The political monster that refuses to die

Well before the Texas gerrymander, history dealt Elbridge Gerry a bad hand

Most of us are destined for obscurity. Even people who have achieved success and status in their chosen field likely will be forgotten only a few decades from now.

Take the 56 people who signed the Declaration of Independence 249 years ago: how many Americans can name more than five of them? (John Hancock, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Samuel Adams are the easy ones to remember.)

One of the lesser-known signers is also renowned, at least as a footnote in history textbooks. It’s not because he signed the Declaration. Or was instrumental in the development of the Bill of Rights. Or was one of the American commissioners who refused to pay a bribe to the French foreign minister Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand. Or served as vice president of the United States, governor of Massachusetts and member of Congress.

No, Elbridge Gerry is remembered for a notorious moment in his long career — reluctantly backing a redistricting plan designed to help his party win as many seats as possible in the Massachusetts state senate.

Elbridge Gerry, by James Barton Longacre - National Portrait Gallery

It’s the word “gerrymander,” compounded from Gerry’s name, that comes up constantly as President Donald Trump pressures Republican state legislatures to redistrict ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. The GOP fears it will pay the price most White House incumbent parties do in midterm elections.

“Texas GOP passes the House gerrymander Trump asked for,” Politico headlined.

The New York Times wrote, “President Trump first broached the Texas gerrymander months ago to initially skeptical Republicans, hoping to stave off Democratic victories in U.S. House elections that would cost his party control of the chamber in 2027. Since then, mid-decade redistricting — once a rarity in American politics — is threatening to reverse decades of movement toward less partisan political mapmaking.”

Actually the trend toward less partisan political mapmaking broke down well before Trump’s intervention. That’s one of the misconceptions surrounding the Texas move — and gerrymandering in general.

The life of Elbridge Gerry is worth remembering, for it helps explain why gerrymandering is built into the American two-party system, and why it’s not going away anytime soon.

Gerry + salamander

By Elkanah Tisdale (1771-1835) Originally published in the Boston Centinel, 1812.

In 1812, the artist Elkanah Tisdale turned the map of a proposed Massachusetts state senate district into an approximation of a salamander, with serpent-like head, wings and claws. It was printed under the headline “The Gerry-Mander.” Members of the Federalist Party were upset that Governor Gerry had signed a bill to rig the voting in favor of his own Democratic-Republican Party.

As the Massachusetts Historical Society noted,

While his federalist opponents sarcastically noted that the ‘monstrous’ shape of the new election district ‘denominated a Gerry-mander, a name that must exceedingly gratify the parental bosom of our worthy chief magistrate,’ there is little evidence that Governor Gerry was the author or even a strong supporter of the redistricting law. Ironically, the gerrymander did not save him from defeat for reelection in 1812, although it worked so effectively for the Republicans that while the federalists won a majority of the popular vote, they won only a third of the seats in the legislature.

No sense of humor

Gerry’s life story raises the question of whether it’s better to be forgotten by history —or remembered for the wrong thing.

Born in 1744 in Marblehead, Massachusetts, he was the son of a prosperous shipping merchant. His mother also came from a merchant family.

Elbridge Gerry, the couple’s third son, enrolled in Harvard College at 14. When he graduated four years later, he ranked 29^th among the 52 members of the class. He earned a master’s degree from Harvard with a dissertation opposing Britain’s Stamp Act.

Gerry actively aided the revolutionary cause in Boston. On the night of Paul Revere’s ride, Gerry was staying at the Menotomy Tavern following a meeting of the Committee of Safety. “When a detachment of redcoats stopped to search the house, Gerry and his companions escaped in their night clothes and hid in a nearby cornfield.”

Under more dignified circumstances, Gerry was elected a delegate to the Second Continental Congress, where he voted in favor of independence.

But Gerry was not a “go along to get along” kind of guy. The website of the Descendants of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence says he was “never very popular because of his aristocratic traits. He had no sense of humor, frequently changed his mind on important issues, and was suspicious of the motives of others.”

