I came home last Saturday from SHEAR’s 2025 sessions in Providence, where I presented on the race and the origins of gerrymandering, to find that Texas Republicans intended to pass a mid-term gerrymander to further limit the number of Democrats in Texas Congressional seats. By Sunday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was telling CNN that the Democrats intended to respond by looking at similar plans in five Democratically controlled states. The history of gerrymandering suggests that the current arms race of redistricting for short-term partisan gains is quite in line with the actions of those in the early republic, indicating a period of political instability akin to the Jacksonian period may be on the way.[1]

“The Gerry-Mander.” Although not the first version of Elkanah Tisdale’s famous cartoon, this one notably includes all the towns of Essex County. Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Gerry-Mander_Edit.png#/media/File:The_Gerry-Mander.png.

Gerrymandering remains constitutional because the Constitution itself gave the operational details of managing elections, including the drawing of district lines, to the states. Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 of the Constitution states:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.

At the time of ratification, only the second part of the clause giving Congress a right to interfere with state legislatures was challenged. Ratification conventions in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Virginia, New York, and North Carolina decried the new federal power, envisioning the federal government dictating the rules of elections for its own gain. The ratification conventions of Virginia and North Carolina actually proposed an amendment to ban Congressional interference “except when the legislature of any state shall neglect, refuse, or be disabled by invasion or rebellion, to prescribe the same.” Little, though, was said about the first part of the clause leaving the actual details of how to elect members of Congress in the hands of individual state legislatures.[2]

Alexander Hamilton and James Madison seemed to indicate the assumption that Congressional districts would be based on existing counties. Hamilton, writing in Federalist #61, noted that New York elected its representatives by county, regardless of size. Madison, writing in Federalist #57, argued that some counties in Pennsylvania, which elected single members to the state’s executive council, were almost as large as the proposed Congressional districts representing 30,000 people. Philadelphia, per his example, was so large that it “might form nearly two districts for the choice of federal representatives.” Whether Madison intended for a geographic separation of Philadelphia County or the establishment of a plural member district is unclear.

James Madison framed constitutional arguments for localized election rules. Portrait by Charles Willson Peale, 1793. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Madison#/media/File:James_ Madison,_by_Charles_Willson_Peale,_1783.png.

Counties remained the basic building block of Congressional districts in the early republic, and the selection of counties often reflected partisan preference. Virginia, in 1788, grouped counties together to form its ten Congressional districts, as prescribed by the anti-Federalist aligned state legislature. The proposed fifth Congressional district, where Madison would stand for election, contained a group of eight counties: five decidedly anti-Federalist and a sixth evenly split. Madison’s Federalist allies, including George Washington, bemoaned the likelihood of his defeat to anti-Federalist James Monroe. Circumstances ultimately changed in Madison’s favor, resulting in his election following his support for Constitutional amendments, but the initial selection of counties to comprise Virginia’s Fifth District seemed, at least in part, designed to disadvantage Madison.[3]

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]

New Jersey switched from a general ticket election to district elections, by county in 1798. Map by Mathew Carey, 1795, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3810.ct005871/?r=-1.054,0.158,3.108,1.206,0.

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]

Elkanah Tisdale (1768–1835) created the “Gerry-Mander” cartoon, seen in this article’s header, that made the 1812 Massachusetts redistricting famous. The “Gerry-Mander” first appeared in the Boston Gazette, March 26, 1812. Self-Portrait, Undated, Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elkanah_Tisdale_-_Portrait_of_the_Artist_-_35.99_-_Detroit_Institute_of_Arts.jpg.

The redistricting plans of the current political parties, especially their rapid response nature, feel very similar to the partisan machinations of the early republic and antebellum period. The usage of sophisticated tracking polls and predictive computer models does not change the fact that the goals of today are identical to those of the Massachusetts Republicans in 1812. That suggests that times of rapid party turnover, legitimate third parties, and increased political violence are all on the horizon.

Endnotes

[1] Nicholas Riccardi and Nadia Lathan, “Texas Republicans aim to redraw House districts at Trump’s urging, but there’s risk,” Associated Press, July 21, 2025; Manu Raju and Sarah Ferris, “As Trump Pushes Texas takeover in fight for House, Democrats plot their counterpunch,” CNN, July 22, 2025. Since originally drafting this article, their plan has taken further shape with the development of a new House map. See J. David Goodman, Nick Corasaniti, and Shane Goldmacher, “Texas Republicans Unveil Gerrymandered House Map, Trying to Please Trump,” The New York Times, July 31, 2025.

[2] Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787–1788 (New York, 2010), 423. Text of the proposed amendments and the following quotes from the Federalist Papers all come from The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy, Yale Law School, Lillian Goldman Law Library (2008), avalon.law.yale.edu.

[3] Thomas Rogers Hunter, “The First Gerrymander?: Patrick Henry, James Madison, James Monroe, and Virginia’s 1788 Congressional Districting,” Early American Studies 9 (Fall 2011), 781–820.

[4] Rosemarie Zagarri, The Politics of Size: Representation in the United States, 1776–1850 (Ithaca, NY, 1987), 126. All vote totals verified in A New Nation Votes: American Election Returns, 1787–1825, American Antiquarian Society and Tufts Archival Research Center, elections.lib.tufts.edu.

[5] Boston Gazette, Mar. 26, 1812. Elmer C. Griffith, The Rise and Development of the Gerrymander (Chicago, 1907), 62–68, 88–91. Griffth is still the only true history of gerrymandering before 1842.