Donald A.

DeBats

Political Consequences
of Spatial Organization
Contrasting Patterns in Two
Nineteenth-Century Small Cities

The unique feature of geographic information systems (GIS) and other forms nf his-
torical data visualization is the capacity to hold and display large amounts oj data
associated with spatial reference points. This software can display all data for a given
point, a single variable for all points, or, most important, any combination of variables
across all reference points. In doing so, these systems bring to the screen instantly and
cheaply a display of information once visible only tn paper form, drawn slowly and
expensively, first by cartographers and then by vector plotters. This project deploys GIS
to help us understand the intersection of social and political life in nineteenth-century
Alexandria, Virginia, and Newport, Kentucky—medium-sized cities with populations
under 20,000. Commercial Alexandria, with a race-based labor system, and industrial
Newport, with an immigrant labor system, present an analytically useful mix of com-
monalities and differences.

This article reports on the use of geographic information systems (GIS) in

the exploration of three facets of urban life in two contrasting small cities in
nineteenth-century America: the organization of space, the nature of com-
munities and contexts that developed in these two cities, and the effects of
these aspects of spatial patterning on the political lives of their citizens. Each
facet is nested within the other—working downward from citywide differ-

5»í'w/.SV(fn<'í'//is(or)'35:4 (Winter 2011) • ,.

DOI 10.1215/01455532-1381832
© 2011 by Social Science History Association
506 Social Science History

enees in the spatial patterns associated with diverging political economies, to

the differences in the spatial groupings that developed in them, and finally to
the political experience of individual residents as participants in their city's
political life.
The political economies on which these two cities rested spoke to impor-
tant alternatives in nineteenth-century America: Alexandria, Virginia (a com-
mercial city built on slave labor), as against Newport, Kentucky (an industrial
city built on immigrant labor). The fact that comprehensive individual-level
social and political information is available for residents of these cities was
critical in their selection. The goal was to repopulate Alexandria and New-
port as they were in the mid-nineteenth century: approximately 80 percent
of the cities' inhabitants have been reconciled with their places of residence
at that time along with all of their social, economic, and political attributes.
Deploying GIS to these datasets allowed us to identify differences in
land-use patterns associated with the differing economic rationales of the
two cities. Of particular importance were differences in the extent of vacant
lands in the two cities and the ownership ofthat land, a seemingly small Vic-
tor but one closely associated with rates of home ownership and consequent
population density. These spatial differences in turn shaped the context in
which the citizens of Alexandria and Newport engaged in politics.
All practitioners of GIS are aware of the demands of time and finan-
cial support required to create a georeferenced database, usually shaped as a
single case study across time. But historical GIS can also be deployed toward
another classical historical mode of study: comparing analytically divergent
case studies in a given time frame. While this approach doubles the labor in
terms of requiring the creation of two rather than one digital database, the
limited time dimension generates savings, and the comparative approach may
enhance the analytic reach of the effort. Adopting this less traveled route, this
project deploys GIS to illuminate important aspects of social and political
life in Alexandria, Virginia, and Newport, Kentucky, two interestingly diver-
gent cities with populations in the mid-nineteenth century of under 20,000.

The Suitability of a Small-City Approach

The small city was the dominant and most rapidly growing urban form for
most of the nineteenth century, amounting to over 90 percent of urban places
in 1870 and containing approximately 50 percent of the urban population.
 Political Consequences of Spatial Organization 507

Adna Weber (1899: 20, 34) noted that if America was the land of "mushroom
cities," the mushrooms that were growing fastest were the small cities: there
were no cities with populations between 10,000 and 20,000 in the United
States in 1800, but there were 36 by 1850 and 180 by 1890, containing more
than 2 million people.
Yet for all the attractions and appropriateness of small cities as a research
focus, there remains, as Diane Shaw (2002: 220) puts it, "a historiographi-
cal silence" concerning this central player in the story of nineteenth-century
urbanization in the United States. The remedy is obvious: "vernacular urban-
ism"—the study of the small town —as a powerful antidote to "the metro-
politan bias of urban history" (ibid.: 230). Other scholars remind us of the
same point from the opposite perspective: "This relative neglect of small and
midsize cities," says James Connolly (2008: 6), "constitutes a significant gap
in our understanding of the urban experience." A "decentered" urban his-
tory that facilitates comparison across types of smaller cities will help iden-
tify the differences between the urban experience of the small and the great
city; this "requires more extensive and systematic attention to urban experi-
ences beyond the metropolis" to yield "a richer more complex understanding
of modern urban history" (ibid.: 13).
The GIS tool kit seems particularly relevant to the study of small cities
and also provides an opportunity to reflect on the programmatic goals articu-
lated by an earlier generation of urban historians. That flowering of urban
history, particularly robust in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s,
began with fundamental questions about political and social life in cities.
Urban historians noted that "the value o f . . . case studies . . . must remain
limited, providing only examples of important topics to be pursued on a truly
comparative basis. What is now needed is a whole series of observations of
nineteenth-century cities, so that some broadly based generalizations might
become possible" (Schnore and Knights 1969: 256). Quickly, however, the
locus of the work, for a variety of reasons, became large cities. The conse-
quences were significant: first politics and then spatial relationships and then
comparative analysis largely disappeared from the agenda, frustrated by the
absence of political information at the level of the individual census returns
and city directories underpinning social history, by the very complexity of the
cities chosen for analysis, and by the limits on computer power at the time.'
A generation later individual-level information for a city of 20,000 is
readily manipulated by modern computers, even if there are many vari-
508 Social Science History

ables per person. In addition, social history, economic history, ethnic his-
tory, women's history, and black history, among others, can advance together
through the study of the small city, where it is far easier to observe the rela-
tionship of one specialism to another and to the whole. Moreover, mapping
whole cities at the individual level sidesteps the many inferential problems
associated with aggregated data, assists the development of "a more inte-
grated understanding of history" (Gregory 2003: 6-7, 50-51), and allows
the discovery of the analytically important levels of aggregation in an urban
space. The application of GIS to carefully chosen sets of small cities could
facilitate the realization of a long-delayed renaissance in urban history.
Mapping small cities with individual-level data also facilitates the inter-
section with "a new kind of fine-scale urban geography" emerging in con-
temporary spatial analysis (Batty 2000: 483). This work reflects the tendency
toward "an individual-based approach to residential segregation," which rec-
ognizes that segregation can occur at many different levels simultaneously.
Individual-level data allow the discovery of "perceived neighborhoods"
determined by individuals themselves (Omer and Benenson 2002: 54).

