George Caleb Bingham ââåthe County Electionã¢ââ 1854 via Reynolda House Museum of American Art
Presented as part of the special Politics Issue
[The County Election] also parodies the men in the crowd, who are divided…past the moral valence of their characters…
The color line inThe County Election
When Missouri creative person George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879) was at work on his almost popular and circuitous paintings he was also deeply engaged in Whig politics. Bingham was already well known for his genre scenes of riverboat men and frontier life—Fur Traders Descending the Missouri(1845);The Jolly Flatboatmen (1846);Boatmen on the Missouri (1846); amidst others—when he decided to run for country office in 1846. He had been involved in Whig electoral politics since the early 1840s, when he painted banners and delivered speeches on behalf of William Henry Harrison and Henry Clay. Bingham especially admired Clay of Kentucky, whose fiery orations compared Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren to Caesar, Cromwell, and Napoleon equally usurpers of executive privilege and destroyers of the people's independence. In 1846, fearing Missouri'south enslavement to a Autonomous bulk, Bingham himself ran for the state legislature as a Whig candidate from Saline County. He lost the race in a biting mail service-ballot appeal. But the razor-thin election became the discipline of his best-known political paintingThe Canton Election (1851-1852).
Given Bingham's politics, it is not surprising that Whig ideals take dominated discussion ofThe County Ballot. What is much more surprising, however, is the degree to which scholarly attention to Bingham's Whig rhetoric has sidelined the racial, indigenous, and grade codes upon which that rhetoric depended.The County Election is a political parody that refers specifically to the Saline Canton election of 1846 in which Bingham ran against local Democratic favorite Erasmus Darwin Sappington (fig. ane). Sappington himself is represented in the painting as the obsequious party hack, tipping his hat to voters and proffering his card, while the portly election judge swearing in a voter at the window is Sappington's ain brother-in-law, sometime Missouri governor Meredith Marmaduke. The painting besides parodies the men in the crowd, who are divided (a la the bang-up eighteenth-century English language artist and political satirist William Hogarth) by the moral valence of their characters: some men (the sober Whigs) read newspapers, debate or deliberate, write or describe, vote or wait quietly in line—while others (the Saline County Democrats) drinkable, recover from fighting, serve drinks, conduct drunken voters, pander for votes, gamble, or run the election.
BecauseThe Canton Ballotsatirizes antebellum politics at a time when Missouri suffrage embraced all adult white men,information technology was initially charged with elitism. To counter this charge, art historians Nancy Rash, Gail Due east. Husch, and Barbara Groseclose argue conclusively that whileThe County Ballot parodies antebellum (and especially Democratic) party politics, it is fundamentally populist. The painting, they contend, asserts the artist's republican faith in the phonation of "the people," the Union, and government past representation, despite abuse past party hacks, fixed elections, drunken voters, and physical intimidation.
Merely this accent on Bingham's Whig populism has obscured a 2nd story contained within the famous work. In his report of race and labor in antebellum St. Louis, social historian Daniel Graff points out that in cardinal Missouri socioeconomic alliances between bourgeois and working-class white men were buttressed by the color line. From St. Louis to Saline County, political solidarity across differences of class and culture was intimately tied to racial apartheid, or shared whiteness. While the racial dynamics of working-class politics are typically associated with Jacksonian Democrats, the Whig populism ofThe County Ballot is structured past precisely this kind of cross-class and multi-ethnic alliance, grounded in whiteness.
Every viewer of Bingham's painting notes the African American human (who, we will run across, was most likely a slave) on its far left margin, serving alcohol to a happy, drunken, white homo. And art historians invariably identify the red-haired workingman "taking the book" at the voting window at the top of the stairs as Irish, according to the physiognomic codes and ethnic stereotypes of the period. But, in fact, the African American homo on the painting's margin and the Irish gaelic voter at its center work together in the painting'south design. Standing in the sun at the summit of the stairs, with his hand on the holy volume, the white ethnic voter represents the unmediated "voice" of the people—albeit a vocalization overwhelmed elsewhere in the painting by the ill-effects of potable. That the drunken Democrat at the drinking table happens to be receiving his beverage from a slave establishes an allegorical relationship between enslavement and drink. Booze, in outcome, enslaves the voter. What are we to brand of Bingham's temperance message? More important, what are nosotros to make of this use of race and slavery on behalf of the familiar Whig perspective on beverage? To answer these questions, we must begin with the social history of Bingham's Missouri.
