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Caprice's Maps and What-Not

The 1905 election was a return to holding a ton of ballots and adjourning without a choice, though the 173-ballot election for Senate Speaker seems to have delayed the start of balloting by three weeks resulting in less ballots than there might have been:

1727868483779.png​

Luckily for almost everybody involved, the next year they actually managed to elect someone on the first ballot for the first time since 1897:

1727868524191.png
Erratum: should say "blank", not "scattering"​
 
Caprice said:
I've started mapping out the 1869-1913 elections previously tabled out, and I've got everything through 1897 except 1895, which I simply do not know how to map coherently. I at least have the last day's balloting:

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>DuPont in Delaware

likely place for him to be
 
1731947052338.png
​
Townships in Illinois in 1950. Some townships hew directly to municipal borders (and Chicago does not have any townships within itself, being a weird bespoke category of county subdivision), even if their names may not be exactly the same (Springfield city is coterminous with Capitol Township, for example), and are shaded in a darker grey. A handful of counties decided not to have townships, and so instead their precincts are shown in white - these are not electoral precincts, but simply the county subdivisions used in those counties for administrative purposes; the difference seems to be that townships have more autonomy.
 
New Netherland was not one for representative government. At least three colonial legislatures were established: the Twelve Men in 1641 (elected by an assembly in New Amsterdam to authorize a war against the local indigenous population, forcibly dissolved by Director Kieft when they started complaining about the authoritarian nature of the government), the Eight Men (elected by "the people" in 1643, presumably the same franchise as in 1641, and would fizzle out after a year or so), and the Nine Men (chosen from 18 candidates chosen by the people, fizzled out after Director Stuyvesant neglected to appoint any replacements), none of which were able to assert any sort of democratic foundation for the colony despite the Netherlands being one of the foremost republics on earth.

Ultimately, it would be until well after the British conquest and renaming to New York for a democratic legislature to take hold. Initially, the governor and council wrote laws, which would be approved by the Duke of York who owned the colony, but after governor Sir Edmund Andros was sacked for a number of offenses (including having the governor of East Jersey arrested, indirectly causing his death), Thomas Dongan was appointed and, in 1683, instructed to call for the election of an assembly of 18 members, apportioned as follows.

1734631564621.png​

Counties did not exist, with the greater part of the colony divided into three ridings whose Long Island sections would become the three initial counties there. The borders of New York were not yet very well demarcated, and have been left off. Of interest are the seat given to Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket and the seat given to the holdings around Pemaquid in what is now Maine; these would be given to Massachusetts upon its rechartering in 1691.

Elections were conducted directly by freeholders in the more compact areas where everybody could be reasonably expected to turn up in one place, while in more scattered districts such as Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket there was a layer of indirect election. Tragically, the names of those elected have been lost, as have the proceedings of the session.

The assembly of 1683 passed a charter of rights which served as a constitution for the Province of New York. Dongan passed it, and it was sent to London where the Duke of York signed it in late 1684, after which it was sent to the Crown to be formally approved by Charles II. Ultimately, Charles II never got around to it before dying; the Duke of York assumed the throne as James II and proceeded to veto the charter that he had sent to himself for being too liberal. He instructed Dongan to dissolve the assembly of the now royal colony, though this did not reach New York until after the first session of the second assembly, the first assembly being dissolved upon the death of Charles II just to make sure everything was still above-board.

In 1688, James II would shove New York into the Dominion of England, chaired by the colony's former governor Edmund Andros. New English government over New York would not last long, however, as when news came that James II had been deposed in the Glorious Revolution, the Dominion of New England immediately collapsed into rebellion. New York was headed by a government helmed by self-proclaimed acting Lieutenant Governor Jacob Leisler, who, while awaiting a proper governor sent by William and Mary, summoned the first intercolonial congress in order to coordinate military actions against the French, who happened to be fighting a war with Britain at the time.

In 1691, Henry Sloughter, the newly-appointed governor, showed up in New York, where Leisler cordially handed over command of the colony and was promptly arrested and hanged for treason for his troubles. Only then could the colonial government resume itself in the manner in which it was run until the Revolution.
 