Two Small Cities C o m p a r e d

Alexandria and Newport were chosen for this paired analysis because they
presented a useful set of similarities and differences. Both fit comfortably in
the category of small cities; each had a population of approximately 15,000
in the primary year of interest. They were manageable cities in terms of the
eñon required to create GIS databases, and they both possessed excellent
runs of individual-level records. They were "river cities" (Alexandria on
the Potomac and Newport on the Ohio) that were also "second cities" in
the shadows of more important urban places on their river's opposite bank
(Washington, DC, and Cincinnati, Ohio).
In addition, both cities were located in states that conducted their elec-
tions not by the more usual ticket system but orally, or viva voce.^ Oral vot-
ing systems were used in Scandinavia, England, Canada, Australia, and some
American states. Virginia prior to the Civil War and Kentucky through much
of the nineteenth century mandated this British (and European) mode of vot-
ing, requiring that voters call out their political preferences and that election
officials record those individual political preferences in poll books. These
books, the official documents of viva voce elections, preserve the name of
 Political Consequences of Spatial Organization 509

each voter, the order in which the voters appeared, and the choice of each for
every office to be filled, from president to constable.
For most places that conducted their elections viva voce, the poll books
have been lost, destroyed, or disposed of. Where they survive, the poll books
constitute a unique trove of individual-level political information from
nineteenth-century America. While historians may locate runs of poll books
for other nineteenth-century cities, at present Alexandria and Newport are
the only American cities for which it is possible to know the voting record of
every eligible resident. This individual-level political information has been
linked to all other social, economic, and cultural information available for
each resident of Alexandria and Newport in the mid-nineteenth century, cre-
ating a unique resource for a comparative GIS study.
The differences between Alexandria and Newport were twofold, reflect-
ing fundamental divergences in labor systems and the economic bases. Alex-
andria grew as a commercial town that traded in corn, wheat, and coal. It also
traded in human lives: Alexandria was one of the largest slave-trading cities
in the United States. Blacks, slave and free, accounted for over 15 percent of
its male population over 16 years of age. Newport, by contrast, was designed
as a manufacturing city, heavily concentrated in the production of iron and
steel; there was only a tiny black population, while Irish- and German-born
men accounted for over 43 percent of the male population over 16.
There was precious little about Alexandria that was not Southern and
very little about Newport that we could not consider Northern, a helpful
point in terms of comparative urban analysis. Nevertheless, the compari-
son developed here requires further studies of other Northern commercial
cities to clarify the contribution of race to Alexandria's "commercialism" as
well as further work on Southern industrial towns to specify the centrality of
ethnicity to Newport's early industrialism. For now, it seems appropriate to
view Alexandria and Newport as radically diverging small cities, one South-
ern commercial and the other Northern industrial. The inclusion of a mani-
festly Southern city in a comparative framework follows Kenneth Scherzer's
(2000: 705, 694) advice "to study the urban South comparatively" and repre-
sents a small step in pursuit of the larger questions of whether the American
urban experience has a regional dimension and the extent to which historic
Southern cities were "somehow exceptional."
510 Social Science History

Table 1 Individual-level records included in datahases

Type of record Alexandria Newport
Census 1860 slave and free schedules: 1870 schedules: all individuals
all individuals for wbom an 1873-75 record
1860 manufacturing data of residence exists
1870 manufacturing data
Citv directory 1860 citv directory 1874 city directory
Tax record 1855, 1862 city tax assessment 1874 city tax list
books
1859 city tax ledger
1859 county tax list
1859 city license tax
Plat book City plat boot<, 1870s
Poll book 1859 congressional and state 1874 municipal election
election
Note: For a detailed discussion of the use of these records iti the mapping of these two cities, see l^e
2008a.

Two Databases Developed

Table 1 summarizes the individual-level information included in the Alexan-
dria and Newport databases. Linking individuals across this record set was a
slow and laborious process calling for meticulous care in deciphering thou-
sands of names in separate handwritten records; because the integrity of the
project depends on the accuracy of the linkages, each link was accomplished
"by hand," matching individual to individual, returning often to the original
record for clarification and confirmation. The finalized databases contain the
whole of each record set, an important feature that results in higher popu-
lation counts than would be obtained by reliance on the census alone. This
increases estimates of the eligible electorates while decreasing measures of
turnout (see Bourke and DeBats 1995: 193-209, esp. 195; DeBats 2008b).
This combination of records suggests that Alexandria had a population in
1859 of 12,293, including its slaves (1,192) and free blacks (1,388), while New-
port in 1874 had 13,779 residents.
Mapping of individual residence was largely successful, if predictably
time-consuming; we were able to determine the precise place of residence of
88.3 percent of Newport's residents in 1874 and 77.7 percent of Alexandria's
residents in 1859.^
 Political Consequences of Spatial Organization 511

The individual-level political data for the voters of Alexandria included

here are taken from the May 26, 1859, general election for Congress, gov-
ernor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, and the House of Delegates.
This was an important contest held in the shadow of the intensifying debate
over slavery and, with the death of the Whig Party and the stillbirth of a
national Opposition Party, threats to the future of the South's two-party sys-
tem (Bean 1954; Hitchcock 1981). The votes of the citizens of Newport are
taken from the municipal contest of March 2,1874, in which 13 offices were
to be filled, including president of the city council, clerk, treasurer, attor-
ney, members of the city council, and tax collector.* The election was held in
the midst of labor unrest, strikes, violent confrontations with strikebreakers,
and a fatal shooting, leading to demands for outside help from the Kentucky
militia or even federal troops. As Herbert Gutman (1959) demonstrated, the
outcome of labor unrest and major strike activity in small industrial cities
such as Newport rested significantly on the control and use of the local police
power, a matter central to the 1874 election.

