In his most influential work, On War (1832), Carl von Clausewitz famously referred to war as “the continuation of politics by other means.” Nathan Kalmoe, in his imaginative and insightful new book, With Ballots and Bullets: Partisanship and Violence in the American Civil War, explores the partisan underpinnings of conflict during the American Civil War. Focusing on the loyal states of the union (i.e., excluding the Confederate States of America [CSA]), Kalmoe explores five central research questions: (1) How did partisanship shape responses to calls to put down the rebellion? (2) how did partisan loyalties shift in the greatest era of party system change in US history from the Second Party System’s contests between Whigs and Democrats to the Third Party System’s contests between Republicans and Democrats? (3) how did local casualty rates influence voting patterns? (4) how did partisan and media leaders influence behaviors during the war? and 5) what does the violence of the Civil War era tell us about political violence in contemporary politics?

Kalmoe applies contemporary theories of mass partisanship, political violence, and opinion leadership to a historical context—the crucible of conflict that re-created the American nation in the nineteenth century—to which they are rarely applied. In doing so, his book argues that partisan orientations provide continuity to American political life even during and across the most extreme and unusual of US political settings. In Kalmoe’s analysis, this partisan continuity in behavior is mirrored by a similar continuity in the nature of partisanship in American electoral history: he argues that contemporary understandings of partisanship that developed in the modern survey era apply also to this pre-survey era setting and, indeed, to this most unusual of American historical settings.

Kalmoe begins his book with two introductory chapters. The first, in part, presents his argument for understanding political behaviors during the Civil War as inherently partisan in nature, whereas the second highlights the continuity of partisan voting in the shift from the Second to Third Party Systems in the North through the continuation of pro- and anti-Democratic Party patterns across these systems. Employing county- and state-level data, he finds strong correlations between Democratic and anti-Democratic vote shares across the two party systems, with Free Soil strongholds forming the initial foundation for Republican Party support and Whig strongholds eventually joining their anti-Democratic brethren. These strong correlations raise the question of how features of negative partisanship (Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster, “Negative Partisanship: Why Americans Dislike Parties but Behave like Rabid Partisans,” Political Psychology 39 [S1], 2018)—in this case, negative partisanship toward the Democrats—played crucial roles in producing stability in partisan voting patterns even across party systems featuring different partisan combatants, a question we cannot definitively address in the absence of individual-level data.

Kalmoe underpins these and the other analyses in his book on a critical argument regarding American partisan identification: that conceptual frameworks and understandings developed in the modern survey era can be applied to this earlier, pre-survey era. He rests this argument on two foundations: (1) that historical research describes partisan attachments in this earlier era in a way consistent with modern political science scholarship and (2) that we now have a sufficiently long record in the survey era (approximately 70 years) during which the basic empirical contours of partisan identification have largely remained unchanged (pp. 14–15). Although Kalmoe’s conceptual framework allows him to ground the historical analyses in modern, individual-level findings, any aggregate-level patterns are, of course, merely consistent with an individual-level argument that cannot be directly tested due to the absence of these micro-level data. Kalmoe’s book is sensitive to the ecological fallacy, but as with any such application, we must in turn be sensitive to how individual-level expectations may aggregate to the county or state level in unexpected ways due to local contextual features (e.g., the presence of mutually antagonistic demographic populations).

After his two introductory chapters, Kalmoe structures the remaining chapters into three distinct parts: (1) partisan opinion leadership, (2) partisan voting patterns during the Civil War, and (3) the legacies and implications of partisan violence during the Civil War for the post–Civil War and contemporary eras. In chapter 3 (coauthored with Tim Klein and Elias Shammas), the book employs a content analysis of a representative sample of 24 newspapers in the Civil War to examine the information that citizens were exposed to from local media. Kalmoe and his coauthors find a pattern of over-time changes in partisan gaps in support for the war and mobilization efforts in the partisan media. Specifically, they find little partisan gap in the early stages of the war, with even this gap in support narrowing by the midterm elections of 1862 (even as opposition to specific Republican policies such as emancipation was evident; p. 73). After the midterm elections, the partisan gap in war support expanded markedly.