On the positive side, “he was a conscientious businessman who paid attention to detail. His patriotism and integrity could never be questioned.”

Gerry’s first biographer, James Trecothick Austin, was his son-in-law. Austin was a Harvard undergraduate when he met his future subject, who by then was temporarily retired from public life.

Not surprisingly, Austin’s book gave Gerry the benefit of the doubt on most points. He described him as “a fond and affectionate husband, a kind and indulgent parent, a friendly neighbour, most liberal in hospitality, and generous in his contributions to alleviate distress…” Austin does concede that Gerry was obstinate and “habitually suspicious.”

David O. Stewart’s book on the making of the Constitution, “The Summer of 1787,” paints a vivid portrait of Gerry. “The wealthy delegate from Marblehead could leave a lingering impression, if not always a favorable one. Described as ‘of middling stature and spare frame,’ Gerry’s stammer made his speech ‘halting,’ while he had ‘a singular habit of contracting and expanding his eye.’ One delegate called him a ‘hesitating and laborious speaker,’ who ‘speaks on, without respect to elegance or flower of diction.’ Exercising a rich man's disregard for his own limitations, Gerry addressed the convention more than 150 times that summer.”

Concerned about the threat to liberty posed by a standing army in peacetime, Gerry proposed that it be limited to no more than 3,000 men. That prompted General George Washington, the presiding officer of the convention, to jokingly suggest an accompanying requirement: that no foreign army be allowed to invade the U.S. with an army of more than 3,000.

Gerry lost that battle, but his concern, coupled with other doubts, led him to become one of only three delegates who refused to sign the Constitution.

While Gerry recognized the fatal weakness of the federal government under the Articles of Confederation, he feared that the Constitution would make Congress and the judiciary too powerful. He found the lack of a bill of rights particularly troubling.

But as the debate continued on ratifying the constitution, some of Gerry’s fears were allayed. Austin quotes him as writing, “The convention of New-York will, I am well informed, annex a bill of rights to a conditional ratification, which will remove all our objections, and it is believed Virginia will do the same.”

XYZ Affair and governorship

When Gerry ran for governor of his home state, he lost in a landslide to his fellow signer of the Declaration, John Hancock. But he remained a player in the Massachusetts political world.

In 1797, President John Adams turned to Gerry when he formed a commission of three Americans to negotiate with France over ending the Quasi War between the two nations. As historian Gordon S. Wood noted, the president picked John Marshall, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and “Gerry, Adams’ quirky Massachusetts friend who was even more anti-party than Adams himself.”

As I noted in a recent Now It’s History post, the negotiations failed at the start when the three Americans balked at paying a 50,000-pound bribe and giving France a loan just to meet with Foreign Minister Talleyrand.

Gerry did himself no favors by eventually meeting with Talleyrand and opting to stay in France for informal talks as his two fellow U.S. commissioners headed home. Gerry’s reasoning was that his departure from France would trigger an immediate war.

The disclosure of the bribe demand exploded into the “XYZ Affair,” casting a harsh light on Gerry’s alleged pro-French stance. “In the excitement, and under the delusion of the moment,” wrote Gerry’s biographer Austin, “the residence of Mr. Gerry at Paris, was severely censured by the administration, and his immediate recall announced by the secretary of state, in a letter which hardly preserved the form of official civility.”

President Adams eventually sent another representative to France and made peace on terms partly influenced by Gerry’s discussions with the president. But the Alien and Sedition Acts signed by Adams at the height of the anti-French fever helped doom his reelection bid. Thomas Jefferson and his Democratic-Republican party gained control of the federal government in the election of 1800.

The Federalists saw their national power ebb away, but retained a stronghold in Massachusetts, where Gerry, a member of Jefferson’s party, again lost elections for the governorship. It was only in 1810, that he finally succeeded in winning the commonwealth’s top post.