The Paperless Voter
After the "internal" Missouri Compromise of 1821, which granted universal adult white male suffrage and guaranteed the legality of slavery, the racial and social dynamics of the country inverse dramatically. Among the consequences of the compromise was a new and much harsher slave authorities. Throughout central Missouri, town ordinances, city police, and vigilante "patrols" required passes, ejected or arrested unfamiliar freedmen, broke up African American social gatherings, and punished the owners of slaves who too freely hired them out. As African American workers experienced these new restrictions, propertyless white workingmen found themselves enjoying the fruits of their recently won right to vote. They were actively courted by the Missouri Democrats (as i might expect) and later by the Whigs. By the time Bingham madeThe County Election, his party had long been courting the white workingman vote. And in Missouri, doing so meant cloaking the Whig platform in a familiar rhetoric of whiteness.
The role of class and ethnicity inThe County Election is antiseptic by an oration Bingham delivered in Jefferson Metropolis after losing the Saline County election of 1846 to Sappington. Bingham had initially won the election in the popular count, by the extraordinarily narrow margin of 3 votes. But as soon every bit Bingham's victory was announced in theColumbia Statesman (fig. 2), Sappington declared himself the winner and, with the support of his brother-in-police force, appealed the results to the legislature, where Democrats were in the majority and where he was assured of easy victory. Rejecting Bingham'southward telephone call to take the vote back to "the people" of Saline Canton, Sappington's allies worked through a legislative committee to evidence that at to the lowest degree four of the votes for Bingham were illegal. These included the vote of an aged Irishman named Spud.
Printed in six columns of theBoonville Weekly Observer (March 11, 1847), Bingham's spoken communication decries the disenfranchisement of ground forces veteran John Murphy who had fought with William Henry Harrison in the War of 1812. Now, "grown grey in the service of his country," the old soldier's vote had been rejected by the Democratic legislature on the grounds that he had lost his naturalization papers. Murphy had once possessed his discharge papers with the date of his naturalization. Just, Bingham explained, "these discharges, with his naturalization papers, were destroyed by an unforeseeable accident." On these grounds, the Democrats had rejected the Irishman's vote, considering he lacked written proof that he was "twenty years of age when he took the oath of fidelity." On this tenuous thread, the state had disenfranchised a veteran who epitomized the very spirit of revolutionary independence.
[W]hen many of the states at present assembled…were still reposing in our female parent'due south arms,…when British bayonets brightened on every side, and the tomahawk and scalping knife glanced in the pulp glare past the cruel torch—so, then, it was sirs, that the manwhose right, yeah, whose right of citizenship I am now defending stepped forward as a volunteer, and bared his bosom to the blast.
Three years later on making this speech communication, Bingham revisited the story of Irish potato's disenfranchisement inThe County Election by picturing an Irishman—without papers—encountering election judge Marmaduke at the voting window. In addition, the painting juxtaposes the young Irishman at the window with an old man immediately below him, who, with bent back, descends the stairs later on voting. In preparatory drawings for the painting,Bingham sketched this same anile character, with the revolutionary number '76 on his hat. The grizzled figure of "Old '76" was a commonplace of antebellum visual culture. Past juxtaposing the red-haired Irish gaelic voter with the old veteran below, the painting condenses the past and present moments of Murphy'due south story while recalling its moral: the worthy voter deprived of his rights (as Bingham had been) by the Democratic "clique" of central Missouri.
In the painting, the Irishman lacks papers of whatsoever kind. Having mounted the stairs, he is preparing to vote viva voce, consistent with state election law. Under the viva voce organisation a vote could be delivered either orally or in writing. Upon hearing or reading a voter's selection, the gauge then appear the voter's proper noun and his vote viva voce—or orally and audibly—to the clerks backside him, who then recorded them in poll books. Ballot judges were empowered to decide the legality of whatsoever voter. If an immigrant had lost his naturalization papers or a voter appeared too young or lacked proof of residency, the guess could then administrate an oath. This is precisely what occurs inThe County Ballot where the election approximate swears in the Irish gaelic voter before accepting and announcing his vote.
Missouri was among the last states to abandon viva voce voting (in 1863), forth with Arkansas (1854), Due west Virginia (1861), Virginia (1867), Oregon (1872) and Kentucky (1891). Although the practice was established to give voters assurance that their actual votes were recorded, it besides invited ethnic profiling, bullying, blackmail, and its own kinds of inaccuracies—every bit, for example, when large crowds of voters overwhelmed clerks with their cacophonous shouts. What is meaning about viva voce inThe County Election, however, is that the required oath sworn by the Irish voter elevates him inside the painting'due south visual rhetoric as an exemplar of "the people's" original vox.
