Extraordinary violence and the congressional struggle to create free, fair, and open elections in the nineteenth-century U.S.

ABSTRACT

The expansive, locally run, and uproariously violent United States was a testing ground for basic questions of democracy in an age of expansion, emancipation, and proletarianization. Over the nineteenth century, the U.S. led the way in extending the vote and in efforts to retract the vote from those who already had it, and thus became a key site for establishing the ways that democracies would respond to violence intended to recast vote outcomes. The effort to define the line between legitimate and illegitimate political violence and to establish the remedies of election contests to overturn disputed returns helps us see the complicated, sometimes paradoxical, relationship between voting processes and political outcomes. Over the late nineteenth century, U.S. elections were outrageously violent and also surprisingly open to working-class engagement, including of freedmen. Violence both oppressed Black southerners and offered them a path to victory. Reducing violence in politics was crucial for opening access to women, denied the vote virtually everywhere in the United States in the nineteenth century, and physically frailer men, and it was also crucial for eliminating Black participation in formal politics throughout the south. The system that emerged in the early twentieth century, purged of most election-day violence (but rooted upon constant threats of violence otherwise) and of contested elections was both fairer on its face and grotesquely more restrictive in practice. From these juxtapositions arise questions that still trouble the United States today, questions about the line between a valid and an unfair election, and remedies for injured voters.

KEYWORDS:

• Contested elections
• electoral violence
• disfranchisement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Chester H. Rowell, A Historical and Legal Digest of all the Contested Election Cases in the House of Representatives of the United States from the First to the Fifty-Sixth Congress, 1789–1901 (Washington: GPO, 1901), 3 (hereafter, Rowell, Historical and Legal Digest); M. St. Clair Clarke and David A. Hall, Cases of Contested Elections in Congress, from the Year 1789 to 1834, Inclusive (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1834), 442–7, 457; and Rowell, Digest of Contested-Election Cases in the Fifty-First Congress (Washington: GPO, 1891), 51^st Congress, 2nd Session, Mis Doc No. 137, 158, 169–71 (hereafter Rowell, Digest, 51^st).

² Richard Franklin Bensel, The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Gideon Cohn-Postar, “‘Mind How You Vote, Boys’: The Crisis of Economic Voter Intimidation in the Late-Nineteenth Century United States, 1873–1896,” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2020); Thavolia Glymph, “‘I Could Not Come in. Unless over their Dead Bodies’: Dignitary Offenses,” Law and History Review 38, no. 3 (August, 2020): 585–98; Justin Behrend, “Fear of Reenslavement: Black Political Mobilization in Response to the Waning of Reconstruction,” in William A. Link and James J. Broomall, eds., Rethinking American Emancipation: Legacies of Slavery and the Quest for Black Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 146–63; Justin Behrend, Reconstructing Democracy: Grassroots Black Politics in the Deep South after the Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015), 197, 215, 230, 251; Jeffrey A. Jenkins, “Partisanship and Contested Election Cases in the House of Representatives, 1789–2002,” Studies in American Political Development 18 (Fall 2004): 112, 115; and Richard H. Pildes, “Democracy, Anti-Democracy, and the Canon,” Constitutional Commentary 17, no. 2 (June 2000): 295–319.

³ The era of Reconstruction closing in 1876 had deep roots in national historiography and remains standard in many textbooks. In part this emerged from narratives, since critiqued, of the alleged centrality of the Compromise of 1877, an endpoint that made it easy for pro-disfranchisement scholars to blame the white north for the end of Reconstruction. See, especially, William Archibald Dunning, Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1907); and E. Merton Coulter, The South during Reconstruction, 1965–1877 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1947).

The last gasp of the 1876 end point was, ironically, a book that explicitly questioned it but had to be framed around it because of the requirements of the series it appeared in: Eric Foner’s still-indispensable Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988). Already by that time, many of the works that Foner termed post-revisionist described a briefer Reconstruction moment of possibility that had passed by the 1865 decision not to divide land or perhaps even earlier. Works like Foner’s that emphasized the achievements of Black political organizing naturally extended the chronology as it became clear that Black political successes at the local level lasted into the 1880s and 1890s. Among the many works that advanced this idea, the most-influential remains Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet. By 2006, a collection of leading Reconstruction scholars largely questioned or dismissed 1876 as the breaking point in Thomas J. Brown, Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Perhaps the work that most closely adheres to the old chronology – resisting both the short Reconstruction of pessimistic post-revisionism and the long Reconstruction of more optimistic takes – is Mark Wahlgren Summers, The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); which details how reunion alone posed multiple complications.

