Slavery or Sheep?
The Antebellum Realignment in Vermont 1840-1860
Christopher H. Achen
Department of Politics
Center for the Study of Democratic Politics
Princeton University
[email protected]
Prepared for presentation at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics weekly seminar,
May 26, 2011. This is a first draft and is not to be cited without the permission of the author.
Abstract
Political scientists and historians have long debated the causes of the dramatic partisan shifts
occurring in realignments. Antebellum Vermont provides an excellent test case. In the 1850s,
Vermont become the most Republican state in the Union, a position it held for a century.
Vermonters were anti-slavery, and in the conventional view, this honorable stance led them to
the GOP. Yet also in this period, Vermonters were anti-Catholic, anti-liquor, and above all, protariff on behalf of their enormous flocks of sheep. These issue positions, too, were shared by the
Republicans. Using population data, agricultural censuses, referendum results, and election
returns from Vermont, this paper carries out a test of whether the pre-Civil War realignment in
Vermont was issue-based, religious identity-based, or the consequence of short-term
retrospections about wool prices and the state of the economy generally.
1
Antebellum Political Historiography1
The rise of the Republican Party in the 1850s had immediate and profound consequences for
American politics. The nature of the Republican founding has continued to shape the nation’s
course to the present day. Antebellum historians have identified several groups as constituting
the initial GOP coalition (for example, Silbey 1985, chap. 9). The first and best-remembered are
the abolitionists—foes of slavery, who came to supply the popular understanding of the terrible
war that followed. But anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic sentiment also mattered in many places.
Indeed, the American Party (―Know-Nothings‖), whose central interest was anti-Catholicism, bid
fair in many states to outcompete the Republicans as the Whigs’ replacement. Temperance
advocates, too, often became prominent GOP spokesmen. Lastly, North-South divisions over
economic policy, including the tariff, internal improvements and other disputes generated by the
divisions between free and slave labor, helped fuel the rise of the purely sectional Republican
party. Historians have been divided over the relative importance of each of these forces.
All are agreed that ―the surge of Republican power,‖ culminating in the election of Lincoln in
1860, was the proximate cause of the Civil War. (The phrase is Silbey’s 1985, chap. 9.) By
emphasizing one or another aspect of the GOP coalition, historians arrive at different causes of
that cataclysm. Was the war ―really‖ about slavery, as the nineteenth century believed? Or were
the differences in Northern and Southern economic systems more central, as Progressive
historians like the Beards (1930) argued? Or did local ethno-cultural divisions, especially along
religious lines, provide a more powerful explanation, with the rhetoric about slavery and tariffs
less important (for example, Holt 1969)? Historical research has demonstrated that no one
answer seems to fit every state. However, especially since the civil rights movement of the
1960s, the historical consensus has moved back to the view that attitudes toward slavery
somehow were the central cause (for example, Sewell 1976). Thus McPherson’s (1988, 158,
chap. 7 ) widely respected study of the Civil War period says about the 1856 presidential
campaign that ―the salient issues were slavery, race, and above all Union‖; and his discussion of
the 1860 campaign is similar. The best known political science study of party realignments takes
the same view (Sundquist 1983, chaps. 4,5).
Most antebellum historians rely on the qualitative analysis of documents—party platforms,
speeches, newspaper editorials, and private letters. Their sure-handedness at sorting reliable
witnesses from the forgetful, partisan, or dishonest, and then entering the minds of people whose
conceptual world may be quite different from the that of the current era, is a methodological skill
that other social scientists are rarely taught. The resulting depth of sympathetic understanding
derived from documents is the marvelous product that historians create, and it has no exact
equivalent elsewhere in the social sciences.
Yet the classic historical method has important limitations when election outcomes are central to
the argument. The point here is not the canard that historians should be borrowing tools or
1
I am grateful for the assistance of the staff of the Vermont State Archives in Montpelier, especially Scott Reilly,
for their advice, and for their assistance in finding and copying a great many pages of handwritten antebellum
election reports.
2
concepts from adjacent social sciences. Valuable as those may be in particular instances,
adherence to textbook methodologies and unified explanatory frameworks makes for bad
historiography. The issue is rather the chasm between what political elites understand and what
ordinary citizens think. The last half century of survey research has demonstrated unequivocally
what thoughtful observers like Lippmann (1922) had spelled out earlier, namely that what
appears in party platforms, newspaper editorials, and the letters of politicians and political
operatives often has little or no resonance in the minds of the voters (Converse 1964; Delli
Carpini and Keeter 1996). The citizenry may adopt the high-flown rhetoric as their own, but
their motives for party choice are often quite different. And if that is true of the relatively welleducated voters of the twenty-first century, then it is at least a plausible hypothesis for the
isolated, mostly rural, and often only partially literate people of the mid-eighteenth century. For
example, Altschuler and Blumin (2000, chap. 4) show that a selection of antebellum men’s
diaries show little engagement with politics. One third never mention it at all (p. 143), and
others report voting without mentioning for whom or what the issues were, even when they go
on at length about other topics closer to home. As Michael Holt 1992, 319) has argued, when a
distinguished historian writes, ―Congress would become for fifteen years the arena of a
continuous battle watched by millions of aroused sectional partisans‖ (Potter 1976, 49), he is
making a strong and doubtful claim. Bassett (1952, 19, cited in Bigelow 1970, 74) more
plausibly concludes from his study of the antebellum Vermont farmer:
His communication was as simple and limited as his travel….Perhaps one out of
three managed to pay for a weekly local newspaper….Yet farmers did not take
much time to read and were suspicious of indirect secondhand booklearning.
Hence to resist the dangers of a foolish ―Civil War synthesis‖ based solely on the thinking of
elites, we need not just the close analysis of documents, but detailed study of disaggregated
election returns as well (Silbey 1964). Of course, some students of the antebellum period,
notably the ―new political historians‖ from the mid-twentieth century, have done that. But to a
political scientist, at least, it is striking how small a role the modern study of election returns has
played in explanations of why the voters chose the Republicans. Even for large swing states in
1860, perhaps the most consequential election the country has ever faced, the literature is thin,
and many states have never been studied at all (Luebke 1971; Gienapp 1986). If one asks, ―Who
voted for Lincoln?‖ or ―Why?‖ the only defensible answer for most places is that we have no
idea.