Using Land: Riverfronts in a C o m m e r c i a l

and an Industrial City

At this broad level of analysis, GIS maps in figures 1 and 2 show how the
two cities used their riverfront space, their most important economic asset.
Alexandria's Potomac riverfront bristled with wharves, which were almost
entirely devoted to commercial use. The Alexandria Canal, funded by local
merchants, funneled barge traffic to Alexandria's wharf district. It connected
the city to the terminus of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in Georgetown,
on the other side of the Potomac. King Street was the major commercial
street, its base resting on the wharves. Local place-names spoke to the city's
main industry: the Carlyle-Dalton Wharf, named after two of the city's mer-
cantile founders; Captain's Row, abutting the Potomac; and Keith's Wharf,
another merchant enterprise, at the southern end of town. The city's three
railroads converged on the wharves, one (like the canal barges) committed
largely to carrying Appalachian coal and two lines ferrying in agricultural
produce, especially wheat for export. Alexandria was the second largest
wheat exporter in the state and one of the largest coal exporters in the nation.
In contrast, Alexandria's manufacturing enterprises, even when associated
with these commercial ventures, faltered: the Pioneer Flour Mill, prominent
Figure 1 Alexandria: Economic use of the riverfront, 1859
Legend
Corporation line
-<—— Railway
River
Commerce
Factory

Residence

Figure 2 Newport: Economic use of the riverfront, 1874

514 Social Science History

on the wharves, opened with fanfare in 1852 but had closed by 1859, as had
the Virginia Locomotive and Car Manufacturing Company, replicating the
never-quite-successful effiîrt of prominent city merchants to create a viable
cloth industry from the Mount Vernon Cotton Mill.'
Newport's riverfront looked entirely different: not a single wharf, almost
no commercial activity, and the frontage on both the Ohio and its tributary,
the Licking River, given over entirely to heavy industrial production. General
James Taylor, Newport's founder, established the city's two principal indus-
trial sites, the first on the Ohio and the second on the Licking, where eventu-
ally the town's largest employer, the Swift Iron and Steel Mill, would locate.
Dominating the Ohio River industrial site was the 58-foot-high Kenton blast
furnace, producing iron for the adjacent Gaylord Iron Pipe Company. The
Licking furnace, built beside the river for which it was named, was even
higher—65 feet—and produced 17,000 tons of iron annually, largely to be
converted to steel for use in the Swift Mill. The entire stretch of the Lick-
ing River within the city boundaries of Newport was essentially an indus-
trial estate —"factory row." Along the Ohio, between the confluence with the
Licking and the industrial estate to the east, was a residential area, something
almost entirely absent along Alexandria's frontage on the Potomac. Newport
had few storage yards along its riverfronts and no businesses. In every cate-
gory of land usage—factory, warehouse, wharf, residence, and business—
the riverfronts of Alexandria and Newport were almost complete opposites.
Newport's railway line served its industrial base, just as Alexandria's rail-
roads served its commercial orientation.

Not Using Land: Vaeant Bloeks

in Alexandria and Newport
The type of land not put to economic use in these two cities is as divergent
as the cities' use of riverfront land. Figures 3 and 4 show that of the 256
blocks laid out in Alexandria, 99 (39 percent) were unoccupied in 1859, and
13 (5 percent) had fewer than five inhabitants, while in Newport only 9 per-
cent of the 186 blocks were unoccupied in 1874 with another 8 percent having
fewer than five inhabitants. In Alexandria, 44 percent of the land available for
residence was almost entirely unutilized as against 17 percent of the potential
residential space in Newport.*
The very different extent of unused land in the two cities is a com-
Figure 3 Alexandria: Unoccupied blocks
 N
Legend
— — Corporation une
-•—^ Railway
0 500 1,000
A 2,000
River ^ ^ ^ ^ = z = ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ Feet
^ H Vacant biocit

Figure 4 Newport: Unoccupied blocks

 Political Consequences of Spatial Organization 517

Table 2 Alexandria: Ownership of vacant blocks

Categories of owners Percentage of vacant
of vacant blocks blocks owned

Merchants 24.8
Estates 17.0
Transportation and coal companies 14.7
Attornevs and doctors 6.7
Women 6.4
Banks and bankers 3.8
Absentee/unknown 25.4
« = 106 owners « = 112 blocks

plex matter.^ Undoubtedly, some part of the caution implicit in the Alexan-
dria story stems from the economic difficulties of the 1840s, which helped
drive the movement for retrocession of what had been part of the District
of Columbia to the state of Virginia. A housing boom followed shortly, with
over 500 houses constructed in the city in the decade after 1850 (Hurst 1991:
13). But the differences in the extent of vacant land in these two cities also
speak to wider themes.
Ownership of vacant land in Alexandria was highly skewed: there were
only 106 owners for the 112 blocks of empty land in the city. Eighty percent
of all vacant land was held in aggregations of a block or more, and the top
21 owners of vacant land held over 70 percent of the buildable land in Alex-
andria. The pattern in Newport was starkly different: 309 owners for the 35
blocks of unoccupied land. Just 15 percent of the vacant land was held in
aggregations of a block or more.
The profile of investors in vacant land in the two cities was also very dif-
ferent. In Alexandria the centrality of commission merchants was especially
evident, as table 2 shows. Commission merchants, the lifeblood and domi-
nant economic force of the commercial city, owned a quarter of the city's
vacant space and were the largest single group of owners. William Fowle, a
commission merchant and one of Alexandria's wealthiest men, with taxable
property assessed at $204,450 in 1859, held nearly nine complete blocks of
vacant land within the city limits. Owners of vacant land in Alexandria were,
with one possible exception, white.
Determining the occupations of owners of vacant land was not univer-
518 Social Science History