Coatless and hatless, at the apex of the painting'south pyramidal composition, the white ethnic workingman is a visual version of the theological motto of the American Revolution—vox populi vox Dei (the voice of the people is God's voice). Reaching hopefully for "the volume," of the law or the Holy Bible, the man summarizes the painting'southward logocentric faith in representative government as a mysterious ritual of incarnation where voting—either orally, or with paper and pencil—guarantees the presence of the vocalization, and thus the voter, in the vote.
But Bingham's painting is also securely ambivalent about the voter's representation through writing. Writing unfolds in the shady space backside the voting window, where a clerk ambiguously sharpens the point of his pencil to either faithfully inscribe or to alter the ballot returns. The painting'due south concern with faithful inscription is as well communicated past the man reading a paper at far right and past the voter/artist seated on the lower steps in the center foreground. With pen and newspaper on his knee, this figure is unremarkably (and rightly) identified as Bingham himself: as he writes, or sketches, two voters peer over his shoulder to watch which way the vote (or drawing) volition go.
By picturing the artist,The County Electionposits a relationship between the honest voice of the rejected Irishman and the pencil of the highly literate Whig creative person, who uses Irish potato'south story to articulate his own claims to faithful inscription. Grounded in the vox populi of the disenfranchised immigrant,The County Ballot projects a cross-grade alliance between the bourgeois Whig and the white indigenous voter he claims to correspond. Intimately associated with Bingham'southward own disenfranchisement by the Democratic legislature, the Irish workingman is elevated at the moment of his assimilation to a text-centered legal and electoral system that claims to represent all white men across differences of pedagogy, class, and culture.
Blackness Work
On April 28, 1836, a mulatto steamboat cook from Pittsburg named Francis McIntosh was burned alive in the streets of St. Louis by a white mob. But off the steamboatFlora, McIntosh had allegedly killed a white policeman while the latter was arresting two of his companions for fighting. No one among the more than than 1 yard people nowadays at the lynching was indicted. While the mob's lawlessness was widely decried (by twenty-7-year-erstwhile Abraham Lincoln, amongst others), St. Louis officials claimed that popular justice had trumped the letter of the police force. In an infamous extension of the logic of popular sovereignty, the astonishingly well-named Judge Luke Lawless argued that the lynching mob had been so large that it must take embodied the authorisation of the people themselves and could not, therefore, be punished by the courts.
The lynching of McIntosh is an example of the racial panic that could be induced in the 1830s by the presence of free blackness workers in the Upper South, especially after Nat Turner's rebellion (1831). City law simply exacerbated the problem. While black codes and blue laws constrained the motion and behavior of gratis blacks, they rarely impinged on the affairs of white workers. A strike and its bellboy social gatherings by the city'due south Workingman's Political party would have been inconceivable for black workers. By excluding costless blacks from public spaces, in other words, city law effectively fabricated St. Louis politics white.
Antebellum racial panic in Missouri reflected white anxiety about slave revolts, abolitionist print culture, and northern economic power. But such panics were also stimulated by the everyday dependence of Missouri's commercial and river economy on African American workers—from dockworkers and draymen to smiths, cooks, barbers, and bootblacks. Moreover, economic dependence implied social contact, calling attention to the reality of relationships (of identity as well as departure) between blackness and white races. This equivocal repression of, and reliance upon, black work is illustrated by an 1836 print satire of a black "strike"—published in the St. LouisLiterary Registerjustiii days before the lynching of McIntosh. Reprinted from a New York paper, the satire'due south central purpose is to ridicule an African American bootblack named "Scip" who is attempting to strike in imitation of white laborers in New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis.
When the bourgeois narrator approaches his bootblack to accept his boots cleaned, he learns that Scip has decided to strike. Scip reports that all the other bootblacks are out on strike and that he will at present require a shilling for shining shoes. "Oh Boss," said he, "I've struck!…—can't black boots for sixpence—muss hab a shillum…" White and well-educated, the narrator refuses to pay.
"Oh, but Scip, I am an old customer; you won't raise on me. I'll send my boots with a sixpence, and exercise you lot mind, make them smooth like a dollar."
"Aye, dominate, I'll brush 'em asixpence worth." Not doubting but they would be returned in decent society, we were not a picayune surprised to find them in the hall next morning, one of them shining like a mirror, and the other covered with mud, with a note stating that he intended to assist the chimney sweeps intheir plough out.
