23. The others were 1860 (81.2) and 1876 (81.8), both times when momentous sectional issues needed resolution.
24. Quoted in Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery (Cleveland, 1969), 63.
25. On the parties’ strenuous efforts to get out the vote, see Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin, Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 2000). On the high general level of interest in politics then, see Mark Neely, American Political Culture in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill, 2005).
26. See Thomas Alexander, “The Basis of Alabama’s Antebellum Two-Party System,” Alabama Review 19 (1966): 276. Based on Alabama data, his finding is applicable more generally.
27. See Robert C. Williams, Horace Greeley (New York, 2006); for a brief assessment, Daniel Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago, 1980), 179–97.
28. Joel Silbey, The American Political Nation, 1838–1893 (Stanford, 1991), 155–56.
29. Richard P. McCormick, “Suffrage Classes and Party Alignments,” in Voters, Parties, and Elections , ed. Joel Silbey and Samuel McSeveney (Lexington, Mass., 1972), 79.
30. See Michael Holt, Political Parties and American Political Development (Baton Rouge, 1992), 151–92, esp. 181.
31. See Amy Bridges, A City in the Republic: Antebellum New York and the Origins of Machine Politics (New York, 1984); Anthony Gronowicz, Race and Class Politics in New York City Before the Civil War (Boston, 1998).
32. George Duffield, A Thanksgiving Sermon (Detroit, 1839); Richard Carwardine, “Evangelicals, Whigs, and the Election of William Henry Harrison,” Journal of American Studies 17 (1983): 47–75.
33. William Henry Harrison, Discourse on the Aborigines of the Valley of the Ohio (Boston, 1840).
34. Thomas Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility,” AHR 90 (1985): 339–61, 547–66; Howe, Political Culture of the American Whigs , 150–80.
35. Robert Swierenga, “Ethnoreligious Political Behavior in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” in Religion and American Politics , ed. Mark Noll (New York, 1990), 146–71, summarizes a large body of historical writing on this subject.
36. Daniel Howe, “The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture in the North During the Second Party System,” JAH 77 (1991): 1216–39.
37. The classic study of negative reference group voting is Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton, 1961). See also Robert Kelley, The Cultural Pattern in American Politics (New York, 1979).
38. See, for example, Daniel Feller, “Politics and Society: Toward a Jacksonian Synthesis,” JER 10 (1990): 135–61.
39. Major Wilson, “Republican Consensus and Party Debate in the Bank War,” JER 15 (1995): 619–48.
40. Matthew Crenson, The Federal Machine: Beginnings of Bureaucracy in Jacksonian America (Baltimore, 1975), 29.
41. See Thomas Brown, “From Old Hickory to Sly Fox: The Routinization of Charisma in the Early Democratic Party,” JER 11 (1991): 339–69.
42. Collected Works of AL , I, 205.
43. John Quincy Adams, “Address to his Constituents,” Sept. 17, 1842, in Selected Writings of John and John Quincy Adams , ed. Adrienne Koch and William Peden (New York, 1946), 392.
44. J. Mills Thornton, Politics and Power in a Slave Society (Baton Rouge, 1978), 133, 137.
45. William Shade, Democratizing the Old Dominion (Charlottesville, Va., 1996), 12, quotation from 221. See also Lacy K. Ford Jr., “Making the ‘White Man’s Country. White,” in Race and the Early Republic , ed. Michael Morrison and James B. Stewart (New York, 2002), 135–58.
46. Life, Correspondence, and Speeches of Henry Clay , ed. Calvin Colton (New York, 1857), I, 189, 191. See also Harold Tallant, Evil Necessity: Slavery and Political Culture in Antebellum Kentucky (Lexington, Ky., 2003), 49–52.
47. “On Abolition” (Feb. 7, 1839) in The Works of Henry Clay , ed. Calvin Colton (New York, 1857), VIII, 139–59.