sally possible. A quarter of the owners were either not Alexandria residents
or not locatable in the city's social inventories.* But table 2 does indicate
how businesses central to the city's commercial rationale were also important
holders of vacant land. The Orange and Alexandria Railroad; the Alexandria,
Loudoun, and Hampshire Railroad; the Alexandria Canal Company, which
carried coal from the mountains to city terminals for transshipment; and the
Cumberland Coal Company together held 15 percent of the vacant land in
the city. Also indicative of the tight hold on land in Alexandria was the sur-
prising finding that 17 percent of all vacant land was held by estates. Alexan-
dria's overall pattern of ownership of vacant land suggests a strategy geared to
long-term investment rather than preparation for quick sale. The restricted
number of people owning Alexandria's empty quarters also ensured tight
control over the transmittal of land to the open market.
The pattern in Newport reflected Taylor's intention to create an indus-
trial town of worker-owners. The city's plat map neatly captures the sequences
of release of vacant lands in large parcels labeled "additions," some 20 in all,
which defined the growth pattern of the city. The newly incorporated land
spread outward from the roughly 20 blocks along the Ohio labeled "Original
Land" on the city plat. This pattern was set early in Newport's history with
the major landowners — most related to the Taylor family—releasing addi-
tions of land platted into small allotments, often 25-foot frontages. One of
the city's first industrial developments, the Newport Manufacturing Com-
pany, owned by Taylor, his son, and his son-in-law, included 36 houses for
factory operatives, with factory land available for purchase by entrepreneurs
(Purvis 1996: 53-54).
Residential land, once platted, was generally purchased or rented by
individuals rather than sold to developers for resale, especially in the sub-
divisions near the iron and steel mills and sawmills on the city's western
edge. The Buena Vista Addition reflected the general pattern. It covered
over 25 city blocks platted into 750 lots, most measuring less than 30 by 90
feet and each available for individual purchase. Additions, quickly incorpo-
rated into the city, provided affordable lots with a variety of local institutions,
from churches to carpentry companies, emerging to facilitate the steps from
ownership to home occupancy' The fact that each addition had a place-name
and was quickly settled ensured shared experiences among the initial buyers
and encouraged from the very beginning the sense of highly localized iden-
tity, features that assisted the development of neighborhood politics.
 Political Consequences of Spatial Organization 519

Table 3 Newport: Ownership of vacant blocks

Categories of owners Percentage of vacant
of vacant blocks blocks owned

Merchants 7.3
Estates 4.2
Transportation and coal companies 0.1
Attornevs and doctors 2.7
Women 15.6
Banks and bankers 0.6
Construction companies/brick and
lumber dealers 9.8
Skilled craftspeople 9.6
I .aborers 2.8
Engincers/machinists/ironworkers 2.7
Clerks 2.4
Absentee/unknown 42.2
n = 309 owners n = 35 blocks

By the 1870s there was not much vacant land left in Newport (figure 4),
and the ownership of that land was widely distributed both by the numbers
and by the social standing of the owners. While the high rate of absentee
ownership (nearly double that in Alexandria) precludes firm conclusions,
there is no evidence in table 3 of the domination of vacant landownership by
a single group, as was the case in Alexandria, where the town's elite commis-
sion merchants were the largest holders of the city's vacant land. The New-
port owners of vacant land whom we can trace were more diverse than their
counterparts in Alexandria. Women, the largest single group of owners (16
percent, twice the Alexandria rate), held their land in small lots—just one-
twelfth of a block as opposed to the average female Alexandrian's holding of
1.2 city blocks.
Commission merchants, Alexandria's economic elite, were entirely
absent from the ownership pattern of Newport's vacant blocks; the New-
port merchants who held vacant land were small retailers. Estates, which
controlled 17 percent of all vacant land in Alexandria, held only 4 percent in
Newport. There construction companies loomed larger in the overall profile,
while bankers, banks, doctors, and lawyers were less prominent. Skilled arti-
sans were significant landholders in Newport but were almost entirely absent
from the ownership rolls in Alexandria; William McCormick was the only
520 Social Science History

Table 4 Occupational status of owners of vacant blocks

Status Alexandria Newport
High 46.9 12.3
Mid 43.8 68.9
Low 9.4 18.9

laborer in Alexandria to own vacant land in that city, but 15 laborers owned
vacant land in Newport.
Taylor's children and heirs held very modest and (perhaps deliberately)
scattered plats of vacant land. The same theme of greater equality emerges
in a comparison (table 4) of the occupational status of the owners of vacant
land.'" Participation of low-status individuals in the ownership of vacant land
in Newport was twice that in Alexandria, while participation of high-status
individuals in Alexandria was four times that in Newport. Ownership of
vacant land, distinctively the prerogative of Alexandria's occupational elite,
was significantly more widespread among middle-status residents of New-
port. As we will now see, three important consequences flowed from this
striking difference in bringing land to market: contrasting urban densities,
important variances in the extent and social distribution of home owner-
ship, and a clear divergence between the cities' potential for neighborhood as
opposed to network politics.

Differences in Density

The extent of vacant land in the two cities identified by GIS carried impor-
tant consequences for the densities of the two cities. In terms of space within
the city limits and in terms of population, Newport was bigger than Alex-
andria: 22 percent larger in area and 12 percent greater in population. If the
populations of each city had been spread evenly over their areas, Alexandria
would have been about 8 percent more densely settled than Newport, but the
much greater extent of undeveloped land within the corporate limits of Alex-
andria gave that city a far higher effective density than Newport."
Table 5 shows the difference in the distribution of people over city blocks
in the two cities, pointing again to the more congested nature of commer-
cial Alexandria. The lower Gini index indicates a population more evenly
spread across the urban space of industrial Newport. Alexandria's popula-
 Political Consequences of Spatial Organization 521

Table 5 Distribution of population by city block, Alexandria and Newport

Alexandria Newport

Least populated 20% of blocks 0 0

Next populated 20°/) of blocks 0 5
Next populated HYVo of blocks 5 18
Next populated 20% of blocks 24 31
Most populated 20'>i) of blocks 70 46
Total number of blocks 256 186
Total number of people 9,552 12,166
Gini index 0.69 0.54

tion was overwhelmingly concentrated along its main commercial core of

King Street: exactly a third of the city's population lived along the 15 blocks
of that single street. Broadening the corridor to include two blocks either
side of King Street captures 60 percent of the city's entire population. In
geometric terms, Alexandria's population formed a long and narrow rect-
angle, with King Street as its axis and the Potomac as its base. Newport, by
comparison, was a dispersed city.