In hope of partial remediation, this paper takes up the electoral analysis of one small state.
Vermont has been so little studied that it is usually given only glancing mention, or even omitted
entirely, in antebellum political historiography. Gienapp’s (1987) magisterial, multi-state textual
and statistical analysis of the rise of the GOP mentions Vermont on just four pages, and very
briefly in each case. Yet the state was unsurpassed in the speed and enthusiasm of its conversion
to the Republicans in the 1850s. Moreover, as I hope to show, the state had certain unusual
social and economic characteristics that allow a particularly good test of the relative strength of
ideological and economic factors in the dramatic Republican realignment. Thus the paper
attempts to speak to antebellum historiography, but also to the literatures on realignments and on
the development of partisanship in new democracies.
3
Politics in Antebellum Vermont
The Vermont Republican Party came into being at a Montpelier convention in the summer of
1854 (Hand 2002, 6-7). That fall, they captured the governorship with 63% of the vote. Two
years later, the state voted Republican for president by a 78-21 margin, the most one-sided
Republican victory in any state. From then until the gubernatorial election of 1962, Vermont
never voted for a single Democrat for either office, a span of more than a century. Famously,
Vermont and Maine were the only two states to vote for Alf Landon in 1936, but lopsided GOP
victories in Vermont extended throughout the period. For example, in 1896, McKinley carried
Vermont 80-17, his largest margin. In 1924, Calvin Coolidge took the state 78-16, also his
largest margin. And in 1956, Eisenhower won Vermont 72-28, his largest margin as well.
Vermont Democrats were strictly an afterthought until Philip Hoff squeaked into the governor’s
chair with 50.5% of the vote in 1962.
Nineteenth century Vermont is an attractive laboratory for studying the rise of a new
partisanship. The Republican conversion was rapid, widespread, and long lasting, so that trivial
aspects of contemporary politics can be set aside as explanations. For this was not a state where
longstanding partisan loyalties slowed the absorption of a new alignment. The Antimasonic
Party carried Vermont in the presidential election of 1832, the only state they won. The
Antimasons then won the governorship through 1835, when they were absorbed into the Whigs.
That party then dominated Vermont politics at the national and state level for the next decade,
although gubernatorial elections were usually very competitive. After that, the successive
Liberty and Free Soil insurgencies took votes from both Whigs and Democrats, routinely leaving
the major parties below 50% in gubernatorial elections and throwing the decision into the
legislature (McCormick 1966, 69-76; Carter 1989, 240-246).2
By the 1856 election, when the Republicans first entered the presidential lists, the Whig and Free
Soil parties that had captured 70% of the Vermont presidential electorate just four years earlier
no longer existed. Even the ongoing (Jacksonian) Democrats were creatures of less than 30
years’ standing, while the Antimasons, Whigs, Liberty Party, and Free Soilers had been born,
lived, and died in even less time. The rapid turnover of parties and the ease with which new
parties attained substantial vote shares suggest strongly that, for most Vermonters, partisanship
had only shallow roots before the rise of the Republicans. Turnout rose rapidly in this period
after the 1830s, too, so that many voters were relatively new to politics in the 1840s and 1850s.3
Certainly, generation-to-generation party loyalties, which provided a powerful brake on later
realignments in the U.S., did not exist in 1850s Vermont. The Republicans could, if not quite
write on a blank slate, at least get an immediate hearing for their party’s point of view.
2
On the Anti-Masonic party in Vermont, see Ratcliff (1995). The party in New England generally is ably discussed
in Goodman (1988). On the Liberty Party in Vermont and nation-wide, see Johnson (1979; 2009). Free Soil is
treated in Rayback (1970), Mayfield (1980), and Alexander (1990).
3
Vermont’s population grew by just 12% from 1830 to 1860, while the number of voters rose by 45% from 1836 to
1856 (Arnold 1980, 14; Burnham 1955, 814).
4
What caused the abrupt conversion in the North to Republican hegemony? One frequently cited
cause was anti-Catholicism, which was rampant in this period (Billington1938), and which had
the clear effect of producing GOP votes in some locales (Holt 1969; Silbey 1985, chap. 9).
Heavily Protestant Vermont was undoubtedly no more enthusiastic about Catholic doctrine than
other states, but the issue was much less relevant there than elsewhere. Vermont had only
modest economic opportunities and thus few immigrants, Catholic or otherwise; indeed, several
counties and many towns in this period were losing population (Arnold 1980). Catholics from
Quebec and Ireland were present, but only in a handful of towns and in small numbers. Often
they had no priests (Feeney 2006).
The result was that the Know-Nothings ran only once for governor, in 1855, receiving just 8% of
the vote.4 Their areas of relative strength bore no relationship to Free Soil or Republican
sentiment, or even to the presence of Catholics. In Addison county, the most Republican in the
state, the Know-Nothings took 12 votes out of nearly 3000. In Lamoille county, the principal
hotbed of Liberty Party and Free Soil sentiment, the Know-Nothings received 37 votes among
more than 1600. In Chittendon county, home of the major city, Burlington, and the place with
the most Catholics in Vermont (Feeney 2006, 108-113), the Know-Nothings received a grand
total of 4 votes among more than 3000. Fillmore’s American Party candidacy for the presidency
in 1856 was an even bigger failure: He attracted 21.5% nationwide, but just 1% in VT. In the
near-absence of Catholics, anti-Catholicism was too abstract an issue to become politically
potent in the Green Mountain State.
Similar remarks apply to the impact of temperance on the rise of Vermont Republicanism.
