Beginning in the 1840s, the two major parties—first the Democrats and the Whigs, and then, after the Whigs collapsed, the Democrats and the Republicans—shared the political stage with a host of smaller parties. Some of the names still resonate: the Liberty, Free Soil, Know Nothing, and Anti-Nebraska parties before the Civil War, and the Greenback, Prohibition, Silver, and People’s parties afterwards.
It was a more fluid system. The rules allowed and encouraged new parties to emerge, and alliances between parties were common. It wasn’t hard for abolition-minded voters, who might have formed a local branch of the Liberty Party, to distinguish between a pro-slavery Democrat and an anti-slavery Whig. In such districts they could urge their supporters: “Vote for so-and-so. He’s a Whig who is good on abolition. Not perfect, but better than the Democrat. So, vote for him but do so on the Liberty Party ticket. Send him a message that you want him to stand up even stronger for abolition.” The minor party, in a fusion-legal regime, remains both independent and relevant.
Such fusion coalitions resulted in victories that we recall nearly two centuries later. The results? It was a Liberty-Whig fusion alliance that elected Congressman Joshua Giddings of Ohio; and it was Giddings who forced an end to the “gag” rule that prevented slavery from even being debated on the floor of Congress. And it was Free Soil-Democratic fusion in the Massachusetts legislature that sent the great Charles Sumner to the U.S. Senate.
But it is after the Civil War that fusion parties truly blossom and transform the political landscape. The Greenback-Democrat alliance produced fusion governors in Maine, Massachusetts, and Michigan; Populist-Democrat fusions did the same in Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Oregon. And there were many hundreds of legislators who likewise enjoyed the electoral support of voters who came from more than one party.
But this richer, sometimes raucous multiparty democracy was not to last. In the 1880s, state governments started regulating elections due to the introduction of the “Australian” ballot. This meant a standardized ballot that the state printed and required voters to use, replacing the older system in which the parties themselves printed ballots listing their favored candidates which their followers then dropped into ballot boxes. Under the new system, it did not take long for the dominant parties—Republicans in the north and Democrats in the south—to draft and pass “anti-fusion” laws that made fusion nominations by minor parties illegal. For the Gilded Age Republicans, this eliminated the farmer-worker alliance, established via the fusion of Democrats and Populists, that was pushing for debt relief, unemployment insurance, and prohibition. In the South, it meant that Jim Crow Democrats need not fear the coalition of Black Republicans and white Populists that had challenged them on voting rights, land ownership, and education in Virginia and North Carolina.