August 22, 2024

The streets of Chicago have been bustling with visitors, law enforcement officers, and a few protesters for the Democratic National Convention. This is the twenty-sixth convention that’s been held in Chicago, first because the Republican Party was centered here in its early days and because Chicago was a major railroad hub, and then because Democrats had a power base here in the twentieth century. Baltimore, Maryland, is second on the list of host cities, with thirteen conventions under its belt. 

While we are now so accustomed to political conventions that they seem to be part of the landscape, they were not part of the original framework of American democracy. They grew out of the expansion of the suffrage in the early 1800s, and their development was an important part of the evolution of our democratic system. 

In the early years of the American Republic, political leaders were faced with the practical problem of how, exactly, to create a democratic government. The Constitution provided a framework for how such a government should work, but it didn’t lay out how voters would interact with that framework. At first, that gap between voters and the machinery of politics didn’t seem to be much of a problem, since George Washington was so popular he essentially ran unopposed and the presidential electors voted for him unanimously. But then President Washington announced he would not run for a third term, and there was no consensus on who should take his place.

The men who framed the Constitution opposed political parties, but partisanship had sprung up during Washington’s administration nonetheless as voters divided into the Federalist Party, which generally supported the Washington administration, and the Democratic-Republicans, who worried that Washington’s supporters were leading the country toward aristocracy. (Despite their name, the Democratic-Republicans were not analogous to today’s Democrats or Republicans.)

In 1796 the congressional delegations of each party met informally to figure out which candidate they would support. The rule of “King Caucus,” as its detractors would call this system, was short lived. The Federalists flirted with secession in 1815 and never recovered. By 1820, they didn’t even nominate a candidate, permitting incumbent president James Monroe, a Democratic-Republican, to run virtually unopposed. 

Many political observers believed that the triumph of the Democratic-Republicans would mean that the nation had finally outgrown partisanship, and they boasted of Monroe’s “Era of Good Feelings.” With politics seemingly in harmony, states extended the vote far more widely than they had done before, dumping the property qualifications that had previously excluded significant numbers of white men. By the 1840s, virtually all white men could vote. (By 1858, free Black men could vote only in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont, and women could not vote.)

Universal white male suffrage changed the American political scene. Early political leaders had assumed that elites like them would always run the government, but that idea exploded in 1824 when the dominant Democratic-Republican party split into factions. Only a quarter of the party’s congressmen showed up at that year’s caucus, and four different candidates ran for office. 

Andrew Jackson won a plurality of both the popular vote and the electoral vote—although not enough to win—and yet lost the election when it went to the House of Representatives. Americans watched as established politicians overrode their votes in order to put John Quincy Adams, the son of former president John Adams, into the presidency. For all politicians talked of equality, it seemed a wealthy elite was taking over the country. 

When Jackson handily won the 1828 election, he declared that the president is the direct representative of the people. 

Voters approved that sentiment and began to demand more of a voice in the choosing of their presidential candidates. In 1831, using a convention model that men used at the state and local level for choosing political candidates, the Anti-Masonic Party called supporters together to choose a presidential and vice presidential candidate. Jackson’s new political party, the Democrats, and the party that rose to oppose the Democrats, known as the Whigs, followed suit. 

Conventions did more than give voters a say in their presidential and vice presidential candidates, though. They created a national party structure that whipped up enthusiasm for candidates, so that all those new voters would work to get their candidates into office. That structure and enthusiasm, in turn, brought ordinary voters into the previously bloodless machinery of democracy the Framers engineered. 

Campaigns ceased to be dignified affairs in which elite politicians allowed themselves to be drafted to serve. While until the end of the nineteenth century it would be considered unseemly for a candidate to campaign personally, other political leaders barnstormed the country on behalf of their candidates, and voters held parades and barbecues and vocally demonstrated their support for candidates who worked to show that they were men of the people. The patrician William Henry Harrison set the standard for such a show when he won the White House by adopting the symbols of hard cider and a log cabin. 

But for all the growing reputation of political conventions as the place where voters made their will heard, professional politicians still carefully managed delegations to jockey their candidates into the best possible positions for nomination. Famously, Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln began plotting his own elevation at least by early 1860. In his insightful and thorough examination of the 1860 convention, political historian Michael S. Green laid out how Lincoln outmaneuvered the many more popular candidates contending for the Republican presidential nomination that year:

In 1859, Lincoln worked with a colleague, Norman B. Judd, to get the Republican convention of the next year held in Chicago, where Lincoln would have a home court advantage. Then his friends helped push the Illinois Republicans to support him unanimously and, in keeping with the idea that he was a man of the people, dubbed him “The Railsplitter.” Still, Lincoln knew he was not a leading candidate. “My name is new in the field; and I suppose I am not the first choice of a great many,” he wrote to a political operative in spring 1860. “Our policy, then, is to give no offence to others—leave them in a mood to come to us, if they shall be compelled to give up their first love.” 

When Republican delegates met at the hastily constructed hall at the intersection of Lake Street and Market Street in Chicago that held about 10,000 people, Lincoln’s allies sang his praises and negotiated. Perhaps as important, as Green explains, one of Lincoln’s key men got the right to seat the delegations. He isolated New York’s, whose members were strong for their own William Henry Seward, keeping it apart from the state delegations that might be persuaded to climb on board the Seward bandwagon. Those undecided delegations Lincoln’s ally kept close to the Lincoln supporters. 

As the balloting got underway, the first ballot had Seward ahead with 173.5 votes but without enough to get the nomination, and Lincoln second with 102. On the second ballot, Lincoln’s numbers climbed until they were almost equal to Seward’s, and midway through the counting of the third ballot, it was clear Lincoln would be the 1860 Republican nominee.  

The minutiae of politics had given the country a candidate who would change the course of history. 

Green quotes journalist Murat Halstead, who was at the convention: “There was a moment’s silence,” Halstead wrote. “The nerves of the thousands, which through the hours of suspense had been subjected to terrible tension, relaxed, and as deep breaths of relief were taken, there was a noise in the wigwam like the rush of a great wind, in the van of a storm—and in another breath, the storm was there. There were thousands cheering with the energy of insanity.”  

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Notes:

https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtid=2&psid=3541

Michael S. Green, Lincoln and the Election of 1860 (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011). 

Leonard D. White, The Jacksonians: A Study in Administrative History (Macmillan, 1954).

Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840 (University of California Press, 1970).