Reviews of Books

The Politics of Long Division: The Birth of the Second Party System in Ohio, 1818–1828. By Donald J. Ratcliffe. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000. Pp. xviii, 455. $65.00.)

Richard Nixon once said that all presidential elections come down to Ohio. Projecting that insight back two centuries, Donald J. Ratcliffe's rich two-volume narrative uses Ohio to test some long-contested propositions concerning the rise and fall of party systems, the relationship of Federalists and Jeffersonians to each other and to their Whig and Jacksonian successors, the timing of electoral democracy's enthronement in principle and practice, and the connection between voters and politicians at local, state, and federal levels. Nearly 600 pages of text on early Ohio politics may seem a bit much, yet Ratcliffe argues fairly that Ohio's rapid maturation from frontier conditions, its cultural mix of Yankees, upland southerners, Quakers, Germans, and Scots-Irish, its mixed economy, and its very size (fourth in electoral votes by 1820, ahead of Massachusetts and North Carolina) make it a better exemplar of the nation than some other more intensively studied states.	1
The title of Ratcliffe's first volume tips off its major theme: majoritarian democracy and grassroots party politics came early to Ohio. Schooled in Revolutionary principle, Ohioans were ideologically primed for popular democracy even before statehood. The state constitution of 1802 gave nearly all adult white males the vote, and passionate party loyalties, imported from the east and credibly linked to in-state controversies, gave them reason to use it. While he attends to both ethnocultural and socioeconomic dimensions of partisanship, Ratcliffe portrays party identity, both in its Jeffersonian and later Jacksonian incarnations, as ultimately an independent variable, not reducible to condition or culture and capable, once formed, of generating its own consequences. The ideological cleavages of the 1790s and the policy divisions of the 1820s—the formative decades of the two party systems—ran deep, and Ohioans, like other Americans, felt compelled to choose sides.	2
Challenging a conventional view of Federalists and Jeffersonians as imperfectly organized and hamstrung by deferential attitudes and antiparty convictions, Ratcliffe sees them competing vigorously and unabashedly for popular favor from the very moment of statehood. Rallying devices such as nominating conventions, usually considered by historians as Jacksonian innovations, were in use as early as 1805. Ohio's politics were egalitarian in spirit as well as form, giving the bulk of power over to ordinary voters and the ambitious men who organized them rather than to a coterie of gentry. Despite Ohio's late entry onto the national scene, the so-called First Party System sank deep roots there.	. . .