Additionally, the 1876 narrative came under strain from historians’ growing skepticism of the narrative of the so-called “Compromise of 1876” that allegedly marked the end of the era. The best narrative of the 1876 story is C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1951), but many scholars critiqued its basic premises, including Allan Peskin, “Was There a Compromise of 1877?” Journal of American History 60, no. 1 (June 1973): 63–75; C. Vann Woodward, “Yes, There Was a Compromise of 1877,” Journal of American History 60, no. 1 (June 1973): 215–223; Michael Les Benedict, “Southern Democrats in the Crisis of 1876–77: A Reconsideration of Reunion and Reaction,” Journal of Southern History 46, no. 4 (November 1980): 489–524; Keith Ian Polakoff, The Politics of Inertia: The Election of 1876 and the End of Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973); and Vincent DeSantis, “Rutherford B. Hayes and the Removal of the Troops and the End of Reconstruction,” in Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, eds., Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 417–50. See also Michael F. Holt, By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008); and Gregory P. Downs, “The Mexicanization of American Politics: The United States’ Transnational Path from Civil War to Stabilization,” American Historical Review 117, no. 2 (April 2012): 387–409.

⁴ Alan I. Abramowitz, “Why Voter Suppression Probably Won’t Work: Voting Procedures, Turnout, and Vote Margins in the 2020 Election,” Sabato’s Crystal Ball, https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/why-voter-suppression-probably-wont-work/ (accessed February 3, 2022); Yoder, et al., “How Did Absentee Voting Affect the 2020 U.S. Election?” Science Advances 7 (December 2021): 52, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abk1755; Hood III and Bullock III, “Much Ado about Nothing?: An Empirical Analysis of the Georgia Voter Identification Statute,” State Politics and Policy Quarterly 12, no. 4 (December 2012): 394–414; Hannah L. Walker, Michael C. Herron, and Daniel A. Smith, “Early Voting Changes and Voter Turnout: North Carolina in the 2016 General Election,” Political Behavior (2019): 841–69; and Enrico Cantoni and Vincent Pons, “Strict Id Laws Don’t Stop Voters: Evidence from a U.S. Nationwide Panel, 2008–2018,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 136, no. 4 (November 2021):2615–60. Other political scientists have argued that the difficulty in finding general impacts on voter turnout masks differential impact on minority groups. See, particularly, Hajnal, Lajevardi, and Nelson, “Voter Identification Laws and the Suppression of Minority Votes,” Journal of Politics 79, no. 2 (April 2017): 363–79; Barreto et al., “The Racial Implications of Voter Identification Laws in America,” American Politics Research 47, no. 2 (March 2019): 238–49; Bernard L. Fraga and Michael G. Miller, “Who Do Voter ID Laws Keep from Voting,” Journal of Politics 84, no. 2 (April 2022): 1091–1105; Phoebe Henninger, Marc Meredith, and Michael Morse, “Who Votes without Identification? Using Individual-Level Administrative Data to Measure the Burden of Strict Voter Identification Laws,” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 18, no. 2 (June 2021): 256–86; and John Kuk, Zoltan Hajnal, and Nazita Lajevardi, “A Disproportionate Burden: Strict Voter Identification Laws and Minority Turnout,” Politics, Groups, and Identities 10, no. 1 (2022): 126–34.

⁵ Richard M. Valelly, The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

⁶ Morales-Doyle and Sanders, “Guns and Voting,” Brennan Center for Justice, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/policy-solutions/guns-and-voting (accessed September 18, 2023).

⁷ And the Senate, of course, as its own judge, but U.S. Senate races produced different forms of contests until the 1913 ratification of the 17^th Amendment providing for direct election of U.S. Senators.