Differences in the Extent of Home Ownership

Newport's pattern of land distribution also democratized home ownership.
The actions of the economic elites of Newport and Alexandria provided
opposite conditions in respect to home ownership: what the one encouraged,
the other discouraged, creating radically different patterns of renting and
owning populations and influencing different patterns of political engage-
ment. In Newport, the availability of small platted lots was a spur to home
ownership, as were the city's five building associations, three of which were
immigrant based and served as land banks. The result (DeBats and Leth-
bridge 2005: 83) was that home ownership rates (owned outright or being
purchased) were twice as high in Newport (45 percent of heads of house-
holds) as in Alexandria (20 percent of heads of households).'^
Home ownership in Newport was also more equitably distributed, and
rates of home ow nership w ere higher than in Alexandria at every step of the
wealth hierarchy, with the poorest quintile of household heads three times
more likely to own homes than their Alexandria counterparts. (For the dis-
tribution of home ownership by wealth cohort, see appendix I.) Exactly the
522 Social Science History

same pattern is evident in the distribution of home ownership by status, with

low-status household heads again three times more likely to own a home than
their counterparts in Alcxandria.'-* On the reverse side, the extent of board-
ing and living in boardinghouses was 50 percent greater in Alexandria than
in Newport (for the distribution of accommodations in the two cities, and
for home ownership by occupational status, see appendix 2). Not only were
residents of Alexandria much more likely to live in rental accommodations,
but they were far more likely than residents of Newport to live in accommo-
dations with several other families in the same situation. The building form
favored in Alexandria —two- and three-story brick buildings —was ideally
suited to this arrangement (and investment). Thirteen percent of all heads of
households lived in buildings with five or more other households, while in
Newport just 5 percent lived in such arrangements.
Alexandria had many more large boardinghouses than did Newport. Jane
Wright's boardinghouse on Princess Street, just a block from the wharves,
had 17 residents, at least 5 of whom were long-term occupants, appearing in
both tax lists and poll books. Alexandria's famous Gadsby's Tavern, attended
by 20 slaves, had at least 15 long-term residents, and James Green's Mansion
House lodged at least 8. Newport's boardinghouses and hotels were smaller,
and long-term guests were fewer. One of the larger of these establishments
was just across the street from the Gaylord Iron and Pipe Company and the
Pomeroy and Pekover Iron Foundry; despite its proximity to a large indus-
trial enterprise, this was a small boardinghouse, with only 10 household
heads in residence. Newport was not a boarding city; it was, far more than
Alexandria, a town of family-owned residences.
There were political consequences, too. Newport's greater economic
equality also democratized political engagement. In Alexandria 79 percent
of high-status men eligible to vote did so, but only 42 percent of low-status
men did. In Newport that gap was just half as great: 69 percent of high-
status men voted as against 52 percent of low-status men. The "home owner
effect" on the turnout of men in low-status occupations was the same in
both cities, as table 6 shows, and is associated with roughly double the rate
of political participation. The difference was that there were far more low-
status home owners in Newport than in Alexandria, and their impact on the
election result was greater by precisely that degree of difference. The politi-
cal consequences of the differential availability of owner-occupied housing in
Alexandria and Newport were significant.
 Political Consequences of Spatial Organization 523

Table 6 Rates of political participation by adult males in low-status occupations

Alexandria Newport

Homeowner 62 61
Non-home owner 32 33

Developing Neighborhoods

These differences in patterns of landholding, urban densities, and home

ownership were most evident in the development of neighborhoods in these
two cities. David Garrioch and Mark Peel (2006: 663) have summarized with
new certitude the significance of locale for the understanding of urban his-
tory: "Social historians of cities working on almost every period and place
have pointed to the centrality of neighborhood in the everyday lives of urban
dwellers. From medieval Genoa to twentieth-century London and New
York, neighborhood ties have come to be seen as a critical and now undis-
puted element within the urban social environment." But Garrioch and Peel
(ibid.: 672) also note the increasing specificity of this traditional focus on
community, with new interest in individuated networks and identities. We
can see the range of these options in the spatial arrangements of Alexandria
and Newport.
The compression of the population and the greater extent of boarding
and lodging in Alexandria meant that groups, even racial groups, overlapped
in the commercial city in a way they did not in industrial Newport, influenc-
ing the extent to which neighborhoods emerged. That difference is evident
in the spatial patterns associated with renting and owning and in the distri-
bution of racial and ethnic groups in the two cities.
Figures 5 and 6 use GIS-based Kernel density maps to show the spa-
tial distribution of the renting and owning populations of the two cities with
a smoothing parameter to identify a core containing approximately 60 per-
cent of each group.'"* What we see is the near-total overlap of the cores of
the renting and owning populations in Alexandria (the crosshatched areas in
figure 5), with only small areas of distinctively rental accommodations—near
the Potomac and the intersection of King and Washington Streets. In the
same way, only small pockets of distinctively owner-based housing are evi-
dent. The situation in Newport (figure 6) was very different, with a large and
clear area of predominantly rental housing stretching from the core of the
 I Owners non-overlap
I Renters non-overlap
i Overlap

Figure 5 Alexandria: Distribution of the renting and owning populations

 Legend
Corporation line

- • — I - Railway
River
Owners non-overlap
Renter non-overlap
Overlap

Figure 6 Newport: Distribution of the renting and owning populations

526 Social Science History

city to the Ohio and along the blocks toward the factories on the Licking. A
more distinctive area of owner-occupied housing is also evident on the north-
ern side of Newport. As in so many other dimensions, renting and owning
were more spatially differentiated in Newport than in Alexandria.
The same tendencies are evident with respect to ethnic groups in the two
cities. Figures 7 and 8 present aspects of the quite different spatial arrange-
ment of politics in Alexandria and Newport.'^ Alexandria had a significant
Irish population, 8 percent of the total population and 14 percent of the eli-
gible electorate, but, as figure 7 shows, this was a widely dispersed popula-
tion without a significant spatial core. A search with GIS for a spatial pattern
containing 60 percent of the Irish population identifies seven small pockets
of Irish residents scattered across the whole face of the city.'* The most sig-
nificant Irish cultural center was St. Mary's Catholic Church, but as figure 7
also shows, St. Mary's was not located near any of those Irish populations. In
a compressed city, the Irish were remarkably dispersed.
Again and again in Alexandria, variable piled on top of variable, cre-
ating a jumble of social types living cheek by jowl —the very pattern that
Sam Bass Warner (1969: 50) identified in the much larger commercial city of
Philadelphia:

Social and economic heterogeneity was the hallmark of the age. Most
areas of the new big city were a jumble of occupations, classes, shops,
homes, immigrants, and native Americans. Although by 1860 there were
the beginnings of concentrations which reflected the future economic
and social articulation of the city —a downtown, three manufacturing
clusters, a small slum, a few black blocks, and occasional class and ethnic
enclaves —these concentrations did not dominate the spatial patterns of
the city.