—"STRIKE EXTRA,"Northward.Y. Commercial Bulletin study in theMissouri Literary Register 25 (April 1836)
The effect of this substitution is to affirm the whiteness of both labor and bourgeois culture by highlighting the absurdity of a striking bootblack. Scip introduces the possibility of economical enfranchisement for black workers. But the joke hinges on the impossibility of a blackness strike or a black workingman, in a world where the just work that counts is costless white labor. If we accept that he is a slave, this same oxymoron of "blackness work" defines the identify of the African American human being inThe Canton Election.
Given the history of Saline County, it is hard to imagine that Bingham intended the homo to be anything just a slave. Saline Canton was in the heart of "Little Dixie," a seven-county area of central Missouri known for its hemp and tobacco farms, and reliance on slave labor. Co-ordinate to historian Thomas Dyer, the canton was "domicile to…well-nigh five thousand blacks" in the belatedly 1850s, "almost all of whom were slaves. The slave population grew by 79 pct during the decade of the 1850s, by far the greatest increase of whatsoever county in Little Dixie, the area of heaviest slave ownership in the state." Bingham's home of Arrow Rock, the boondocks pictured inThe County Election, was the near important river port in Saline County. Past 1860 Arrow Rock had a population of more than than ane one thousand people, nearly one-half of whom were African Americans.
When Bingham assembly African American slavery with drinking he does so in role to imply that Democrats are enslaved. His satire implies that Sappington, Marmaduke, and their allies take corrupted the county election, not only past manipulating the letter of the police but by substituting fake "spirits" for the Whig spirit of republican independence. Their senses distorted by drinkable, the Democrats cannot mayhap do their franchise in a free or disinterested fashion. Instead, it is the alcohol and the party hirelings dragging drunks to the poll that are voting.
The race of the Saline County slave tars the white Democrat at his table, not only by clan with drunkenness simply with blackness likewise. Similar the abject and beaten man on the opposite (far correct) side of the painting, the drunkard in the painting's left foreground is positioned at the far edge of the white political customs. While the white drunk does not exactly fraternize with the black retainer, the plate of meat bones before him suggests he has been at the tabular array for some fourth dimension. As a site of social contact between a black slave and a white voter, the drinking table implies social, racial, and sexual degradation at the limit of white law and guild—where mixed-race social contact violates the prohibition on racial and gender mixing in street gatherings or in leisure pursuits.
Bingham'southward allegory of drinking equally enslavement is neither pro- nor antislavery per se. Nor is the figure of the slave racist past itself. Antebellum newspaper satire could exist much more virulently racist thanThe County Election, every bit proved, for example, by countless antebellum parodies of Lincoln as a black ape. In the Whig press also, cartoons of Irish gaelic Catholic voters were far more than ethnocentric and racialized than Bingham's Irish voter. Simply Bingham, however, engages in racist political parody by deploying an African American body to satirize his white political enemies, by associating them with blackness or with condign blackness through contact.
Moreover, the linking of blackness with drink and degradation is carried across the entire canvas, through the 3 stages of decline that constitute the painting's temperance narrative. Moving from left to correct, the first stage is represented by the white man at the cider table; and the second, by the drunken voter held upwardly by some other homo (in the left middle ground); while the third phase is represented by the beaten and bloodied voter alone on the bench at far right. Art historians have noted the temperance narrative in the painting. Simply what makes information technology peculiarly significant is Bingham's insinuation of race by way of the slave with whom it begins.
While the black man introduces the topic of slavery, the fact of racial apartheid and the threat of abolition are subsumed by the painting'southward temperance allegory—which associates drunken Democrats with moral enslavement and racial blackness but not with slavery in particular or the legalized violence that enabled it. With the message that Democrats are (drunken) slaves, the impulse of antislavery is sidelined and contained by the less divisive Federalist topos of republican virtue, as good by the comparatively sober and upright (Whig) voters. Past dissimilarity, the upright and sober slave at the cider table is tainted by the racist implication that fifty-fifty an African American slave is more virtuous than a white drunk—or a Missouri Democrat.
In Bingham'south political parody, race and temperance are deployed together in keeping with the blackness codes and blue laws of cardinal Missouri where, between 1836 and 1859, racial violence and moral panics unfolded together within the field of white solidarity. Between 1853 and 1859 Saline County and adjoining Pettis and Carroll counties endured seven white-on-black lynchings. As in the lynching of Francis McIntosh, these acts were construed past their white participants every bit acts of popular justice. In Arrow Stone, for example, over one thousand people turned out for the 1859 lynching of an unnamed slave "owned by Dr. William Price," who was accused of molesting a twelve-year-one-time white daughter.