⁸ Marie Garber and Abe Frank, Contested Elections and Recounts 1: Issues and Options in Resolving Disputed Federal Elections (Washington, DC: GPO, 1990), 3; John Thomas Dempsey, “Control by Congress over the Seating and Disciplining of Members” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1956), 14–17; Henry Dawes, “The Mode of Procedure in Cases of Contested Elections,” Journal of Social Science 2 (1870): 56–67; De Alva Stanwood Alexander, History and Procedure of the House of Representatives (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1916), 314–28; Jenkins, “Partisanship and Contested Election Cases,” 113; Vincent M. Barnett Jr. “Contested Congressional Elections in Recent Years,” Political Science Quarterly 54, no. 2 (June 1939): 187–215; C.H. Rammelkamp, “Contested Congressional Elections,” Political Science Quarterly 20, no. 3 (Sept. 1905): 421–42; Morton Stavis, “A Century of Struggle for Black Enfranchisement in Mississippi: From the Civil War to the Congressional Challenge of 1965—and Beyond,” Mississippi Law Journal 57, no. 3 (December 1987): 591–676; Sean J. Wright, ”The Origin of Disputed Elections: Case Studies of Early American Contested Congressional Elections,” Albany Law Review 81, no. 2 (2017–2018): 609–648; Thomas B. Reed, “Contested Elections,” North American Review, 151, No. 404 (July 1890), 113–14; Rowell, Historical and Legal Digest, 3; Clarke and Hall, Cases of Contested Elections in Congress; Rowell, Digest, 51^st, 3; Edward Foley, Ballot Battles: The History of Disputed Elections in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); and James C. Scott and Brian L. Lawson, “The Political Economy of Voting Rights Enforcement in America’s Gilded Age: Electoral College Competition, Partisan Commitment, and the Federal Election Law,” American Political Science Review 93, no. 1 (March 1999): 115–31.

⁹ Jenkins, in the most-complete recent study of contested elections cases, wrote that there were no studies focused exclusively on contested elections published between 1946 and 2006. Jenkins, “Partisanship and Contested Election Cases,” 112; John Mercer Langston, From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol or The First and Only Negro Representative in Congress from the Old Dominion (Hartford, CT: American Publishing, 1894), 476.

¹⁰ Office of History and Preservation, Black Americans in Congress, 1870–2007 (Washington: GPO, 2008), 162. Even this overstates the number of cases in the early years of Congress, as 21 of the 107 contests between the founding and 1861 turned on a single question: were states required to draw district lines to fit Congress’ 1842 law requiring single-member districts? Jenkins classified the grounds for cases in a different manner than I did, aiming to find the single crucial ground, and grouping together criminal action or intent as one category and serious election irregularities that were not criminal as another. Jenkins, “Partisanship and Contested Election Cases,” 115, 117, 130.

¹¹ To obtain my figures, I followed an imperfect strategy modeled on Jenkins and other social scientists: I looked for usage of the term “intimidation” or “intimidate” or “intimidated” or variants of “violence” and “violent” in the pleadings or head notes for each case, examining all the digests available through 1917. I struck examples that simply invoked intimidation in a pro forma list, or that used violence in metaphoric terms (as to refer to a violent rejection of a legal argument.) I am aware of cases that I did not capture using this method, but where intimidation emerged deeper in the proceedings. Thus, my data should be read as a reasonable underestimate.

I examined the following digests: Rowell, Historical and Legal Digest; Clarke and Hall, Cases of Contested Elections in Congress, from the Year 1789 to 1834; D.W. Bartlett, Cases of Contested Elections in Congress, from 1834 to 1865, Inclusive (Washington: GPO, 1865), (hereafter Bartlett, Cases from 1834 to 1865); Bartlett, Digest of Election Cases. Cases of Contested Election in the House of Representatives from 1865 to 1871, Inclusive (House of Rep. 41^st Congress 2^nd Session,Mis Doc. No. 152382) (Washington: GPO, 1872), (hereafter Bartlett, Digest, 1865 to 1871); J.M. Smith, Digest of Election Cases. Cases of Contested Elections in the House of Representatives, Forty-Second, Forty-Third, and Forty-Fourth Congresses, from 1871 to 1876, Inclusive (Washington: GPO, 1878); J.H. Ellsworth, Digest of Election Cases. Cases of Contested Elections in the House of Representatives, Forty-Fifth and Forty-Sixth Congresses, from the 1876 to 1880, Inclusive (Washington: GPO, 1883), (hereafter Ellsworth, Digest 45^th and 46^th); Ellsworth, Digest, 47^th; William H. Mobley, Digest of Contested-Election Cases Arising in the Forty-Eighth, Forty Ninth, and Fiftieth Congresses (50^th Congress 2^nd Session, Serial Set Vol NO 2657 Session Vol No 4. House Mis Doc 63) (Washington: GPO, 1889), Rowell, Digest, 51^st; Alfred J. Stofer, Digest of Contested-Election Cases in the Fifty-Second Congress (53^rd Congress 3^rd Session. Mis Doc No. 77) (Washington: GPO, 1895); and Merrill Moores, A Historical and Legal Digest of all the Contested Election Cases in the House of Representatives of the United States from the Fifty-Seventh to and Including the Sixty-Fourth Congress, 1901–1917, To Which Are Added the Laws of the United States Relating to Election Contests in the House, Together with Other Laws Relating to the Nomination and Election of Representatives in Congress, with Some Reference to Decided Cases, Being a Continuation of the Digest of Contested-Election Cases by Chester H. Powell (Washington: GPO, 1917).