This is not to suggest that Alexandria was spatially uniform; there cer-
tainly were exceptions to the overlap of groups, and those exceptions tell
us much about the basis for the spatial organization of this Southern city
Mapping the distribution of slave owners, for example, helps identify privi-
leged cores in the city while providing evidence (table 7) for the very unequal
distribution of this particular kind of property. The unequal distribution of
both slave property and vacant lands contributed significantly to the higher
level of inequalities distinguishing commercial Alexandria from industrial
Newport.'^
Figure 7 Alexandria: The core of the Irish population
 Legend
Corporation line
-^—<- Railway
River
Prussian 60% core

Figure 8 Newport: The core of the Prussian population

•1 í*
 Political Consequences of Spatial Organization 529

Table 7 Alexandria: Ownership of slaves

Number of Number Percentage Percentage of
slaves owned of owners of owners slaves owned
1 95 34.7 11.7
2 68 24.8 16.7
3 40 14.7 14.7
4 22 8.0 10.8
5 17 6.2 10.4
6 11 4.0 . ' 8.1
7 5 1.8 4.3
8 S hi 4.9
9 2 0.7 2.2
10+ 9 3.3 - 16.2
« = 815 • « = 274

Likewise, the distribution of the free black population across the map
of Alexandria provides an index to the concessions imposed on this race-
based town by its spatial compression. There was, for example, a significant
concentration of the large free black population (1,388) in the lower eleva-
tion levels of the city, where Potomac floods were a frequent occurrence. A
third of the black population lived here, as did almost all of the free black
home owners. The cores of the only three black communities in Alexan-
dria that acquired place-names—Hayti, The Dip, and The Bottoms —were
located here. Just as high elevation was associated with the location of high-
status white churches, so low elevation was associated with the cores of the
black population and defined the location of both of Alexandria's black reli-
gious institutions—Roberts Memorial Chapel and the Alfred Street Baptist
Church.
Yet this was not the whole story; two-thirds of free blacks did not live
in the lower elevations. Many free blacks lived, like many slaves, with the
white families they served. In an ironic way, Alexandria, a slave city and a
city deeply conscious of race and status divisions, took on the appearance of
an "integrated city." The compression of the city helps us understand this
fundamental social patterning. There was in Alexandria a distinct degree of
status and race separation combined with a surprising degree of the min-
gling of status and race that came about by necessity, perhaps revealing the
530 Social Science History

strength and meaning attached in this Southern city to what Scherzer (2000:
699) termed a "traditional deference" that proximity could not challenge.'*

Neighborhood Politics

On the eve of the 1859 election in Alexandria, William Carne, a teacher (and
soon principal) at St. John's, the Catholic boys school run by the St. Mary's
parish, wrote to the Alexandria Gazette (May 10) to protest any notion of a
"Catholic vote," as constructed by nativist elements, saying that "the Catho-
lics of Alexandria were far less unanimous in their opinions on the subject
than the members of several other churches." Carne understated the religious
diversity of St. Mary's: the poll books tell us that members of St. Mary's,
while narrowly Democratic (56 percent), were the most evenly divided reli-
gious group in Alexandria. This diversity is reflected, too, in Irish residential
arrangements —widely dispersed, with a good deal of Catholic and Protes-
tant intermingling both socially and politically.
The patterns were different in Newport. There the German population
made up 17 percent of the total population and 28 percent of the potential
electorate. Henry Wise, the 1870 census taker and son of German-immigrant
parents, systematically identified the native province of birth for each of his
fellow Germans. Figure 8 reveals the spatial distribution of the "60 percent
cores" of those of Prussian birth." GIS shows us that the Newport Prussians
were concentrated in two very different sections of Newport—one core near
the industrial factories along the Licking River and the other straddling the
tracks of the Louisville, Cincinnati, and Lexington Railway that ran down
Saratoga Street before crossing the new bridge over the Ohio to Cincinnati.
The "Mill core" and the "Saratoga Street core" were relatively simi-
lar socially, as table 8 indicates. There was a slight upward bias in the social
profile of Prussians in the "downtown" area along the tracks, where there
were more Prussian merchants and grocers and also more lawyers and physi-
cians. But there were also more porters, fewer tailors, and almost precisely
the same number of laborers. In social and economic terms, these two Prus-
sian neighborhoods were very similar.
This social similarity contrasted greatly with their political differences,
summarized in table 9. The Prussians were not a vast population, but their
numbers were significant, as were the trends their voting reveals: the Prus-
sians in the Mill core were overwhelmingly Democratic, while their compa-
 Political Consequences of Spatial Organization 531

Table 8 Newport: Social profile of two Prussian populations

Saratoga
Characteristics Mill core Street core

Prussian population 137 196

Male ("/()) 54.0 52.0
Occupational status (%)
High 1.4 9.8
Medium :'-' 56.8 59.8
Low 41.9 : 30.4
Home ownership (%)
Home owner '-•' Tl.l 75.2
Tenant-boarder - 22.7 24.8
Assessable propertv (%)
W-199 17.6 14.6
S200-999 38.2 31.4
SI,000+ 44.1 54.0

