Votes by the barrel

In the 19th century, votes were
bought not by money but by whiskey. A keg would be set up outside each polling
place on election day, and the more generous a candidates was with the ladle
the better he was likely to do.

Not everyone approved. Paul Angle in
Here I Have Lived recalled a pioneer’s tale about the general
election at Springfield in 1822:

Three men named Kinny, Par­kerson and Edwards, had a long bench
ranged along the Court House, on which they set their liquors. The polls were
held in the interior. We all got plenty to drink [and] a gen­eral frolic
occurred . . . . The great evil was, that every candidate had to fill his
portmanteau with whiskey, and go around and see and treat every voter and his
wife and family with the poisonous stuff, or stand a chance of being defeated.

A history of the Old Stonington
Colony posted by Sally Andrews Neely on the Christian
County GenWeb site, includes this story about three candidates for
political office who encountered a voter by the name of Elijah Palmer.

 Each one passed the time of
day, and … began soliciting him for a vote, stating each office they wished to
run for, and uncle Elijah was rather slow in his talk. He says to them,
“Where is your bottle?” No sooner than he had said it, each man
pulled out of his pocket a pint bottle of whiskey and offered it to Uncle
Elijah, and he replied in his long and slow drawn out words, “That is all
I want to know of you. I would not vote for one of you.” They discovered
they had pulled the bottle on the wrong man this time.

I must thank Christopher Fowler for reminding us that the old world carries off this sort of thing with rather
more flair. The site is the ‘The Intrepid Fox’ pub in London’s Wardour Street.
It was named after Charles James Fox, prominent
British Whig statesman from the
late 1700s, remembered in this country if at all for supporting the American
rebels against George III. Fox was famous as a drinking man when drinking was
less a vice than a pastime.

There was a mural in the pub
depicting his mistress, who won him votes by downing a yard of ale and smashing
it in the fireplace, before giving every man a drink for a vote. 

Ah,
Democracy.

This article appears in Mar 6-12, 2014.