The two cities project

This project is a close analysis of the people inhabiting two mid-sized American cities in the middle years of the nineteenth century. As total history, the project allows the reconstruction of the economic, cultural and political lives of the residents of those cities at that time. Because Alexandria, Virginia and Newport, Kentucky operated under viva voce election law, we are able to examine the political performance—voting, non-voting and candidate selection – of the approximately 2500 potential voters of Alexandria and the 4000 age eligible voters of Newport. The voting records produced by the oral voting requirement (a feature of the mid-century electoral law of Britain, Canada and five American states) are official results. Using these records, we are able to learn more about the political choices of these people than we know of any group of citizens in American history. And because almost all of Alexandria’s churches and their records survive, we can also ask, for that city, about religious affiliation and the relationship between the worlds of politics and religion.

Perhaps most importantly, we have been able to map the exact residence of nearly three quarters of the inhabitants of both Alexandria and Newport, opening both towns to the explorative possibilities made available by newly developing GIS techniques.

In analytic terms, Alexandria and Newport represent the diverging political economies of nineteenth century America. Alexandria, on the Potomac, boasts a mercantile history stretching back to the early years of the eighteenth century as the entrepot of the Shendoah Valley. Across that River was the nation’s capital and Alexandria reflects much of the nation’s history. George Washington’s Mt. Vernon is just a few miles down river and the Lee family’s Arlington is just a few miles up river: both George Washington and Robert E. Lee had homes in Alexandria and were involved in Alexandria’s public life. On the eve of the Civil War, when this Project intersects with the city’s history, Alexandria had a total population of about 12,000 and was a fine example of an American Georgian city with a distinctly genteel caste.

Alexandria was also a slave city in a slave state, its black population (about 20 percent of the town’s residents in 1860) equally divided between slaves and free men and women. We enter Alexandria in 1859 with the crisis over slavery boiling and the 1859 state and national elections looming.

Newport, Kentucky, was also a river city, situation on the Ohio just opposite the inland industrial colossus of Cincinnati and had little of Alexandria’s genteel gloss about it. In the early 1870s, Newport was a burgeoning industrial place with the Swift Iron Rolling Mill at its economic core and a population of about 15,000. Newport was a Victorian city, gritty and proud – and heavily immigrant. If Cincinnati was the “Munich of America,” Newport was Munich’s satellite, with nearly a third of its citizens of German birth. The Irish were nearly as prevalent.

As in Alexandria, crisis was in the air. The Panic of 1873 shook Newport in economic terms just as the impending political crisis of the late 1850s was shaking genteel Alexandria. The strikes of the Ohio River Valley rolled into Newport where Swift, president of the Valley Iron Owners Association, fought to reduce wages and keep his mills afloat. We enter Newport in the Spring of 1874 in this time of turmoil – in the midst of a devastating economic depression, the city pre-occupied with a violent strike against its largest employer, and a municipal election just days away.

The Two Cities Project is part of a larger set of studies of North American communities in the era of viva voce election law. Seven other case studies are in preparation: Southampton County, Virginia; Todd County, Kentucky; English Prairie, Illinois; Sangamon County, Illinois; Washington County, Oregon; Oxford County, Ontario, Canada; and Bertie County, North Carolina. The two totally mapped rural environments – Washington County and Oxford County —will soon be presented as the Two Counties Project. The Australian Research Council has provided financial support for this work over many years; the projects have also enjoyed the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities in the United States.

For a recently published article arising from the work on the two towns in the urban phase of the larger poll book project, see Donald A. DeBats and Mark Lethbridge, “GIS and the City: Nineteenth-Century Residential Patterns,” Historical Geography, 33 (Special Issue, 2005), pp. 78-98. See also Donald A. DeBats, “German and Irish Political Engagement: The Politics of Cultural Diversity in an Industrial Age,” in Wolfgang Helbich and Walter D. Kamphoefner, German-American Immigration and Ethnicity in Comparative Perspective (Madison: Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, 2004), pp. 171-220.

Work from the Two Cities Project is presented on this site, where you can explore Alexandria, Virginia in 1859 or Newport, Kentucky in 1874.