triots along Saratoga Street were almost as universally Republican. The influ-
ence of this contextual difference is evident in the reversed political behavior
of Prussians in these two neighborhood settings. Prussian tenants and board-
ers voted 80 percent Democratic in the Democratic Mill core and 75 percent
Republican in the Republican Saratoga Street core. Wealthy Prussians voted
83 percent Democratic if they lived in the Mill core but 70 percent Republi-
can if they lived in the Prussian Saratoga Street core.
Even finer gradations of this pattern are represented in table 10, which
compares the political performances of Prussian men in the same occu-
pations in the two areas. Laborers, the largest single group in both areas,
behaved in a politically consistent fashion across areas, voting solidly Demo-
cratic regardless of the setting in which they lived. Indeed, Prussian laborers
were even more Democratic in Saratoga Street's Prussian Republican
enclave than they were in the solidly Democratic area near the mills. On the
other hand, Prussian carpenters, tailors, and grocers —small businessmen
with localized clienteles—in these two areas voted in opposite directions.
Prussian carpenters were 75 percent Democratic in the mill area and 88 per-
cent Republican in the other. Prussian tailors and grocers were 75 and 100
percent Democratic in the Democratic area and 80 and 100 percent Republi-
can in the Republican area. This suggests that the "contextual effect" asso-
ciated with the different outcomes in the Prussian enclaves in Newport was
532 Social Science History

Table 9 Newport: Partisan preferences of two Prussian populations

Characteristics Mill core Saratoga Street core
Prussian voting population 51 58
Partisan preference —
Republican (%) 22.2 64.1
Partisan preference —
Democratic (%) 11.1 35.9
Occupational status (%) Republican Democratic Republican Democratic
High NA NA 80.0 20.0
Medium 16.7 83.3 70.7 29.3
Low 30.0 70.0 80.0 20.0
Home ownership (%)
Home owner 23.5 76.5 60.4 39.5
Tenant-boarder 20.0 80.0 75.0 25.0
Assessable property (%)
W-199 22.2 77.8 66.7 .33.3
$200-999 26.7 73.3 50.0 50.0
$1,000+ 16.7 83.3 70.0 30.0

not a uniform diktat but a spatial proclivity, perhaps reinforced by religious

membership, that operated differentially on Prussians in the two areas. G I S
helps us see and understand the way an industrial city such as Newport could
develop the social and political neighborhoods that commercial Alexandria's
compression precluded.

Of Neighborhoods and Networks

Alexis de Tocqueville's (1969: 511) insights into the dynamics of American

politics emphasize the political significance of neighborhoods and his con-
cern for the consequences of each citizen being so deeply embedded in a local
community:

Each part of the land [has] its own political life so that there should be an
infinite number of occasions for the citizens to act together and so that
every day they should feel that they depended on one another. . . . When
the people who live there have to look after the particular affairs of a dis-
trict, the same people are always meeting, and they are forced, in a man-
ner to know and adapt themselves to one another.
 Political Consequences of Spatial Organization 533

Table 10 Newport: Partisan preferences of Prussians in selected occupations

Mill core Saratoga Street core
Occupation Republican Democratic Republican Democratic
Laborer 35.7 64.3 30.0 70.0
C-arpenter 25.0 75.0 87.5 12.5
Tailor 25.0 . 75.0 80.0 20.0
Grocer 0.0 100.0 100.0 0.0

The threat of heedless individualism was more than matched, Tocqueville

(ibid.: 643) observed, by the suasive power that accompanied this social
imbeddedness:

Whenever conditions are equal, public opinion brings immense weight

to bear on every individual. . . . There is no need for the majority to com-
pel him; it convinces him. Therefore, however powers within a democ-
racy are organized and weighted, it will always be very difficult for a man
to believe what the mass rejects and to process what it condemns. This
circumstance is wonderfully favorable to the stability of beliefs.

An appreciation of the suasive influence of the group on the individual also

informed a much later scholarship arising from intensive community studies,
including those pioneering works focused on Elmira, New York, and Erie
County, Pennsylvania. These efforts were not without their critics, among
whom were V. O. Key, who conjured up community studies as sociological
straw men threatening to "take politics out of the study of electoral behav-
ior" and imposing a new social determinism on the voting decision (Key
and Munger 1959: 281). When in the 1950s and 1960s the focus of electoral
behavior shifted from community case studies to representative national
samples as developed in the University of Michigan studies of the American
voter, the earlier interest in the influence of a voter's immediate context on
behavior was "swept aside." Explanatory models shifted from an interest in
the external suasive influences on individuals in communities to the internal
attitudinal worlds of independent individuals uninfluenced by their immedi-
ate contextual circumstances.
Today many political scientists have returned to the earlier theme, citing
Tocqueville's observations on the political significance of context as part of a
"general wisdom" shared by classical thinkers and the founders of the mod-
534 Social Science History

em discipline alike (Zuckerman: 2005a). "Spatial sensibilities," Javier Auyero

(2007: 568) reminds us, "have been around since social sciences' inception."
Given the acceptance of these principles, "what is surprising," A. S. Zucker-
man (20()5a: xv) remarks, "is how they alternatively disappear and recur" in
the research agenda of the academy
Contemporary political scientists with an interest in contextual effects
reject a choice of extremes, arguing that "the social logic of politics does not
stand in contradiction with the claims about reasoning voters or citizens. It
implies no social determinism" (Zuckerman 2O()5b: 19). The way forward
will be found, Zuckerman (2005a: xix) argued, in explanations that "include
the characteristics of both individuals and their social contexts and that link
these two levels of analysis." Robert Huckfeldt (2007: 100) agrees, arguing
that "citizenship takes on meaning through processes of communication,
persuasion, and conflict that occur among interdependent citizens." These
"interdependent individuals arrive at choices and decisions as interactive
participants in a socially imbedded process that depends on networks of
communication among and between individuals within particular settings."
This is not so far from the wise counsel of Sam Hays, who, having done so
much to urge the unity of social and political history, sought to adjudicate the
increasingly hostile exchanges between proponents of the two schools in the
early 1980s. Hays (1985: 499) reminded both sides that "the study of politics
cannot stray too far from the study of society."
Alexandria and Newport provide interesting nineteenth-century ana-
logues of these contemporary themes, returning voters to their social set-
tings and examining, with unique records and new techniques, the networks
in which those "socially imbedded individuals" functioned and made politi-
cal decisions. Nonspatial patterns, composed of close personal networks and
relationships, prevailed in compressed commercial Alexandria, while New-
port's greater spatial specificity encouraged a politics rooted in the more
expansive contexts of neighborhood and community.

