of nineteenth-century culture, and the white male voters who upheld it, deserve our sustained attention. The two volumes in The American Party Battle: Election Campaign Pamphlets, 1828-1876 share a common introduction. Each volume collects partisan campaign pamphlets arranged chronologically to cover the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras. Silbey combed the archives to obtain representative samples of political argumentation by Jacksonians, Anti-Masons, Democrats, Whigs, Free-Soilers, Know Nothings, National Republicans, secessionists, and Republicans. The coverage is thorough, with a couple of minor exceptions. North and South are well represented, for example, but only a single selection (from Illinois) comes from the West. …

A respectable minority : the Democratic Party in the Civil War era, 1860-1868

After The First Northern Victory: The Republican Party Comes to Congress, 1855-1856 Between its first electoral victories in the congressional races of I854 and Abraham Lincolns triumph in the presidential contest six years later, the Republican party grew from one faction among several opposing the dominant Democrats to a majority position within the Northern electorate. Accounts of its rise to political prominence often have the quality of an American morality play. Determined to resist the further expansion of slavery on the American continent, the Republicans proved able to overcome the hesitations and resistance of the indifferent, the hostile, and those with other agenda. Although Republicans themselves disagreed about timing and the reach of their future policies, there was no question that with their victory in I860, at a minimum, the further expansion of slavery had been checked, a situation which Southern secessionists read clearly, to their ultimate sor-