Widespread drunkenness made temperance a powerful issue in the U.S. during this period
(Rorabaugh 1979; Tyrrell 1979), and Republicans were anxious to capture the votes of
temperance advocates. Vermont was no exception. The state voted seven times on the topic
between 1845 and 1853. The last of these, a complete ban on consumption and production of
alcohol, drew the largest turnout. It passed by a very narrow margin. But there is no relationship
between that vote and support for the Liberty and Free Soil parties. Figure 1 shows the countylevel plot of the Republican vote in 1860 against 1853 temperance support. The absence of a
relationship is apparent (r = .06). The plots for the Liberty and Free Soil parties in earlier years
are similar. In the same vein, Bigelow (1970, 84) studied the earlier temperance referendums
and their relationship to Liberty Party votes, using town-level returns. The correlation
coefficients were always near zero, and never more than .02.5
4
References to county-level vote returns in presidential years are taken from ICPSR file 08611, provided by the
Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan, accessed September
17, 2010. Aggregate gubernatorial returns are from Carter (1989). County and town returns for gubernatorial
elections and referenda are reported by the author from the original records in the Vermont state archives in
Montpelier.
5
The successive temperance votes in each town were more volatile and less tied to party than might be expected
(Bigelow 1970, chap. 4), perhaps because pragmatic Vermonters were learning from experience what worked and
what did not, and because the votes were taken at annual town meetings, whose attendance was variable.
5
65
70
75
80
85
Vermont 1860 GOP County Vote vs. Temperance
40
45
50
55
temperance1853 percent
60
65
Figure 1.
Certainly, some Vermont evangelicals became temperance leaders, and then moved on to the
anti-slavery ranks (Ludlum 1939). And undoubtedly, some moralizing voters saw temperance,
anti-slavery, and Republican loyalty as all of a piece. But by 1853, temperance was a settled
issue in Vermont. Whatever forces drove it, they bear very little relationship to abolition
sentiment or to GOP voting among Vermonters as a whole.6 Indeed, after being burned by the
issue initially, Republican leaders nationwide were generally anxious to soft-pedal temperance in
favor of a focus on their central issue, anti-slavery, in hopes of attracting both drinkers and
abstainers to their cause (Gienapp 1987, 190, 206-208, 227-228).
Thus in assessing the causes of the 1850s Republican surge, Vermont presents a simpler
inferential problem than most states. Temperance and anti-Catholicism can be set aside as major
forces. That leaves sectionalism, including antipathy toward slavery and slave owners, plus
economic factors as the forces to be addressed.
6
Some interpretations of this period lay emphasis on Protestant evangelical revivalism and moral fervor as the
sources for temperance and abolitionism (Cawardine 1993; Strong 1999). But as those sources note, local
conditions mattered. Since the two movements are unrelated in county-level voting, it is difficult to see how they
could have a common cause in Vermont. Similarly, efforts to tie either one to denominational differences at the
town level find no substantial relationships. Quakers seem to have been disproportionately for abolition and
Episcopalians disproportionately not, but the great majority of Vermonters belonged to neither denomination
(Bigelow 1970, 19-44, chap. 4). The key distinction may have been ―Old Light‖ versus ―New Light‖ theologies,
and those divided denominations and are not easily measured (Roth 1987; Bassett 2000).
6
Anti-Slavery and Tariffs in Early Antebellum Vermont
In Vermont memory, the cause of its fondness for the Republican party is simply a deep aversion
to slavery. In the main hall of the capitol in Montpelier, engraved on granite, one may read this
inscription, taken from a Vermont Senate Report of 1855:
Born of a resistance to Arbitrary Power—her first voice a declaration of equal
rights of man—how could her people be other than haters of slavery—how can
they do less than sympathize with every human being and every community
which asserts the rights of all men to blessings like their own?
General histories of Vermont invariably recount the earliest-in-the-nation prohibition of slavery
in the first state constitution in 1777, the abolition societies, the anti-slavery petititions to
Congress (Carpenter 2011), and the comparatively large vote for the Liberty and Free Soil
parties as evidence that Vermonters focused their antebellum politics around opposition to
slavery and a love of liberty for all. ―Vermont enjoyed the reputation of being the most
antislavery state in the nation‖ (Johnson 1979, 258). Attachment to the Republican Party then
seems to have followed in the natural course.
The difficulty with this argument is that northern whites were comfortably racist in this period
(Litwack 1961, Woodward 1962), and that Vermonters were no exception. Abolitionist speakers
were often shouted down in 1830s Vermont, for example, and after very rough treatment during
an 1843 speaking tour, Frederick Douglas remarked that Vermont was ―surprisingly under the
influence of the slave power‖ (Graffagnino 1977; Lovejoy 2001, 61). Much of antebellum
Vermonters’ sympathy for blacks ―was paternal or designed to make a point, and it was far
overshadowed by the malicious attentions of other white Vermonters‖ (Roth 1987, 272-273). As
late as the Civil War, Vermont soldiers’ letters home were peppered with negative, even vicious
remarks about African-Americans, often the first they had ever seen (for examples, see Marshall
1999, 5, 142; of course, some soldiers had the opposite view--see Manning 2007).
Vermonters had lived with slavery from the time of their entry into the Union, and without
worrying much about it. The Liberty Party received just 319 Vermont votes in the 1840
presidential election. During the next dozen years of constant agitation, neither Liberty nor Free
Soil ever came close to winning a statewide Vermont election.
Like other northerners, what Vermonters opposed was not slavery, but the Slave Power (Davis
1969; Richards 2000). Antipathy toward the South had early roots in Vermont. Southerners
opposed Vermont statehood in the late eighteenth century, since it would add two additional antislavery senators (Richards 2000, 46). Vermont sent unofficial delegates and observers to the
Hartford Convention during the War of 1812, a convocation called to consider New England
secession as a response to an economically inconvenient war conducted by a Virginian president,
―Mr. Madison’s war‖ (Horsman 1969, 211-214; Sherman et al. 2004, 163-164). Condemnations
of slavery and the South from religious leaders and other activists were a commonplace of
Vermont life, beginning in the 1830s (Ludlum 1939, chap. 5). So flagrant and frequent were
Vermont denunciations of the South that the Georgia state senate passed the following motion at
the time of Kansas-Nebraska agitation (Graffagnino 1977, 31):
7
Resolved, That His Excellency, President Pierce, be requested to employ a
sufficient number of ablebodied Irishmen to proceed to the State of Vermont, and
to dig a ditch around the limits of the same, and to float ―the thing‖ into the
Atlantic.
