Mapping American Authoritarianism

About the Project

The mechanisms of political geographic manipulation are not inherently antidemocratic. Whether the redrawing of boundaries serves democratic or antidemocratic ends depends on context: whether it advances inclusion or exclusion, majority rule or minority entrenchment. This book examines how the deliberate manipulation of political geography shaped the trajectory from Reconstruction to Jim Crow, tracing how the same geographic tools served first to build multiracial democracy and then to destroy it.

Counties appear on maps as natural features, their boundaries seemingly determined by rivers, mountains, or historical accident. This appearance of naturalness obscures how geographic units are themselves products of political struggle. Between 1868 and 1920, southern states created over 130 new counties, far more than any other region despite slower economic growth. These counties were not administrative conveniences; they were instruments through which political power was distributed, exercised, and contested. The boundaries drawn during these decades determined who could vote, whose votes counted, and who held office.

I argue that political elites weaponized the drawing of county boundaries, the allocation of legislative seats, and the design of electoral systems to entrench their power. During Reconstruction, Republicans created counties to empower Black voters and generate Republican majorities. During Redemption and Jim Crow, Democrats repurposed these same geographic tools to destroy Black political power and establish authoritarian control that would endure for nearly a century. Republican county creation during Reconstruction violated traditional norms governing county development, yet it served democratic values by creating institutions through which newly enfranchised Black citizens could exercise political power. Democratic geographic manipulation during Redemption violated the same norms but served opposite ends: entrenching white minority rule and eliminating competitive elections.

Three theoretical concepts organize the analysis. I introduce compartmentalized authoritarianism to describe how Democrats concentrated their most repressive tactics in specific geographic areas while maintaining democratic appearances elsewhere. I show how geographic boundaries functioned as veto points, institutional positions from which political actors could block unwanted change. And I demonstrate how these geographic arrangements created institutional path dependence, perpetuating the political economy of racial control through mechanisms distinct from the cultural transmission of racist attitudes. The empirical chapters trace these dynamics across county creation, electoral violence, state centralization, regional allocation systems, and congressional redistricting.

This history illuminates how democracy can be undermined through seemingly technical decisions. Precisely because they appear administrative, geographic manipulations often escape scrutiny until their effects are entrenched. Counties created in 1869 still exist today; apportionment schemes adopted in the 1890s persisted until the 1960s. By the time their consequences became visible, the arrangements had acquired the legitimacy of tradition. The strategies documented here remain available to contemporary actors, and the lesson of the post-Reconstruction South is that democratic erosion need not require dramatic ruptures. It can proceed through the gradual manipulation of geographic foundations that citizens barely notice until change becomes extraordinarily difficult to reverse.