Blood and ballots: Military voting and political communication in the Union Army during the United States Civil War, 1861--1865

This historical-critical account of partisan conflicts over the soldier vote in the United States presidential election of 1864 advances our understanding of the relationship between voting technology, political communication, and the construction of a functioning public sphere. During the course of the American Civil War, bipartisan support for the Lincoln administration faltered and political conflict intensified in the Northern states. With each state election, whether or not soldiers in the field would be allowed to cast ballots proved a major point of contention. How the soldier vote would be facilitated was as pressing as the question of which candidate the soldier would support, and the two issues were closely intertwined in legislative debates. Both parties desperately wanted those votes. How to allow the soldier's participation, without exposing the ballot to fraud, theft, or delay, was the initial problem presented by the legalization of distance voting for the soldiers in the field. The technical problem of transmitting the vote as a piece of information was complicated by the presumed effects of military experience on an individual's political choices. Disputes over the administration of the soldier vote first described the nature of the experiential as well as the physical distance between civil and military spheres of influence, then proposed strategies for bridging that distance. This dissertation uses historical-critical methods to contextualize soldier voting discourse against the larger cultural history of communication technologies in the United States. In advancing certain criteria for genuine political decision-making, partisans utilized mutually divergent, yet historically specific notions about the nature of participatory democracy and, by extension, articulated the role of developing media technologies in the political culture of the mid-nineteenth century.