Kalmoe follows this analysis of potential opinion leadership with one in chapter 4 of partisan differentials in soldiers’ votes, participation, desertions, and deaths. He finds stronger Republican vote shares in 1864 for soldiers versus the civilian male population (78% vs. 53%) and higher levels of war participation for both white and Black males in counties with higher prewar Republican support. Over-time variation in white male voluntarism is consistent with the opinion leadership identified in chapter 3, with prewar Republican support associated with higher levels of voluntarism in 1861 and 1864 (when it reached its highest effect) and no partisan differential in 1862 and 1863. Kalmoe also finds that soldiers from states with higher 1860 Lincoln vote shares experienced higher rates of Civil War combat deaths. Lacking quantitative data on women’s war participation, Kalmoe examines historical accounts and concludes, “Women likely shared their community’s partisan views, and those individual and local forces probably spurred their service in ways that resembled local men, to the extent allowed” (p. 101).

The linkage of partisan media content, and thus possible opinion leadership, to over-time differences in the effects of local partisan contexts on war voluntarism is a particularly important contribution of the book, as is its identification of state-level partisan differences in combat deaths. As Kalmoe notes, his analysis of the latter may be the first to uncover such partisan effects (p. 90). The partisan effects across so many different measures at the state and local level speak to the strong partisan underpinnings of orientations toward the war.

Part II of the book focuses on partisan framing and on the effects of Civil War deaths and events on voting behavior. Kalmoe and his coauthors of chapter 5, Klein and Shammas, find that partisan media engaged in moral disengagement to present their partisan opponents “as disloyal, evil, national threats, and less than human” (p. 111). Such framing, Kalmoe and his coauthors argued, provided rationales for acts of political violence that ensued in the North. Meanwhile, Republican and Democratic papers did not differ in their level of coverage of the number of casualties in the lead-up to the 1864 election but did offer competing frames, with Democrats framing the losses as senseless and Republicans framing the war dead as martyrs, and the two sets of papers using their competing frames to argue for the war’s end or its continuation to victory (p. 134).

Chapter 6 explores the effects of local war deaths on voting patterns during the war. Here, Kalmoe finds a highly contingent effect depending on local partisan contexts. In Democratic counties, higher levels of casualties were associated with lower levels of support for Lincoln in 1864, whereas in Republican counties, casualties did not affect support for Lincoln. Kalmoe traces these differing contextual effects to “partisan motivated reasoning, local opinion leadership, and local social influences” (p. 150), although lacking individual-level data it is difficult to assess the relative contributions of these or other factors on the differential responses. Chapter 7 examines the effects of events, with Kalmoe arguing strongly against the conventional wisdom that Sherman’s taking control of Atlanta rescued Lincoln from an inevitable defeat. He argues instead, using the leverage provided by differing election dates for nonpresidential elections during the war, that Lincoln had long been on a path toward victory in 1864. The evidence here is convincing and is consistent with Kalmoe’s broader theme of enduring and resilient partisanship that shaped behavior throughout the war.

Part III, the final part of the book, examines the enduring legacy and implications of partisan violence both in the post–Civil War era and for contemporary politics. In chapter 8, Kalmoe finds that Republican locales exhibited greater war memorialization and more extensive record keeping, in part because the war became central to the party’s political identity. Prewar Republican voting patterns are also found to be associated with greater institutionalization of Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) posts after the war.

In the book’s concluding chapter, Kalmoe addresses the obvious echoes of his analyses to concerns about contemporary partisan violence in the United States. He cautions against popular arguments that the country could devolve into a large-scale, second Civil War, arguing instead that partisan violence is likely to be more localized and less organized. At the same time, Kalmoe claims that understanding the critical role that partisanship played during the Civil War can help serve as a cautionary tale for our present time, in recognizing “American partisanship as more powerful and more dangerous than we knew. A clear-eyed view of the Civil War shows us the lethal potential of mass partisanship” (p. 226).

In highlighting the partisan dimension of the Civil War, Kalmoe’s book makes significant contributions to our understanding both of this particular historical era and of contemporary concerns such as political violence, opinion leadership, and mass partisanship. The continuity that Kalmoe argues that partisanship provides even during the most tumultuous of eras is matched by the continuity in applying contemporary conceptualizations and models to the pre-survey era in American politics. As such, Kalmoe’s book should be of considerable interest not only to political and electoral historians but also to scholars of voting and partisanship in the contemporary era. By better understanding historical continuities in American politics, scholars will be better able to place current analyses and concerns in historical perspective. Kalmoe’s book is a critical resource for expanding our understanding of partisanship in the American experience.