Whatever Bingham may accept thought of these appalling events, he knew slavery well. When his own family unit immigrated to Saline Canton in 1823, they brought several slaves with them from Virginia. When the creative person began work onThe Canton Election, he owned "a male and female person slave," and in 1853 he bought four more. Even so, Bingham'due south overarching political concern was to preserve the Union through peaceful compromise. The artist'southward enemy was anyone, be they abolitionist or proslavery Southerner, who threatened the constabulary and gild of the federal organisation. Hence, as the conflict over slavery intensified and the Whig party disintegrated, Bingham allied himself with Lincoln and "the Black Republicans." When war came, he served the Union in Missouri.
In 1846, when he first ran for political office, Bingham probably did not foresee the collapse of his political party. The Whigs had tasted national victory in 1840, with Harrison'southward Log Motel Campaign. And when Bingham began to paintThe County Election, Missouri was four years away from the electoral anarchy and violence that erupted with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. It is in the Log Cabin spirit of Whig popular politics, then, rather than as a prelude to Civil State of war, thatThe Canton Election celebrates white male solidarity across class lines. Nevertheless, the reasons for the party's collapse are evident in the painting. While many factors explain the Whigs' disintegration after 1854, they include the party's deeply equivocal human relationship to economic and racial inequality, as well as the abject failure of either Whig populism or legislative compromise to adjudicate, or even address, the black codes of antebellum political life upon which white power relied.
Further Reading:
Social historians of voting such every bit Stuart Blumin and Glenn Altschuler,Rude Republic: Americans and their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, N.J., 2000), have commented usefully on the frequent and misleading reproductions ofThe County Election,in textbooks and on monograph covers, where the painting is deployed ideologically as prove of some golden age of voting in the United States or a never-again-matched period of political participation (albeit among developed white men). But for a detailed voting history that considers viva voce voting alongside the wildly diverse, ethno-cultural attitudes and practices of antebellum voting in Missouri and elsewhere, there is no meliorate source than Richard Franklin Bensel,The American Election Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2004).
Daniel A. Graff'due south "Citizenship and the Origins of Organized Labor in St. Louis," in Thomas K. Spencer,ed., The Other Missouri History: Populists, Prostitutes, and Regular Folk (Columbia, Mo., 2004): 50-80, is essential to seeing the axis of racial apartheid inThe Canton Election; Thomas Thou. Dyer'southward exemplary business relationship of lynching in Saline County, "A Most Unexampled Exhibition of Madness and Brutality: Approximate Lynch in Saline County, Missouri, 1859," in W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ed.,Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South (Chapel Colina, N.C., 1997): 81-108, provides the data for situating Bingham'south fine art inside the history of Saline County. Arrow Rock historian Michael Dickey has also just published a comprehensive history of Arrow Stone that draws on scattered sources to document the boondocks's emergence on the commercial frontier of the Santa Fe Trail and Missouri River,Arrow Rock: Crossroads of the Missouri Borderland (Arrow Rock, Mo., 2004).
Sometime slaves have besides narrated the history of "Little Dixie." Many of these oral histories were collected past the Federal Writers Projection (WPA) in the late 1930s and are attainable online through the National Athenaeum Website,Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers Projection. Three WPA narratives from Saline County—including the memories of a kid of 1 of Judge Meredith Marmaduke's slaves—are also reprinted at the roots Website) equally "Slave Narratives of Saline County."
The fine art historical scholarship on Bingham is abundant. Students of Bingham's ballot paintings should begin with Nancy Rash'southwardThe Paintings and Politics of George Caleb Bingham (New Haven, Conn., 1991); both versions of Gail Eastward. Husch'south article "George Caleb Bingham'sThe County Ballot: Whig Tribute to the Volition of the People," in Mary Ann Calo, ed.,Critical Issues in American Fine art, A Book of Readings (New York, 1998): 77-92, revised past the author from theAmerican Art Journal 19:4; and the entire 1990 exhibition catalogueGeorge Caleb Bingham (St. Louis, 1990), which includes essays by Barbara Groseclose, Paul C. Nagel, and John Wilmerding, among others. For a comprehensive checklist of Bingham's paintings and sketches, including the sketch of "Old '76" descending the stairs inThe County Election, see John Francis McDermott,George Caleb Bingham, River Portraitist (Norman, Okla., 1959).
This commodity originally appeared in issue 9.1 (October, 2008).
Laura Rigal is an associate professor of English and American studies at the University of Iowa. She is completing a report of the relationship betwixt icons of American visual culture and U.S. territorial and economic expansion, Picturing Entitlement: Rhetorics of Expansion in American Visual Culture, 1776-1900.
Source: http://commonplace.online/article/black-work-polling-place/
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