More common efforts at partisan manipulation of Congressional seats involved state legislatures toggling back and forth between district and general ticket elections depending on which favored their party. New Jersey in 1798 and 1800 offers a case in point. Federalists in 1798 rightly suspected that they would lose a general ticket election and moved to divide the state into five districts to keep at least some Congressional seats. Their division of New Jersey’s counties worked very well, giving them a majority in three of the five districts despite losing the overall popular vote. (One of the Federalist districts, New Jersey Western district, actually had a majority of Federalist votes cast, but split between two different candidates resulting in the election of the Republican.) With Republicans in control of the statehouse before 1800, they simply switched the state back to a general ticket election and swept all five Congressional seats.[4]
The 1812 Massachusetts “Gerry-Mander” gained its infamy, in large part, because it did not respect existing county boundaries. Republicans in Massachusetts rightly feared a Federalist wave election and, in order to keep some of their seats, proposed a redistricting for the state senate and Congress. For the first time, though, they divided two counties—Worcester and Essex—into two districts with unusual shapes. Federalist opponents bemoaned the fact that such a division destroyed historical bonds between communities that had voted together since the colonial period. Federalist politicos lampooned the u-shape of the Essex South district, suggesting that it looked like a salamander. They named it the “Gerry-Mander,” after the state’s Republican governor, Elbridge Gerry, and bequeathed to us a vital term of the American political lexicon. Republicans won the “Gerry-Mander” district in 1812, but opposition to the War of 1812 and the “Gerry-Mander” itself returned Federalists to power in 1813. Yet the Federalists, rather than returning to the status quo and restoring community bonds, simply altered the “Gerry-Mander” lines to favor themselves for the next Congressional elections in 1814, beginning a political tradition. By the time Congress mandated single-member district elections for Congressional seats, gerrymandering had become part of the American political tool kit, at times outside of the traditional decennial redistricting.[5]