Harvard

Federalists had been in control of Massachusetts so long that they dominated not only its legislature, but its courts, colleges and churches. At first the new governor was conciliatory, telling the legislature that everyone should be thankful for the nation’s “numerous blessings, political, civil and religious” and should build on “the solid foundation of internal peace, order and concord.”

Harvard University honored Governor Gerry with a degree of doctor of laws and he returned the favor by giving a speech in Latin at the induction of the college’s new president.

But Gerry’s party, if not Gerry himself, must have looked at Harvard the way President Donald Trump has. According to Austin, Harvard “had very long been a powerful opponent to the republican party” and had indoctrinated “the youth under its care” in pro-federalist principles.

Institutions like Harvard had “by long usage conformed to the views and sentiments of the federal party” and “any alteration was therefore proclaimed to be not an alteration of a party system, but an overthrow of the institutions themselves.”

Thus the Federalists viewed Gerry’s party’s ascendancy as akin to the return of the “Visi-Goths,” noted Austin.

The victorious party reorganized the Massachusetts court system to make it less beholden to the Federalists. The Democratic-Republicans chafed at their inability to control the evenly divided state senate, which prompted the party to make what Austin called a “fatal mistake:”

They sought to control the chamber by drawing new district lines. “The new districts were arranged by breaking up counties, which had formed, as far as was possible, the ancient limits of senatorial districts, or by joining several counties together,” Austin wrote. “They thus destroyed old associations and threw the electors into new combinations and connexions, in which local and territorial interests were confounded.”

To Gerry, Austin contended, “the project of this law was exceedingly disagreeable.” He argued with his friends against it and hesitated to sign the bill into law, his son-in-law wrote. But Governor Gerry did sign it, giving the pro-Federalist press a salamander-shaped weapon with which to pound him. (A further indignity was that the word gerrymander is pronounced with a soft “G", rather than the hard “G” of Gerry’s name.)

Gerry lost his bid for re-election; his party lost the lower house of the legislature. But its gerrymander of the state senate proved effective, even if it was a pyrrhic victory. Democratic-Republicans won 29 of the 40 state senate seats even while losing the popular vote.

And there was a consolation prize for Gerry. In 1812; he was elected vice president of the United States in the new administration of President James Madison.

Gerrymandering before Gerry

In his history of gerrymandering in America, One Person, One Vote, political science professor Nick Seabrook points out that the practice existed long before Gerry. But the Massachusetts redistricting plan was indeed a classic case of gerrymandering, which he described as “a concerted effort to make the votes of certain groups of people matter more than the votes of others.”

“It is an effort to place a thumb on the scale of representative democracy, stacking the deck before an election has even taken place...The gerrymander is an unnatural creation, a violation of the norms, procedures, and conventions of a functioning democratic system.”

State senators in Massachusetts weren’t apportioned on the basis of population but on the amount of taxable property in each district. The 1812 redistricting “utilized every tool in the book to manipulate the electoral playing field,” wrote Seabrook.

“Counties were split between two and even three districts with reckless abandon,” he noted. Gerry’s party “arbitrarily increased” the seats given to Maine, which was then part of Massachusetts, “from seven to ten to capitalize on the Democratic-Republican strength in that region, and the principles of compactness and regularity in district boundaries were jettisoned in favor of distorted irregular lines and bizarre shapes.”

“But it must be noted that this infamous ‘original’ gerrymander, while certainly an egregious manipulation of the levers of democracy, bears little resemblance to the gerrymanders of today,” which are far more effective and sophisticated, thanks partly to their use of computer technology.

Seabrook skillfully traced the origins of gerrymandering back to the “rotten boroughs” that originated in England in the 13th century. He also pointed to the redistricting plan authored by George Burrington, a hot-tempered governor of the colony of North Carolina, and to a failed effort by Patrick Henry to sink James Madison’s bid for a House seat by putting his home county in the same district as that of James Monroe.