No doubt overcome by the emotions of the moment, the senators failed to explain how ―the
thing‖ was to float across New Hampshire and Maine.
What gave anti-Southern outbursts resonance, however, was not the depth of positive feelings
toward the slaves themselves, but rather the impact, or imagined impact, of the South on the
economic fortunes of Vermonters. Initially, the focus was the tariff, which was, apart from
slavery, the central issue in American politics throughout most of the 19th century. The federal
government drew the bulk of its revenues from the tariff, so that debates about the level of duties
were also a debate about the size of government and its role in the domestic economy. When
times were bad, out-parties blamed the state of the economy on the in-party’s tariff policies
(Taussig 1889; Stanwood 1903; Hofstadter 1938; Bolt 2009).
Tariffs were closely related to the sheep-growing industry. George Washington at one point
owned 800 sheep, and he once wrote in a letter that he had ―no doubt as to the good policy of
increasing the number of sheep in every State‖ (Carman 1892, 54, 57). Vermont took him at his
word. Beginning in the late 1820s, a ―sheep mania‖ overtook the state. By 1836, Vermont had
one million sheep; by 1840, the state contained just under 1.7 million of them, nearly six per
capita. Addison County had eleven sheep for every man, woman, and child.7 Other New
England states joined the sheep-raising industry, but no other state had the same density of the
wooly creatures (Wright 1910; Cole 1926; Wilson 1935; Wilson 1936). Vermont’s governor
remarked in his message of 1842, ―Our citizens have become so dependent upon the growing of
wool that this article may be said to be the staple of the state‖ (Wilson 1936, 81).
Unfortunately for Vermonters, competition from British woolens was stiff. Thus Vermonters all
over the state had a special reason to care about the tariff on wool. This uniformity of economic
interest makes it easier to assess economic effects on politics in Vermont than in virtually any
other states in this period.
Alexander Hamilton as Secretary of the Treasury had reported to Congress as early as 1791 to
encourage a tariff on imported wool and other products to help support American industry
(Carman 1892, 119-120). Tariff agitation began in earnest in the mid-1820s, resulting in the
Tariff of 1828--the ―Tariff of Abominations‖ to its opponents (Wright 1910, 47-51). It was
modified slightly by the Tariff of 1832.
7
Sheep counts are taken from the U.S. Agricultural Census of 1840. See also Benton and Barry (1837) for 1836
figures. The two county-level counts correlate very strongly (r = .99).
8
The South was an exporting area, and it had no interest in paying duties on imports, which it
regarded as a subsidy to the North and to New England in particular.8 In addition, when
American tariffs were high, the British retaliated by buying less cotton, further damaging the
South. Feelings ran high. Newspapers and books were filled with dramatic essays condemning
the tariff and its Northern supporters (notably, Turnbull 1827) . It is sometimes forgotten that
John C. Calhoun’s development of nullification theory was directed at the 1828 tariff. His
arguments on behalf of nullification mention only the tariff, not slavery. Tensions rose high
enough that in November of 1832, South Carolina’s special Nullification Convention declared
the Tariffs of 1832 and 1828 unconstitutional. South Carolina came close to mobilizing troops
over the issue and seceding (Freehling 1965). Nor were Northern interests in the tariff merely
perfunctory: ―The debates over the tariff were not trivial or subsidiary to northerners, but went
to the heart of northern concerns over the nation’s future‖ (Grant 2000, 44).
The parties divided over the tariff. Whigs favored, and Democrats opposed. Since the tariff
funded ―internal improvements‖ such as roads and canals, Whigs also favored them and
Democrats opposed. The South had little need of either, while the Northeast needed tariffs and
the ―Northwest‖ (that is, what is now the upper Midwest) needed internal improvements. In the
early antebellum period, party lines held and were usually strong enough to overcome sectional
forces (Silbey 1985, chap. 3). But with time, the sectional division over economic policy came
to line up with attitudes toward slavery, with fateful consequences.
Vermont knew where its economic interests lay. Its newspapers in this period are filled with
intense discussions of tariff questions. By 1832, early in the sheep mania, the correlation of
county Democratic vote with sheep per capita was already -.4. The correlation grew to -.6 by
1836 and 1840. (The Democratic vote is used because of the third-party vote in this period, and
because the Democrats held the presidency from 1828-1840.) Figure 2 gives the relationship for
1840, a high turnout election more representative of Vermont sentiment than the earlier years. In
the wake of the Panic of 1837, wool prices had fallen.9 No part of the state was very enthusiastic
about the Democrats, but their tariff policies were blamed for declining wool prices, so that they
had become hopelessly uncompetitive in the counties most reliant on sheep.10
8
Of course, not everyone in the North favored tariffs, and not everyone in the South opposed them. Merchants
engaged in north-south trade were particularly resistant to sectional feelings. See Freehling (1965, 274) on
Charleston, and O’Connor (1968, 166-167) on Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.
9
Wool prices are taken from Wright 1910, 347-349. (Connor 1921, 193-194 extends the series further into the
twentieth century.) I have followed other authors in quoting medium grade prices to illustrate changing price levels,
as in Taussig (1889, 152) and in the ditty on the following page. U.S. production was confined mostly to middle and
lower grades because it was not competitive with the British on higher grades (Taussig 1889, 144-152; Cole 1926,
vol. 1, 300-302). Adams (1944, 140-144) gives wool prices in index numbers and in purchasing power indices, but
they do not seem to track nominal prices closely, and I have chosen to set them aside. He also gives tariff rates on
wool at various time periods (p. 155). A weighted index of wholesale price levels in this period appears in Smith
and Cole (1935, 158, 167). Antebellum wholesale prices are much more volatile than in the current era, and they
track the Panics of 1837 and 1857, as well as newspaper reports of other hard times.
10
Of course, some towns were exceptions. Bristol is located near the center of Addison County, but against the
mountains. It had mills and forges from its early days (Munsill 2009, 103-115), and it clung to the Democrats
through most of the antebellum period.
9
20
30
40
50
Vermont 1840 County Presidential Vote vs. Sheep Populations
4
6
8
sheep per capita 1840
10
12
Figure 2.
