Abstract
We analyze a unique case of voting on voting with the feet, when Tennessee twice considered secession from the Union in 1861 by popular referenda. The initial votes to hold a convention, and to send disunion delegates to a convention, failed, but after the Confederate states adopted a new constitution and the bombing of Fort Sumter took place, a second set of votes to separate from the union, and to join the confederacy, passed. Regression results support the importance of both economic interests and political tendencies, along with regional differences, in explaining the variation in votes across counties. Class distinctions were not found to be significant.
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Notes
Holcombe (2002, 129–137) presents an economic analysis of the Confederate Constitution and contrasts it against the United States Constitution. He suggests the primary difference was more direct limits on special interest politics acting through the legislature. One conclusion which might be drawn from Holcombe’s accounting on slavery, taxation, expropriations and general welfare, was that the Confederate Constitution strove to better preserve the status quo.
Data for the February votes are taken from “Official Voting Results”, Republican Banner, 5 March 1861.
Note that as reported in Table 1 the mean county support in the Middle region for holding a convention is just slightly above 50%, but as stated in the text opposition among all Middle region voters actually comprises a slight majority. In general, measuring support in a given region on any vote is only slightly different when comparing mean county support rate versus combined voter support rate.
Totals for the June 8, 1861 vote differ slightly in various sources, depending on how votes from Confederate military camps are included, among other minor discrepancies (Crofts, 1989, 411n3). Our totals, taken from “Official Returns”, Knoxville Whig, 13 July 1861, do not include votes cast in military camps.
Breckenridge was one of four major candidates in the 1860 presidential election, and he took the orthodox position of the Democratic Party on the principal slavery question of the day: he would not have permitted the federal government to have any power over slavery in the territories. His principal competitor in Tennessee (and the winner of the state’s electoral votes) was John Bell, the Constitutional Union candidate and Tennessee resident who took no position on the federal government’s power over slavery in the territories and simply sought to preserve the Union above all else. Meanwhile, Stephen Douglas, the Northern Democratic candidate who sought to permit residents of the territories to resolve the question of slavery through popular sovereignty, received few votes in Tennessee, and Lincoln, the Republican candidate, was not even on the ballot in the state (Partin, 1935, 70–71).
Article VI, Section 2 stipulates that no more than two of the five state supreme court justices can reside in any one of the three grand divisions.
The logistic transformation is computed as log[(percentage support)/(percentage oppose)].
Using the Democratic vote share for governor instead of the presidential share would result in a statistically insignificant negative coefficient for tobacco but not affect any other results.
An F-test confirms the coefficient on West is significantly greater than the coefficient for Middle.
Cheatham (Middle) is the only county reporting returns for the June vote but not for the presidential or gubernatorial elections. No returns were reported for the February vote either.
A secession convention was held by representatives of 68 of the 100 counties in Kentucky later that same year (November, 1861). Their Ordinance of Secession was recognized by the Confederacy but never formally accepted by the state government (Copeland, 1997).
Replacing the Democratic vote share in the presidential election with the Democratic vote share in the gubernatorial election results in a positive coefficient for tobacco although it is not statistically significant and thus does not alter the interpretation given. No other variables are affected in terms of sign or significance.
An alternative interpretation to the unimportance in wealth is that average wealth in the county does not properly capture individual differences in wealth across counties due to distributional asymmetries.
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Heckelman, J.C., Dinan, J.J. Voting on voting with the feet: a cross-county analysis of the Tennessee popular referenda to secede from the union. Constit Polit Econ 18, 83–97 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-007-9014-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-007-9014-4