President Abraham Lincoln engaged in a form of gerrymandering when he backed the creation of two new states during the Civil War, giving his Republican Party four more seats in the U.S. Senate, Seabrook wrote.

Cracking and packing

The Constitution says elections for the House shall be held every two years, but it says nothing directly about how states should draw districts, or even if they should elect representatives by districts or statewide. “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,” says Section 4 of Article I.

As Lee Drutman noted in a report for New America, this lack of guidance resulted in a multiplicity of voting arrangements:

Some states (Connecticut, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania) choose to elect all their representatives statewide on a “general ticket.” That meant that in Pennsylvania, for example, voters got eight votes, to allot to the eight candidates they preferred. Two states (Georgia and Maryland) used a mixed district/at-large system, in which candidates were elected at large, but had to be residents of a specific district that they would represent.

The other states divided themselves into districts, though they went on to show constant fluidity to suit political aims. Drutman added:

The classic gerrymandering technique of “cracking and packing”—essentially, distributing your supporters more efficiently than your opponents’ supporters—was certainly one trick. But an even neater gambit was to shift back and forth between statewide at-large general ticket elections and districted elections. Here’s the basic logic: Say your party is popular statewide. If your party garners 55 percent of the vote statewide, moving all House races to general ticket at-large elections means your party can win the entire slate. With districting, by contrast, your party is still likely to lose a few seats, unless your party is equally popular in every district.

Congress finally weighed in with an 1842 bill that sought to mandate the use of single-member districts in every state, though some states defied it into the 20th century.

As Drutman wrote, “Periods of close partisan competition for national power and high levels of partisan polarization (1878 to 1896; 1992 to present) have generated the most vigorous periods of gerrymandering.” While the 21st century has seen some states adopt independent commissions as the arbiters of district lines, many others have kept the decision making in the hands of legislatures controlled by political parties.

REDMAP

Following the election of President Barack Obama in 2008, Republicans began to focus on winning majorities in state legislatures, with a view to promoting gerrymanders for their benefit.

“Armed with the significant gains made in statehouses across the country during the wave election of 2010, the GOP undertook an unprecedented effort to use control of the redistricting process to entrench those majorities,” wrote Seabrook. “The scheme was known as REDMAP (short for the Redistricting Majority Project) and was the brainchild of Chris Jankowski, a veteran Republican political strategist and consultant at the Republican State Leadership Committee. Their effort specifically targeted those states, like Wisconsin, that provided fertile ground for gerrymandering, bombarding them with outside money during the 2010 campaign.”

In 2012, they reaped the rewards. As Sam Wang, the founder of the Princeton Election Consortium, wrote for the New York Times, “Democrats received 1.4 million more votes for the House of Representatives, yet Republicans won control of the House by a 234 to 201 margin. This is only the second such reversal since World War II…Through artful drawing of district boundaries, it is possible to put large groups of voters on the losing side of every election.”

This is what the new Texas map is trying to achieve. Its backers hope it will gain five seats for the GOP.

In retaliation, Gov. Gavin Newsom this week signed a bill drawing new lines in a bid to wrest five seats away from Republicans in California. There’s no end in sight to the redistricting frenzy as Trump pushes other red states to gerrymander, and Democrats respond.

Gerry’s end

Monument to Elbridge Gerry, Congressional Cemetery, Washington, D.C.

On November 23, Eldridge Gerry was riding in a carriage in Washington when he suffered a pulmonary hemorrhage and died. Gerry was buried in the Congressional Cemetery under a monument carved out of white marble from Massachusetts.

The inscription reads:

“Elbridge Gerry, Vice President of the United States, who died suddenly in this city…on his way to the Capitol. As President of the Senate. Aged 70 Years. Thus fulfilling his own memorable injunction, It is the duty of every man, though he may have but one day to live, to devote that day to the good of his country.”