Parties scholars, campaign aficionados, and election junkies tend to be familiar with the 1840 US presidential election, and most think they know the story quite well. The 1840 presidential race was a contest dominated by shrewd and ubiquitous marketing, emotional dog-whistle appeals, and the unconditional triumph of style over substance. The final outcome of this less than admirable affair saw past-his-prime war hero and political novice William Henry Harrison defeating incumbent president and former New York Governor Martin Van Buren, with Harrison voted into office by an American public duped by propaganda and half (or no)-truths and overly influenced by campaign earworms and slogans so catchy that it’s impossible to believe they had not been created in a focus group. Indeed, ask anyone in the three groups noted already about the 1840 presidential campaign and the odds are good that the first thing out of their mouth will be “Tippecanoe and Tyler too” or “Van, Van, is a used-up man.” In short, we think we know all we need to know about the presidential election of 1840.

Richard Ellis is here to tell us we’re all wrong. While there is some small amount of truth in the standard story of the 1840 presidential election, Old Tip vs. the Sly Fox: The 1840 Election and the Making of a Partisan Nation, clearly demonstrates that there was far more going on in this contest than the traditional accounts allow for. Indeed, while the 1896 election contest is often deemed to be the first modern American presidential campaign, Ellis in this outstanding piece of scholarship makes a strong case that this title could just as easily and deservedly be bestowed on the 1840 campaign.

Ellis clearly documents how several elements central to modern US presidential campaigns have their origins in the 1840 contest. Many of these have to do with the nature of the campaign. High levels of voter turnout are often thought to be a hallmark of postbellum nineteenth-century elections, and while turnout levels declined throughout the twentieth century before rebounding somewhat in the twenty-first century, the strong emphasis on voter mobilization and activation has remained constant throughout. Ellis’s careful work demonstrates how energetic mobilization efforts fueling high voter turnout are first found in the state and congressional elections of 1837–39 and came fully into play in the presidential contest of 1840, resulting in a dramatic expansion of American participatory democracy. In a related development, it is the 1840 campaign that established the presidential contest as the central focus of American electoral politics, and in many ways American political life. Ellis relates that prior to 1840 voters tended to pay more attention to and turn out at higher levels for their state and congressional elections. This changed in 1840, as the presidential contest dominated national attention. Today we take it for granted that a presidential election will have meaningful impact far down ballots and across the nation. But when it happened in 1840, it represented a substantial and important change.

What drove these high turnout levels and caused the presidential contest to assume center stage? Here too Ellis deftly makes the case for the critical importance of the 1840 presidential campaign. First, the 1840 race was an overwhelmingly partisan affair. In terms of both campaign efforts and voting patterns, partisanship was key. This comes through most clearly in the unified Whig effort to elect Harrison but is clear in the Democrats’ efforts for Van Buren as well. Second, far from sitting by silently and allowing surrogates to make their cases to the voters both Harrison and Van Buren proactively took their arguments to the people and did so quite substantively. While they did so in very different ways—Harrison through large public speeches and Van Buren using public letters—both candidates actively and personally courted voters and did so in a manner that was heavy on public policy. Third, and according to Ellis the most important factor in the outcome of the 1840 presidential contest, this election demonstrated for the first time the power of the economy in shaping presidential election results. Van Buren simply could not overcome the poor economy in place during his reelection campaign. Future incumbents have learned this lesson as well. These critical developments both refute many of the common conceptions of the 1840 campaign and once again demonstrate the critical linkage of the 1840 contest to the presidential campaigns of the modern era.

These are just the primary threads that run through this excellent book. Readers will find far more of interest as well, such as the place of slavery in the party politics of the 1830s and 1840s, the significance of using open party conventions to nominate candidates, the implications of the lack of a national election day in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and the importance of Henry Clay in many different areas. This book is superbly researched and very well written. It is also highly accessible and will be a valuable read for all audiences from the educated layperson to the scholar with decades of experience in the area. My one complaint is that the text focuses far more on the Whigs and Harrison than it does on Van Buren and the Democrats. Readers are informed that this will be the case in both the Editor’s Foreword and by Ellis, but I still would have liked a bit more on the man who is often credited with the creation of modern American political parties. But this is a minor quibble with an excellent piece of work.

Throughout the book Ellis often notes how similar American politics of the 1830s is to the politics of our own time. Party leaders and politicians on both sides of the aisle fervently believe that the very future of the republic rests on the outcome of the next election. As such, these same leaders are not above using propaganda in support of their cause. We even have the losing presidential candidate in 1840 chalking his loss up to widespread voter fraud, as Van Buren couldn’t come up with any other plausible explanation for his defeat. But these similarities can also cause a reader to ponder what is different about our political moment. For me, one key difference is the ubiquitous presence of social media in our time. Nineteenth-century American politics had no equivalent. If other readers’ thoughts go in a similar direction, I’ll leave it to them to render judgment on whether this is a good thing.