¹² The difficulty of separating violence from other factors in U.S. history is something historians take for granted, but that other disciplines sometimes struggle to recognize. When I was in graduate school, early Americanist Michael Zuckerman told me about his experience studying violence. Despite significant work on classes and public talks on the issue of Violence in U.S. History, he did not take up writing a longer work. The reason could be summed up in the problem of a title. What if you could simplify a book or essay called “Violence in U.S. History” merely by eliminating two words: “Violence” and “in”? One risks ends up simply retelling the story of U.S. history with the violence mentioned, rather than swept aside. Four years ago, a questioner at a public workshop asked us about studying and teaching violent aspects of U.S. history. Crystal Feimster responded that the question missed the point: Violence doesn’t exist apart from U.S. history or U.S. democracy in the 19^th century; violence is U.S. history and it is 19^th century U.S. democracy.

¹³ Clarke and Hall, Cases, 506–7; Rowell, Historical and Legal Digest, 83–84.

¹⁴ Bartlett, Cases from 1834 to 1865, 185–86, 188, 201; and Rowell, Historical and Legal Digest, 145, 147.

¹⁵ Frank Towers wrote that “Baltimore’s 1850s elections should give pause to historians who use vote totals to measure the electorate’s support for party platforms and candidates.” Frank Towers, “Violence as a Tool of Party Dominance: Election Riots and the Baltimore Know Nothings, 1854–1860,” Maryland Historical Magazine 93 (Spring 1998): 6, 11, 145–15, 24–25.

¹⁶ Rowell, Historical and Legal Digest, 154, 156–57; and Bartlett, Cases from 1834 to 1865, 258, 260–63, 266.

¹⁷ Meanwhile, in an Albany, New York state legislative election in 1865, charges of violent claims over the ballot-box prompted a state legislative committee to opine that “a man is not compelled to endanger his life, or to incur risk of bodily injury” to vote and to invoke the Civil War to show the necessity of free voting. “By a long and bloody war we have sought to maintain the right of every citizen freely to express his opinion at the ballot-box.” A Compilation of Cases of Contested Elections to Seats in the Assembly of the State of New York, with the Reports of Committees on Privileges and Elections, and the Action of the House Thereon, From 1777 to 1899, Inclusive (New York: Wynkoop Hallenbeck Crawford Co., 1899), 420–21; Rowell, Historical and Legal Digest, 162, 169, 170, 188–90, 220; Clarke and Hall, Cases, 281, 341, 343, 345, 488, 506, 518–19; and Bartlett, Digest, 1865 to 1871, 384, 428, 461.

¹⁸ Oddly it has been repeated in the popular press that future president James Garfield moved to vacate the seat and that he served on the elections committee that examined the case. The Congressional Globe shows no such motion and records Garfield as speaking in favor of Menard’s claim and voting to confirm Menard in the seat; he was not a member of the Committee on Elections. Rowell, Historical and Legal Digest, 227; Bartlett, Digest, 1865 to 1871, 486, 493; Congressional Globe 40^th Congress, 3^rd Session, February 27, 1869, 1684–85, 1688, 1689, 1696; Deneen L. Brown, “He Was the First Black Man Elected to Congress. But White Lawmakers Refused to Seat Him,” Washington Post, September 21, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/09/21/he-was-the-first-black-man-elected-to-congress-but-white-lawmakers-refused-to-seat-him/; Philip W. Magness, “A Separate Peace Disunion blog,” New York Times, January 8, 2013, https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/08/a-separate-peace-2/; Based on internet searches, it appears that most of these references have their roots in an unsourced mention in early (not most-recent) versions of Lerone Bennett, Jr., Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America, 6th ed. (New York: Penguin, 1993), 487, 650. Interestingly Bennett once attributes the phrase to Garfield but later to a “general belief.” Wikipedia, however, notes that the claim does not fit with Garfield’s recorded vote or motions (though of course it is conceivable Garfield made such a statement privately.) “John Willis Menard,” Wikipedia.com, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Willis_Menard; Office of History and Preservation, Black Americans in Congress, 1870–2007 (Washington: GPO, 2008), 71.

