Greater New England

Posted on November 11, 2009 by David Hume

1856To the left is a map which shows the 1856 election results for president by county. In the blue are counties where John C. Fremont, the Republican, received a majority of the votes. The more intense the blue, the higher the proportion. You can see here the rough outlines of “Greater New England.” Most of New York supported Fremont, excluding the regions around the Hudson valley. Only the northern and western fringe of Pennsylvania supported the Republicans in 1856, and these are counties settled by Yankees. In Ohio Republican strength is strongest in the northeast, which was settled from New England and once claimed by Connecticut. The northern portion of Illinois, most of Iowa, and Wisconsin and Michigan, are part of the Yankee domains as well. 1860 is less representative of the cultural landscape of the Yankees because this was the election when much of the Mid-Atlantic, and in particular Pennsylvania, turned away from its historical ties to the South and created a “Solid North” bloc which would go on to dominate politics for nearly 100 years. 1856 still shows the Yankee lands as a minority faction, culturally powerful and influential, but politically impotent, as they had been since the fall of the Federalist party.

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10 Responses to Greater New England

  1. Zimriel says:
    November 11, 2009 at 8:53 pm

    Thanks for making a new topic on this one…

    One of my comments below mentioned New Brunswick and the Ontario peninsula as settled by runaway Tories from the Revolution. (I’ve been calling them “anti-States”.) I wonder in this case if the English in Canada hailed from historically pro-Crown counties back home. (Massachusetts was famously Puritan.)

    In this case, the Canadians might be technically “New England”, but a different sort of English than the moral crusaders and abolitionists in Boston.

  2. David Hume says:
    November 11, 2009 at 9:30 pm

    1) parts of nova scotia were settled by new england colonials. they tended to stay neutral during the revolution (the scots were pro-crown).

    2) the tories were a diverse bunch, but i think a disproportionate number emigrated from form the mid-atlantic colonies, in particular individuals of prominence from the coastal cities. according to the cousins’ wars (and other books i’ve read) anti-crown sentiment was strongest in new england.

  3. Polichinello says:
    November 12, 2009 at 6:30 am

    Neat graphic!

    according to the cousins’ wars (and other books i’ve read) anti-crown sentiment was strongest in new england.

    Yes. It was British intransigence and incompetence that cost them the mid and lower colonies during the American Revolution.

  4. Chris says:
    November 12, 2009 at 7:50 am

    Did the fact that Buchanan was from Pennsylvania have any influence on the way that state broke, perhaps?

  5. J. says:
    November 12, 2009 at 8:15 am

    Most people consider Pennsylvania “yankee” (or unionist) now, but the graph shows that it was solidly pro-Democrat in ante-bellum days. So Buchanan’s Admin.–or perhaps fears of secession– most likely pushed some Penn. “mugwumps” to join the North. Lee’s Army did some damage in Pennsylvania in the early part of Civil War (perhaps thinking it a reclaiming of territory).

    I doubt David Hume himself was fond of either the puritanical and unitarian New Englanders, OR the southern dixie boys, but Virginia at least had a reputation for free-thinking (e.g. Jefferson and Madison–and the Lees themselves), and quite a few Torys supported the South–given Hume’s not exactly PC writings, he probably sides, ideologically speaking, with the …Confederacy.

  6. Polichinello says:
    November 12, 2009 at 8:24 am

    But Hume would have never been able to commit wholeheartedly as he was opposed to slavery, IIRC.

  7. J. says:
    November 12, 2009 at 8:47 am

    Hume waffles a bit on the slavery issue, but was certainly a racist –see the “National Character” essay (and the last few years of his life he began to purge any racist comments he had previously made). He generally justified English and european colonialism. He did, however, appear to denounce chattel slavery on occasion (but it was generally a historical point, ie in regards to the slavery in the roman empire, etc). Hume may have been brilliant in some sense (Jefferson thought otherwise), but PC he was not.

  8. David Hume says:
    November 12, 2009 at 12:48 pm

    Did the fact that Buchanan was from Pennsylvania have any influence on the way that state broke, perhaps?

    no. invert the causality. pennsylvania was the linchpin of democratic ascendancy between 1800 and 1860. the non-elites in pennsylvania and the mid-atlantic outside greater new england was aligned with the democrats and against the federalists (and later whigs). the civil war was the beginning of a realignment as the northeast unified as a block (the lower midwest settled from the south there were still plenty of partisans of the auld alliance for obvious reasons)..

  9. Big "AL" McCormick says:
    November 12, 2009 at 9:41 pm

    Erie country was Democrat and still is.

  10. Jack says:
    November 13, 2009 at 12:00 pm

    The counties that voted for Fremont in 1856 also provided the core of Republican support for the next century. The presidential election of 1964 was the first election in which this trend was reversed. Many of the counties of New England and the upper Midwest that had supported the Republicans for over a century (even during the Democratic landslide of 1936) now voted Democratic for the first time. Much of the South, on the other hand, abandoned a century of one-party Democratic rule to vote Republican for the first time since Reconstruction. This trend has continued for the past 44 years, so that the Democrats now dominate the northeastern United States, while most white southerners now support the Republicans.

    As many commentators have noted, the party of Lincoln is now in danger of becoming a regional party based in the South- the same thing that happened to the Democratic party during the 50 years following the Civil War.

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