The 1840 election brought the Whigs to power (―Tippecanoe and Tyler, too‖), and with them
went the hopes of Vermonters for better wool prices. ―No group celebrated Harrison’s victory
more optimistically than Vermont’s sheep farmers. They hoped to be rewarded for their votes
with tariff relief‖ (Sherman et al. 2004, 199). However, the 1833 Compromise Tariff Act, ―the
result of an agreement between [Kentucky Senator Henry] Clay and Calhoun,‖ had replaced the
Tariff of 1828. It had a sunset clause that led to rapidly declining rates in 1842. For that or other
reasons, wool prices fell dramatically. The Whigs raised rates again in 1842 over Democratic
opposition, but recovery was slow. Sometime in this period, John Saxe (ca. 1841) of Burlington,
a Democratic party activist, wrote ―The Whig’s Lament‖:
In old Vermont-mont-mont
We’re in a dreadful state.
Instead of fifty cents for wool
We can’t get thirty eight.
They promised if we’ed vote for Tip
That wool would surely rise;
But all they’ve done with wool has been
To pull it o’er our eyes.
10
By 1844, only a weak recovery had taken place, and on average, Vermont moved a few
percentage points against the incumbent administration and toward the Democrats, particularly in
counties with relatively few sheep. Only in two counties did voters continue to shed Democratic
votes. (See Figure 3.) Addison County, buried in sheep and evangelical fervor (Potash 1991),
did so. Strongly abolitionist Lamoille also dropped a bit in its support for the Democrats for
reasons unrelated to wool.11
-2
0
2
4
6
Vermount Counties Presidential Vote Change, 1840 to 1844
-4
Lamoille
4
6
8
sheep per capita 1840
10
12
Figure 3.
As Figure 3 shows, the changes in 1844 voting strengthened the already strong relationship
between sheep densities and presidential voting into even closer alignment in Vermont. (The
zero-order county-level correlation with the 1844 Democratic vote is -.7, higher than ever before;
graph not shown.) Thus by 1844, Vermont had become a Whig state where the Democrats were
competitive in about half the counties. Voting patterns were closely tied, not to slavery issues,
but to the presence of sheep and their need for tariff protection.12
11
Lamoille was the boyhood home and frequent adult residence of Joseph Poland, the editor of the state’s leading
abolitionist newspaper from 1840-1844, which was published in Lamoille (Ullery 1894, 321-322). In consequence,
Lamoille was the only county where the Liberty Party ran well in 1844 (25%), taking substantial votes from the
Whigs and a few percentage points from the Democrats as well. No other county gave the Liberty Party as much as
11%.
12
In a brief cross-sectional comparison of a few counties in 1844, Benson (1961, 158-159) doubts this association
for New York state. I hope to take a closer look at those counties over time in a subsequent draft. Alternately,
Freehling (1965) argues that the tariff issue mattered for Southerners, but that (to oversimplify his argument) the
debate was really about slavery. He cites a private letter from Calhoun in 1830 making that point (p. 257). Without
11
The 1848 Election and After
In 1848, the two parties nominated candidates opposed to New England interests. The
incumbent Democrats had passed the Walker Tariff in 1846, reducing rates drastically. The new
Democratic candidate, Lewis Cass of Michigan, was not only a foe of tariffs, but also an avowed
opponent of the Wilmot Proviso, the never-passed bill to ban slavery from the territories
acquired in the Mexican War. The Whig, Zachary Taylor, was a substantial slave owner. Under
Democratic president James Polk, the economy was slipping badly, and sheep prices were as low
as they had been after the expiration of the Tariff of 1833. Sheep in Vermont dropped from
almost 1.7 million in 1840 to about 1 million in 1850, as farmers sold their flocks. ―It appeared
more obvious to Vermonters than it has to subsequent generations of economists that the
Democratic tariff policy had destroyed the state’s wool industry and denied farmers their welldeserved prosperity‖ (Hand 2002, 4). The slave owning Whig candidate was precisely the sort
of man who had blocked tariffs in the past. Thus there was every reason to look for an
alternative. New Yorker and former Democratic president Martin Buren, running as the
candidate of the Free Soil Party, provided just that.
At the level of party leaders, Free Soil was an amalgam of former Liberty Party members plus
disaffected Whigs and Democrats. (In New York, it was more closely related to factional
disputes between ―Hunkers‖ and ―Barnburners.‖) In addition to opposing slavery, the party
platform endorsed internal improvements and a ―moderate‖ tariff to support them.
In spite of being a new party, Free Soil ran well in Vermont. Votes for the party were
remarkably little related to former party shares. (See Figure 4.) It was also unrelated to sheep
densities, just as Liberty Party votes had been. However, votes for the two abolitionist parties
were closely related to each other in Vermont, more so than one might expect from their very
different origins. (See Figure 5.)
denying that farsighted people saw a connection and that it formed a useful rhetorical point (―You wait: The tariff is
just the beginning.‖), I find it difficult to read and dismiss as window-dressing the very lengthy discussions and
elaborate calculations about the tariff in Southern writers at this period, for example, Turnbull (1827) and Calhoun
himself in his well known and lengthy Senate ―speech on the force bill‖ on 15 February 1833 (Cheek 2003, 411441), which makes no mention of slavery. Slavery faced no serious threats in the 1830s. Parallel remarks apply to
Anbinder’s (1992) argument that the Know-Nothings were often attractive due to their stands on temperance or
slavery rather than anti-Catholicism. However, all these claims deserve careful consideration, and both seem
researchable for mass electorates using election returns.
12
10
20
30
40
50
Vermont Counties 1848 Free Soil vs. 1844 Democrat
20
30
40
1844 Democratic vote
Figure 4.
13
50
10
20
30
40
50
Vermont Counties 1848 Free Soil vs. 1844 Liberty
0
5
10
15
1844 Liberty vote
20
25
Figure 5.