¹⁹ Rowell, Historical and Legal Digest, 249, 259; and Bartlett, Digest, 1865 to 1871, 906, 930.

²⁰ Rowell, Historical and Legal Digest, 243; and Bartlett, Digest, 1865 to 1871, 533, 540, 705–6, 714–15.

²¹ Rowell, Historical and Legal Digest, 241; Bartlett, Digest, 1865 to 1871, 700–3; and George W. McCrary, A Treatise on the American Law of Elections, 4th ed., ed. Henry L. McCuny (Chicago: Callaghan & Co, 1897). 417.

²² Rowell, Historical and Legal Digest, 243–44, 245, 246; and Bartlett, Digest, 1865 to 1871, 722, 728, 742.

²³ Bartlett, Digest, 1865 to 1871, 728.

²⁴ We may doubt whether Washington was speaking frankly about his knowledge or his goals, including when he said he didn’t want “equal rights” but only “peace.” In the highly artificial setting of a deposition, everyone was aware that each question served particular political purposes, so skewed their answers to the moment. At most Washington’s testimony suggests that he understood that presenting himself as a solid Republican but not an agitator for “equal rights” strengthened the case for counting his would-be vote, and the votes of other Black men. Bartlett, Digest, 1865 to 1871, 730; Ellsworth, Digest, 47^th, 551. For examples of careful reading of post-emancipation testimony, taken in different contexts, see legal work like Dylan C. Penningroth, “Everyday Use: A History of Civil Rights in Black Churches,” Journal of American History 107, no. 4 (March 2021): 871–98; Kim Welch, Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Giuliana Perrone, “‘Back into the Days of Slavery’: Slavery, Citizenship, and the Black Family in the Reconstruction Era Courtroom,” Law and History Review 37, no. 1 (February 2019): 125–61; and Melissa Milewski, “Reframing Black Southerners’ Experiences in the Courts, 1865–1950,” Law and Social Inquiry 44, no. 4 (November 2019): 1113–40.

²⁵ Dawes, “The Mode of Procedure in Cases of Contested Elections,” 64–67.

²⁶ Rowell, Historical and Legal Digest, 276, 283; Smith, Digest, 75–76, 104.

²⁷ Rowell, Historical and Legal Digest, 304, 335–38; and Smith, Digest, 356, 363, 366; Ellsworth, Digest 45^th and 46^th, 100, 225, 229–30, 233–34, 272–74, Cohn-Postar, “‘Mind How You Vote, Boys.”

²⁸ Contested-Election Case of Mabson vs. Oates, 47^th Congress, 1^st Session, House of Representatives, Report. No. 938. Washington: GPO, 1882, 8; Ellsworth, Digest 45^th and 46^th, 454, 459, 502; In the Matter of the Contest of Ignatius Donnelly vs. William D. Washburn, for a Seat in the House of Representatives of the Congress of the United States from the Third District of Minnesota. Contestee’s Brief (NO: Pioneer Press, 1878), 23.

²⁹ Data on cases and expenditures from a database I am compiling based on the annual reports of the Attorney General. I wrote some early thoughts on the commissioner/marshal system for trying to protect voting rights from the 1870s-1890s in “The Problem of Enforcement: The Republican Struggle to Protect Voting Rights in Peacetime,” in Orville Vernon Burton and Peter Eisenstadt, ed., Lincoln’s Unfinished Work: The New Birth of Freedom from Generation to Generation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2022): 102–32.

³⁰ The five congresses seated after the elections of 1880, 1888, 1894, 1896, and 1898.

³¹ “Contested elections were the vehicle by which the Republican Party sought to preserve a party organization in the South during the late-nineteenth century,” an “institutional equalizer” to “Democratic-led disfranchisement of African Americans in the South,” Jenkins writes. Between 1789 and 1865, the net gain for the majority party on contested-election seats was five; that was matched between 1865–1869, and the 1869–71 Congress led to 10 flipped seats for Republicans. Jenkins, “Partisanship and Contested Election Cases,” 113, 120, 127, 129, 131.