Caprice said:
New Netherland was not one for representative government. At least three colonial legislatures were established: the Twelve Men in 1641 (elected by an assembly in New Amsterdam to authorize a war against the local indigenous population, forcibly dissolved by Director Kieft when they started complaining about the authoritarian nature of the government), the Eight Men (elected by "the people" in 1643, presumably the same franchise as in 1641, and would fizzle out after a year or so), and the Nine Men (chosen from 18 candidates chosen by the people, fizzled out after Director Stuyvesant neglected to appoint any replacements), none of which were able to assert any sort of democratic foundation for the colony despite the Netherlands being one of the foremost republics on earth.
Click to expand...

This feels like it's halfway to recreating Venetian Doge Elections from first principles.
 
Caprice said:
Apparently Stuyvesant called the Nine Men "Tribunes of the People" which if that's a straight translation from the Dutch is an early exercise in American governmental Romaphilia. Every other source I have found just calls them the Nine Men.
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1) This sounds reminiscent of the Heeren XVII of the VOC, and 2) speaking of American governmental Romaphilia, this is ironic considering a couple of centuries later DeWitt Clinton would decide it was the Iroquois whose government resembled that of Rome (because...reasons?)

Also great to see more of your work on American colonial government! What are the sources like on the Virginia House of Burgesses, incidentally?
 
Thande said:
1) This sounds reminiscent of the Heeren XVII of the VOC, and 2) speaking of American governmental Romaphilia, this is ironic considering a couple of centuries later DeWitt Clinton would decide it was the Iroquois whose government resembled that of Rome (because...reasons?)

Also great to see more of your work on American colonial government! What are the sources like on the Virginia House of Burgesses, incidentally?
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There was a book published for (I believe) the 1976 bicentennial that had the fullest rosters they could find for Virginia legislative bodies all the way back to 1619; these are reasonably complete as far back as the 1640s, I think. The section for the House has also been put online as a database. As for election returns, I haven't found any online, but I've heard that there's a handful of count books preserved by either the counties in question or by the state library — one of these days I'll have to head to Richmond to peruse them.
 
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The eternal trouble with mapping colonial American legislatures is the lack of either well-attested election returns or particularly coherent partisan divisions. The electoral practice in New York in particular was not very forthcoming for returns, as if a candidate's victory was obvious from a show of hands the returning officer wouldn't even bother doing a proper count. (Not that elections were free or fair; it was by voice vote and the many tenant landholders were expected to vote in accordance with their concerningly feudalistic landlords.)

There were factions, but in the general way that American colonies were, it was a rough court vs. country split and mostly consisted of the governor fighting the assembly over various implements of government. However, I can at least map the final assembly, elected in 1769 to a seven-year term, on whether its members went on to support the revolution or become Loyalists (or at least be treated as Loyalists).

1734776142149.png​

Some designations were obvious, others less so. A majority voted against the findings of the First Continental Congress when it returned in early 1775, and that was used to assign some as Loyalists for lack of further information. One representative from Tryon County in the northwest tried to be neutral, but he was deemed a Loyalist for lack of support and is thus listed in blue. On the flipside, people were assumed to be Patriots if they participated in the provincial assemblies that took legislative control away from the General Assembly in the upstate. (New York and Long Island were occupied by Britain throughout the war and, owing to the General Assembly's seven-year term expiring and also there being a war on, were administered under martial law.)

Throughout the colonial period, each county got two representatives except for New York, which got four. The boroughs of Westchester and Schenectady eventually got one each, as did the three largest of the semi-feudal manors. I have chosen to put the latter to the side, as they were a) essentially rotten boroughs even more in the hands of the large landholders than usual, and b) the tenants tended to vote in the county constituencies, and accusations were aplenty that this allowed the landholders to effortlessly control those counties' delegations as well.
 
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Caprice said:
The eternal trouble with mapping colonial American legislatures is the lack of either well-attested election returns or particularly coherent partisan divisions.
Click to expand...
Indeed, the way I look at this (and contemporary elections back in the motherland, for that matter) is to assume the information does not exist by default, and thus it's a pleasant surprise to find there are exceptions.

That's excellent work on New York, and your approach of mapping them by later loyalties in the Revolution seems a reasonable one - I took the same approach when I attempted to map the English election of 1640 by classifying MPs by what loyalties they took in the ensuing Civil War. The pattern of support in the relatively more representative (mostly) county constituencies actually somewhat reflects the areas which each side would go on to hold in the Civil War, which surprised me somewhat - though partly this may be because an MP followed the loyalties of his county rather than vice versa.

Z-Election 1640 FINAL.png
 
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