How is a voting pattern of this kind to be interpreted? The simplest interpretation is
sectionalism. By 1848, the earlier disputes over economics had become intensified by the
Mexican War and the acquisition of new territory. Whether those territories were slave or free
states would tilt the balance of power in Washington. Shrill criticism of all kinds, including
fantasies of sexual immorality, became more common North and South, and sectional
nationalism increased. Emerging from the tariff debates of the 1830s, the perceived threats
spread to include Northern and Southern livelihoods (Owsley 1941; Simms 1942, chap. 7; Davis
1969; Grant 2000, 42, 46). The South needed slavery and even non-slaveholders feared slave
revolts. Even Northerners unaffected by tariffs saw in slavery a threat to ―free labor‖ and the
white working man (Foner 1970). Newspapers on each side fanned the flames (Grant 2000,
chap. 3). The result in Vermont was a quasi-uniform swing away from the two main parties and
toward a purely sectional party that represented their interests.
Thus by 1848, there were two almost orthogonal forces at work in Vermont politics, each
tending to the same outcome. The first was the tariff, the second was sectionalism. Both
represented economic threats rather than anti-slavery impulses, as election participation shows.
For in 1840 and 1844, when the central issues were economic, Vermont’s turnout was 73% and
67%.13 In 1848, 1852, and 1856, when the slavery issue was central, its turnout fell to 63%,
56%, 64%, and 56%, respectively. And in the critical election of 1860, with slavery debate at a
fever pitch, just 56% of Vermont voters got to the polls, a full 17 percentage points fewer than in
13
Texas annexation and the question of whether it would be slave or free also figured in the 1844 election. But
Vermonters had no difficulty choosing Henry Clay, a slaveholder and author of ―the American system‖ of high
tariffs (55%) in place of the single-issue abolitionist candidate of the Liberty Party, James Birney (8%).
14
1840 (Gienapp 1982, 18-19). Slavery simply did not engage the Vermont citizenry the way the
tariff had.
The Democrats had won the presidency in 1852, though they did not carry Vermont. The Free
Soil vote in Vermont fell off, and the Democrats had been damaged by repeated association with
tariffs and hard times. Hence the Whigs carried Vermont by a large margin.
The calm was soon shattered. Wool prices took another plunge in 1854, focusing Vermont
attention on sectional threats. Tensions over slavery weakened the Whigs nationally, as did the
Know-Nothing surge in many states. ―Bleeding Kansas‖ and the Kansas-Nebraska Act reopened sectional wounds. The idea of a ―North‖ began to gain strength in 1854 as Northern
politicians effectively invoked Northern nationalism and read the South out (Grant 2000, chap
6).
.In July of 1854, Vermont became one of the first states to create a Republican party on a
platform of anti-slavery, temperance, strong tariffs, and internal improvements (Burlington Free
Press 1854). They swept to victory in the gubernatorial race in the fall as the Whigs and KnowNothings collapsed and were absorbed into the party. By the 1856 presidential election, the
realignment had happened in Vermont. In spite of the horrors of the Panic of 1857, which
mattered mightily elsewhere (Huston 1987; Egnal 2009), there was no subsequent increase in
Vermont GOP percentages in the presidential races of 1860, 1864, 1868, or 1872.14
In most Vermont counties, the Republican vote in 1860 was closely approximated by the sum of
the 1852 votes for the Whigs (51%) and Free Soil vote (20%). (See Figure 6.) Only in formerly
more Democratic counties did the Republicans gain. Thus the Republicans simply incorporated
the two electoral forces that dominate this period of Vermont politics, the tariff constituency and
the sectional-antagonism constituency. Both continued to matter.15 Both were economic
concerns at base, but not in a reductionist way. Accurately or not, perceptions of slavery and its
future sharpened the economic threats to each side in a way nothing else could have.
Exacerbated by the Mexican War and given cultural resonance by the spiral of mutual
antagonism, New England moralism, and Southern haughtiness and fear, sectional feelings came
to take on the trappings of nationalism at the expense of national loyalties (compare Kinder and
Kam 2009).
14
In the five presidential elections from 1856 to 1872, GOP votes shares in Vermont were 78%, 76%, 76%, 79%.,
and 78%.
15
From 1856 to 1860, Democratic vote shares gained proportionately by more than 25% in just two Vermont
counties—Rutland and Addison, the two counties with the most sheep. Wool prices were up in 1860 compared to
the Panic of 1857 period and its aftermath, and the Democrats were in office. By contrast, the economy as a whole
was somewhat down from the two preceding years.
15
65
70
75
80
85
Vermont Counties 1860 GOP vs. 1852 Whig + Free Soil
50
60
70
1852 Whig plus Free Soil vote
80
90
Figure 6.
Newcomb et al. (1965, 451) lay out conditions when group tensions can lead to violence: (1)
preexisting shared prejudice against the other side, (2) an immediate situation that heightens the
threat, (3) a definition of the current situation justifying violence, and (4) heightened excitability.
Those conditions were amply met in the winter of 1860-61. With a president elected on a purely
sectional platform and with a purely sectional vote, secession and war followed.
Conclusion
In what sense was the sheep mania responsible for Vermont’s long love affair with the
Republican party? In one sense, the answer is: ―Not at all.‖ In the absence of slavery, sectional
tensions would never have reached the level they did, and there would never have been a
Republican party. Territorial acquisition made slavery relevant politically, and once political and
economic interest were combined in both North and South, sectionalism followed.
Yet sheep and tariffs played a central role. Northerners cared little about slavery or the slaves for
decades. Yes, they regretted the institution, but they were busy with other things. It was instead
the bitter tariff battles that set off the spiral of hostility and continued to give it meaning.
Calhoun saw the danger early. He stated in his 1831 Fort Hill Address: ―The Tariff has placed
the sections…in deep and dangerous conflict‖ (Cheek 2003, 329). Thirty years later, at the
Republican convention in 1860, the loudest cheers for a platform plank came when the tariff
commitment was read (Potter 1976, 423). As Horace Greeley phrased it, an ―Anti-Slavery man
per se cannot be elected; but a Tariff, River and Harbor, Pacific Railroad, Free Homestead man,
may succeed although he is Anti-Slavery‖ (Huston 1987, 237).
16
Beginning in the 1830s, slavery or its absence increasingly become the marker for friend and foe.