³² While some scholars emphasize the crass partisan motivation for Republicans to support seating other Republicans, Matthew N. Green’s analysis led him to emphasize that they were moved by “Genuine concern with the use of fraud and violence to repress the black vote.” So, too, did Morton Stavis see these contested election cases as places where “forceful voices spoke out against the denial to blacks of the right to vote.” Contested-Election Case of Lynch vs Chalmers, 47^th Congress 1^st Session, House of Reps, Report No. 931 (Washington DC: GPO, 1882), 10–11, 15; Lynch vs. Chalmers. Testimony in the Contested Election Case of John R. Lynch vs. James R. Chalmers, from the Sixth Congressional District of Mississippi (47^th Congress, 1^st Session, Mis. Doc. No 12) (Washington: GPO, 1882) 70; and Matthew N. Green, “Race, Party, and Contested Elections to the U.S. House of Representatives,” Polity 39, no. 2 (April 2007): 170; Stavis, “A Century of Struggle for Black Enfranchisement,” 612, 633.

³³ Rowell, Historical and Legal Digest, 382–84, 385, 387; and Ellsworth, Digest, 47^th, 434–35, 452, 489–91, 495, 503.

³⁴ The Republican Campaign Text Book for 1882 (Washington: Republican Campaign Committee, Republican National Committee,1882), 10–64.

³⁵ Ibid.

³⁶ Campbell vs. Morey: Papers and Testimony in the Contested-Election Case of J.E. Campbell vs. H.L. Morey, from the Seventh Congressional District of Ohio (Washington: GPO, 1884), 175–76, 242; Rowell, Historical and Legal Digest, 416, 435; Mobley, Digest, 444, 778; and Cohn-Postar, “‘Mind How You Vote, Boys.’”

³⁷ Rowell, Historical and Legal Digest, 431; and Mobley, Digest, 680, 711, 736, 744.

³⁸ Jenkins, “Partisanship and Contested Election Cases,” 127, 129; Black Americans in Congress, 143; my in-progress dataset.

³⁹ Jenkins, “Partisanship and Contested Election Cases,” 119; Rowell, Historical and Legal Digest, 442, 447, 457; and Rowell, Digest, 51^st, 158, 171, 194.

⁴⁰ Rowell, Historical and Legal Digest, 490; Contested Election Case of Thomas E. Watson vs. J.C. C. Black, from the Tenth Congressional District of the State of Georgia (Washington: GPO, 1896), 17, 153, 266; and Cohn-Postar, “‘Mind How You Vote, Boys.’”

⁴¹ Rowell, Historical and Legal Digest, 510, 519–20, 525.

⁴² Rowell, Historical and Legal Digest, 608; and Moores, Historical and Legal Digest, 20; Jenkins, “Partisanship and Contested Election Cases,” 127, 129.

⁴³ Rowell, Historical and Legal Digest, 519–20, 526–28.

⁴⁴ Rowell, Historical and Legal Digest, 527; and Hinds, Precedents, 231–32.

⁴⁵ Rowell, Historical and Legal Digest, 673–75; Green, “Race, Party, and Contested Elections,” 171–72; and Jenkins, “Partisanship and Contested Election Cases.”

⁴⁶ Pildes, “Democracy, Anti-Democracy, and the Canon,” 309–10, 319; Green, “Race, Party, and Contested Elections,” 171–72; Moores, Historical and Legal Digest, 42, 48; Stavis, “Century of Struggle,” 540–1, 633–39; Contested-election Case of Carney vs. Morgan (Washington: GPO, 1914), 28; and Jenkins, “Partisanship and Contested Election Cases,” 129.

⁴⁷ At the edges, cases still arose, like the 1913 battle over Oklahoma’s grandfather clause, ruled discriminatory by a federal judge. Democrats complained that election officials were warned they would be prosecuted federally for following the state law, and that this showed that “intimidation may be through the mind as well as through the body … .You take a man with a family … and tell him if he does not let the negro vote you will put him in the penitentiary, he is not going to take a chance like that.” Pildes, “Democracy, Anti-Democracy, and the Canon,” 309–10, 319; Green, “Race, Party, and Contested Elections,” 171–72; Moores, Historical and Legal Digest, 42, 48, Stavis, “Century of Struggle,” 540–1, 633–39; Contested-election Case of Carney vs. Morgan, 28; and Jenkins, “Partisanship and Contested Election Cases,” 129.

⁴⁸ For examples of early political science works that denounced partisanship and ignored race, see Rammelkamp, “Contested Congressional Elections” and Barnett, “Contested Congressional Elections”

Critiques of this seemingly race blind effort to treat the imposition of Jim Crow as an abstract question of political science include Pildes, “Democracy, Anti-Democracy, and the Canon”; Green, “Race, Party, and Contested Elections,” 177–78; Vallely, Two Reconstructions; and Stavis, “Century of Struggle.”