48. Ibid., 158.
49. Lincoln quoted extensively from Clay’s views on slavery in his speech at Edwardsville, Illinois, on Sept. 11, 1858. Collected Works of AL , III, 93–94.
50. William J. Cooper, The South and the Politics of Slavery (Baton Rouge, 1978), 123–24.
51. [Calvin Colton], Political Abolition, by Junius (New York, 1844), 2.
52. Papers of Henry Clay , ed. Robert Seager (Lexington, Ky., 1988), IX, 283.
53. J. Mitchell to John McLean, Nov. 28, 1840, quoted in William Brock, Parties and Political Conscience (Millwood, N.Y., 1979), 72.
54. Quoted in Norma Peterson, The Presidencies of William Henry Harrison and John Tyler (Lawrence, Kans., 1989), 34.
55. “Report of the Physicians” (April 4, 1841), Presidential Messages , IV, 31.
56. Charles Hambrick-Stowe, Charles G. Finney and the Spirit of American Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1996), 198–203.
57. Robert Seager, And Tyler Too (New York, 1963), 243–66.
58. See Dan Monroe, The Republican Vision of John Tyler (College Station, Tex., 2003); Edward Crapol, John Tyler, the Accidental President (Chapel Hill, 2006). On the issue of Tyler’s slave children: Crapol, 64–67.
59. For how former nullifiers turned into Whigs, see J. Mills Thornton, Politics and Power in a Slave Society (Baton Rouge, 1978).
60. Representative Christopher Morgan, quoted in Holt, Rise and Fall of Whig Party , 130–31.
61. Quoted in Peterson, Presidencies of Harrison and Tyler , 57.
64. Charles Warren, Bankruptcy in United States History (Cambridge, Mass., 1935), pt. II; Edward Balleisen, Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, 2001).
65. Statistics presented in Holt, Rise and Fall of Whig Party , 140–60.
66. On the Exchequer Plan, see Peterson, Presidencies of Harrison and Tyler , 96–98.
67. Robert Gunderson, The Log-Cabin Campaign (Lexington, Ky., 1957), 212–16; Reinhard Luthin, The Real Abraham Lincoln (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1960), 54–55; Collected Works of AL , I, 159–79.
68. Kenneth Winkle, “The Second Party System in Lincoln’s Springfield,” Civil War History 44 (1998): 267–84.
69. David Donald, Abraham Lincoln (New York, 1995), 43–44; “Application for a Patent,” Collected Works of AL , II, 32–36.
70. Abraham Lincoln to Joshua Speed, quoted in Richard Carwardine, Lincoln (London, 2003), 12.
71. For Lincoln and the Illinois System, see Gabor Boritt, Abraham Lincoln and the American Dream (Memphis, Tenn., 1978), 13–39. For Lincoln and the Illinois Whig Party, see Joel Silbey, “Always a Whig in Politics,” Papers of the Abraham Lincoln Association 8 (1986): 21–42.
72. Donald, Abraham Lincoln , 110; Allen Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln, Redeemer President (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1999), 57.
73. See “Address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society” (Sept. 30, 1859), Collected Works of AL , III, 471–82.
74. For recent interpretations of Lincoln’s religion, see Carwardine, Lincoln , 28–40; Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln , 149–58, 312–24; Ronald White, Abraham Lincoln’s Greatest Speech (New York, 2002), passim; and Stewart Winger, Lincoln, Religion, and Romantic Cultural Politics (DeKalb, Ill., 2003).
75. “Temperance Address” (Feb. 22, 1842), Collected Works of AL , I, 271–79, quotations from 276, 278, 279. I say more about Lincoln’s conception of the constructed personality in Making the American Self (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 138–49.
76. David Grimsted, American Mobbing (New York, 1998), 205–9.
77. George Dennison, The Dorr War (Lexington, Ky., 1976), 14 (40 percent); Grimsted, American Mobbing , 209 (two-thirds).
78. Peter Coleman, The Transformation of Rhode Island (Providence, R.I., 1963), 270.