Careless rhetoric on both sides escalated, and the new territories broadened the conflict to ―all of
us‖ against ―all of them.‖ Lines hardened, leading by the late 1850s to violence in Kansas and
at Harpers Ferry. It is hard to believe that most Northerners would have cared seriously whether
distant Kansas was slave or free had not Southern economic interests threatened them directly
over the tariff in the beginning. The same opponents then confronted the North in the sectional
controversies over who was to control the federal government. Republicans took advantage of
the electoral opportunity. The ―free labor‖ ideology of the Republicans appealed to Northern
racism while it gave meaning to the antagonism of Northern business interests toward the South.
Thus slavery was a genuine political issue in the minds of Northerners, and it had a genuine
independent impact. But its origins owed more to Northerners’ economic interests than to their
moral codes.
The last word may be left to that thoughtful and appealing Southern diarist, Mary Chestnut of
South Carolina. Anti-slavery but loyal to the South, she wrote in the early days of the war (June
28, 1861):
I think incompatibility of temper began when it was made plain to us that we get
all the opprobrium of slavery and they all the money there was in it—with their
tariff. (Woodward 1981, 84).
17
References
Adams, T. M. 1944. Prices Paid by Vermont Farmers for Goods and Services and Received by
Them for Farm Products, 1790-1940. Burlington, Vermont: Vermont Agricultural Experiment
Station, University of Vermont.
Alexander, Thomas B. Harbinger of the Collapse of the Second Two-Party System: The Free
Soil Party of 1848. In Lloyd E. Ambrosius, ed., A Crisis of Republicanism. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press. Pp. 17-54.
Altschuler, Glenn C., and Stuart M. Blumin. 2000. Rude Republic. Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press.
Anbinder, Tyler. 1992. Nativism and Slavery. New York: Oxford University Press.
Arnold, Thomas W. 1980. Two Hundred Years and Counting: Vermont Community Census
Totals, 1791 to 1980. Vermont Community Data Bank, Center for Rural Studies, University of
Vermont (November)..
Bassett, Thomas D. S. 1952. Urban Penetration of Rural Vermont, 1840-1880. Doctoral
dissertation, Harvard University.
Bassett, T. D. Seymour. 2000. The Gods of the Hills. Montpelier: Vermont Historical Society.
Beard, Charles A., and Mary R. Beard. 1930. The Rise of American Civilization, one volume
edition. New York: Macmillan.
Benson, Lee. 1961. The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case.
Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Benton, C., and S. F. Barry. 1837. A Statistical View of the Number of Sheep in the Several
Towns and Counties in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island,
Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Folsom, Wells,
and Thurston.
Bidwell, Percy Wells, and John I. Falconer. 1925. History of Agriculture in the Northern United
States 1620-1860. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, esp. 217-223.
Bigelow, Bruce L. 1970. Abolition and Prohibition: Themes for an Historical Geography of
Vermont, 1841-1850. Masters thesis, Department of Geography, Pennsylvania State University.
Billington, Ray A. 1938. The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860. New York: Macmillan.
Bolt, William K. 2010. The Tariff in the Age of Jackson. Doctoral dissertation, Department of
History, University of Tennessee.
18
Burlington Free Press. 1854. Platform and Resolutions of a Mass Convention in Montpelier. 18
July 1854. Reprinted in J. Kevin Graffagnino et al., 1999, 181-182.
Burnham, W. Dean. 1955. Presidential Ballots 1836-1892. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.
Carman, Ezra Ayers. 1892. The Sheep Industry in States East of the Mississippi River. In D. E.
Salmon, Special Report on the History and Present Condition of the Sheep Industry of the United
States. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, pp. 11-700.
Carpenter, Daniel. 2011. Consequences of Canvassing: Women Petitioners in the American
Antislavery Campaign. Manuscript, Government Department, Harvard University.
Carter, Christie. 1989. Vermont Elections, 1789-1989. State Papers of Vermont, vol. 21.
Montpelier: Vermont Secretary of State.
Cawardine, Richard J. 1993. Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America. New Haven,
Connecticut: Yale University Press.
Cheek, H. Lee, Jr. 2003. John C. Calhoun: Selected Writings and Speeches. Washington,
D.C.: Regnery.
Cole, A. Harrison. 1926. The American Wool Manufacture, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press).
Connor, L. G. 1921. ―A Brief History of the Sheep Industry in the United States.‖ American
Historical Association, Annual Report, 1918, vol. I. , pp. 93-197. Washington: Government
Printing Office.
Converse, Philip E. 1964. ―The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics.‖ In David E. Apter,
ed., Ideology and Discontent. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Davis, David Brion. 1969. The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press.
Delli Carpini, Michael X., and Scott Keeter. 1996. What Americans Know about Politics and
Why It Matters. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Egnal, Marc. 2009. Clash of Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War. New York:
Hill and Wang.
Feeney, Vincent Edward. 2006. Pre-Famine Irish in Vermont, 1815-1844. Vermont History 74
(Summer/Fall): 101-126.
Foner, Eric. 1970. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men. New York: Oxford University Press.
19
Freehling, William W. 1965. Prelude to Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gienapp, William E. 1982. ―Politics Seem to Enter into Everything‖: Political Culture in the
North, 1840-1860. In William E. Gienapp, Thomas B. Alexander, Michael F. Holt, Stephen E.
Maizlish, and Joel H. Silbey, Essays on American Antebellum Politics, 1840-1860. College
Station: Texas A&M Press.
Gienapp, William E. 1986. Who Voted for Lincoln? In John L. Thomas, Abraham Lincoln and
the American Political Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Gienapp, William E. 1987. The Origins of the Republican Party 1852-1856. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Goodman, Paul. 1988. Towards a Christian Republic. New York: Oxford University Press.
Graffagnino, J. Kevin. 1977. Vermont Attitudes Towards Slavery: The Need for a Closer
Look.‖ Vermont History 45,1 (Winter): 31-34. Reprinted in Muller and Hand, 193-196.
Graffagnino, J. Kevin, Samuel B. Hand, and Gene Sessions, eds. 1999. Vermont Voices, 1609
through the 1990s. Montpelier: Vermont Historical Society.
Grant, Susan-Mary. 2000. North over South. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas.
Hand, Samuel B. 2002 The Star that Set: The Vermont Republican Party 1854-1974. Lanham,
Maryland: Lexington.
Hofstadter, Richard. 1938. The Tariff Issue on the Eve of the Civil War. American Historical
Review 44,1 (Oct.): 50-55.
Horsman, Reginald. 1969. The War of 1812. New York: Knopf.
Holt, Michael F. 1969. Forging a Majority: The Formation of the Republican Party in
Pittsburgh, 1848-1860. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press.
Holt, Michael F. 1992. Political Parties and American Political Development from the Age of
Jackson to the Age of Lincoln. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Holt, Michael F. 1999. The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Huston, James L. 1987. The Panic of 1857 and the Coming of the Civil War. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press.
Johnson, Reinhard O. 1979. The Liberty Party in Vermont, 1840-1848: The Forgotten
Abolitionists. Vermont History 47,4 (Fall): 258-275.
20
Johnson, Reinhard O. 2009. The Liberty Party, 1840-1848. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press.
Kinder, Donald R., and Cindy D. Kam. 2009. Us against Them. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Lippmann, Walter. 1922. Public Opinion. New York: Macmillan.
Litwack, Leon F. 1961. North of Slavery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lovejoy, John M. 2001. Racism in Antebellum Vermont. Vermont History 69 (Symposium
Supplement): 48–65.
Ludlum, David M. 1939. Social Ferment in Vermont, 1791-1850. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Luebke, Frederick C. 1971. Ethnic Voters and the Election of Lincoln. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press.
McCormick, Richard P. 1966. The Second American Party System. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press.
Manning, Chandra. 2007. What This Cruel War Was Over. New York: Vintage.
Marsh, George P. 1855. Letter on the Know-Nothing Movement in Vermont. In Graffagnino et
al., p. 182.
Marshall, Jeffrey D. 1999. A War of the People: Vermont Civil War Letters. Hanover, New
Hampshire: The University Press of New England.
Mayfield, John. 1980. Rehearsal for Republicanism. Port Washington, New York: Kennikat
Press.
Morrow, R. L. 1929. The Liberty Party in Vermont. New England Quarterly 2,2 (Apr.): 234248.
Muller III, H. Nicholas, and Samuel B. Hand. 1982. In a State of Nature: Readings in Vermont
History. Montpelier, Vermont: Vermont Historical Society.
Munsill, Harvey. 1979. Bristol, Vermont: The Early History. Bristol Historical Society,
Bristol, Vermont.
Newcomb, Theodore M., Ralph H. Turner, and Philip E. Converse. 1965. Social Psychology.
New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
O’Connor, Thomas H. 1968. Lords of the Loom. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
21
Owsley, Frank L. 1941. The Fundamental Cause of the Civil War: Egocentric Sectionalism.
Journal of Southern History 7,1 (Feb.): 3-18.
Potash, P. Jeffrey. 1991. Vermont’s Burned-Over District. Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing.
Potter, David M. 1976. The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861. New York: Harper.
Ratcliffe, Donald J. 1995. Antimasonry and Partisanship in Greater New England: 1826-1836.
Journal of the Early Republic 15,2 (Summer): 199-239.
Rayback, Joseph G. 1970. Free Soil. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
Rorabaugh, W.J. 1979. The Alcoholic Republic. New York: Oxford University Press.
Renda, Lex. 1994. Retrospective Voting and the Presidential Election of 1844: The Texas Issue
Revisited. Presidential Studies Quarterly 24,4 (Fall): 837-854.
Roth, Randolph A. 1987. The Democratic Dilemma: Religion, Reform, and the Social Order in
the Connecticut River Valley of Vermont, 1791-1850. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rozwenc, Edwin C. 1949. Agriculture and Politics in the Vermont Tradition. Vermont
Quarterly 17,4 (October): 81-96. Reprinted in Muller and Hand, 153-159.
Richards, Leonard L. 2000. The Slave Power. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Saxe, John Godrey. Ca. 1841. The Whig’s Lament. Reprinted in Graffagnino et al. 1999, 153,
and in Sherman et al. 2004, 200..
Sewell, Richard H. 1976. Ballots for Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press.
Sherman, Michael, Gene Sessions, and P. Jeffrey Potash. 2004. Freedom and Unity: A History
of Vermont. Barre, Vermont: Vermont Historical Society.
Silbey, Joel H. 1964. The Civil War Synthesis in American Political History. Civil War History
10,2 (June): 130-140. Reprinted in Silbey (1985), chap. 1.
Silbey, Joel H. 1985. The Partisan Imperative. New York: Oxford University Press.
Silbey, Joel H. 2009. Party over Section: The Rough and Ready Presidential Election of 1848.
Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.
Simms, Henry H. 1942. A Decade of Sectional Controversy, 1851-1861. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press.
22
Stanwood, Edward. 1903. American Tariff Controversies in the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols.
Boston: Houghton, Mifflin
Strong, Douglas M. 1999. Perfectionist Politics. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University
Press.
Sundquist, James L. 1983. Dynamics of the Party System, rev. ed. Washington, D.C.:
Brookings Institution.
Taussig, F. W. 1889. The Tariff History of the United States. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
Turnbull, Robert James. 1827. The Crisis: Or, Essays on the Usurpations of the Federal
Government. Charleston: A. E. Miller.
Tyrrell, Ian R. 1979. Sobering Up: From Temperance to Prohibition in Antebellum America,
1800-1860. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press.
Ullery, Jacob G. 1894. Men of Vermont: Illustrated Biographical History of Vermonters & Sons
of Vermont. Brattleboro: Transcript Publishing Company.
Wilson, Harold Fisher. 1935. The Rise and Decline of the Sheep Industry in Northern New
England. Agricultural History 9,1 (Jan.): 12-40.
Wilson, Harold Fisher. 1936. The Hill Country of Northern New England. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Woodward, C. Vann. 1962. The Antislavery Myth. American Scholar 31: 316-327. Reprinted
in C. Vann Woodward, 1989, The Future of the Past. New York: Oxford University Press,
chap. 15.
Woodward, C. Vann, ed. 1981. Mary Chestnut’s Civil War. New Haven: Yale University
Press.
Wright, Chester W. 1910. Wool Growing and the Tariff. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
23