Conclusion
Newport suggests that in the nineteenth century, too, the social interconnec-
tions associated with place — the development of neighborhood — also influ-
enced political preference. The Prussians of Newport offer intriguing evi-
dence of the sensitivity of independent contractors (those grocers, tailors.
 Political Consequences of Spatial Organization 535

and carpenters who very likely conducted their business through localized
social networks) to the political preferences of their place and the sharing of
neighborhood beliefs. The indifference of Prussian laborers to the politics of
place may suggest that these men, especially in a situation of great industrial
unrest, operated in a world defined by social contacts with other laborers
that encouraged a consistent partisan stance largely independent of context.
Alexandria provides a compelling case of political heterogeneity at a fine
level, where most voters lived in contexts characterized by political disagree-
ment. As with the Prussian laborers of Newport, they likely shared channels
and networks that transcended space: highly individuated social space sepa-
rated from physical space (see Huckfeldt et al. 2005: esp. 33).
The individual-level sociopolitical databases created for Alexandria and
Newport and illuminated by GIS identify a nested array of spatial features
in these two very different nineteenth-century cities. The visualization capa-
bilities of GIS make clear the different organization of riverfront space in the
two cities and the extent of vacant land in them. These differences reflect the
divergent visions and design intentions of the different elites (commercial
versus industrial) who shaped these two places and set in motion the distinc-
tive social and political patterning of their towns. .. : '•,. ': .
Alexandria came to resemble the traditional commercial city, reflect-
ing "the mid-nineteenth-century conception of the city (that] did not posit
the existence of distinct and diñerential residential neighborhoods" (Miller
1981: 5). Newport reflected a more modern pole, the new industrial city rep-
resenting a "more rigorous sorting out of land uses by function and of peoples
by class, race, and ethnicity" (ibid.). Not so much larger than Alexandria,
Newport exhibited many more distinctive spatial groupings, a consequence
of the dispersion of population encouraged by the greater availability of land
for home ownership. It was not just the large city that "became characterized
by distinct units . . . [that] became known as neighborhoods" (Melvin 1987:
258). The small industrial city, too, as Newport suggests, quickly became a
city of neighborhoods, even as commercial Alexandria remained compact,
relatively crowded, and, in a superficial way, relatively integrated. Perhaps
not surprisingly, Newport would soon develop a system of horse-drawn and
then electric trolleys, while Alexandria long remained a walking city.
Spatial statistics associated with GIS identify the consequential overlap
of groups in the compressed urban space of Alexandria in contrast with more
dispersed patterns in industrial Newport. The limited and highly skewed
536 Social Science History

distribution of home ownership in Alexandria, combined with the even more

unequal distribution of the wealth that came with slave ownership, helped
create a distinctively unequal city but one in which only some inequalities
were spatially expressed. Indeed, the fact that racial and status patterns were
visible at all in a city typified by extensive overlap of social groups speaks to
their distinctive importance.
In these case studies, the integrated databases containing individual-
level social, economic, spatial, and political information led to the discovery
of highly differential rates of home ownership in Alexandria and Newport
along with evidence that indexes of belonging, such as home ownership, were
closely associated with political engagement. Home ownership, often identi-
fied as a measure of commitment to community, is sometimes evaluated only
in terms of its impact on partisan preference (Putnam 1966: 643-46); the
enhanced rates of political participation among Newport home owners at all
levels of income and status are a reminder that nineteenth-century political
life was very much the province of those who belonged. Likewise, discover-
ing a context conducive to fine-grained network politics in Alexandria, in
contrast to the more inclusive neighborhood politics of Newport, adds an
important historical dimension to political science's call to "return to the
logic of social politics" (Zuckerman 2005a: xvi). Spatial analysis has helped
identify for both cities that fundamental connection, as Don Kalb (2007:
587) put it, "between the production of space and the making of place."

Appendix 1 Distribution of wealth for heads of households and extent of home

ownership
Alexandria Newport
1 lome owners {'Yo of
total population) 20.0 44.5
Home Home
Wealth quintile Share of ownership Share of ownership
from census wealth {%) wealth (%)
Lowest 0.2 3.9 0.8 11.0
Next highest 0.5 5.7 1.0 11.0
Next highest • 2.3 32.7 5.3 67.7
Next highest 10.0 55.9 11.6 74.1
Highest 87.0 65.8 81.3 77.5
Note: For further details, see DeBats 2(XW
 Political Consequences of Spatial Organization 537

Appendix 2 Owning and renting populations and home ownership by

occupational status
Alexandria Newport
Type of head of household (%)
Home ow ner 20 45
Tenant 51 «
Boarder 28 14
A' 2,459 3,068
Home ownership (%)
High-status J . 22 46
Mid-status ' : 17 42
Low-status ! 9 26
N 369 1,202
Note: For further details, see DeBats and I.ethbridge 2005.

Notes
1 It is easy to underestimate the importance of data differences in the divides that
have shaped research agendas in botb history and political science. Tbe gap between
individual-level social information and aggregation political information was a sig-
nificant factor in the acrimonious separation of social and political history. A. S.
Zuckerman (2005b: 3) saw the dismissal of the long tradition of contextual and net-
work analysis in political science by tbe Michigan .scbool as "driven primarily by
issues of data and survey methodology."
2 See the poll-book work described in Bourke and DeBats 1977, 1995, and DeBats
2004 and summarized in DeBats 2009.
3 This amounted to 78.0 percent of the white inhabitants, 67.8 percent of the free
black population of 1,388, and, assuming that slaves resided with their owners, 84.7
percent of the slave population of 1,192. Newport had a tiny black population, just
114. See DeBats 2008a. All members of tbe bousebold and their information profiles
were attached to the place of residence of the head of household.
4 The other offices on the ballot were jailor, engineer, pbysician, market master, city
weigher and measurer, street commissioner, and school trustee.
5 Only 5 of the 13 manufacturing establisbments listed in the 1850 census for Alexan-
dria were present in the 1860 census. While the value of annual production of those
five firms had increased 21 percent, capitalization bad decreased 25 percent, and
the number of hands employed had decreased 18 percent. The Virginia Locomotive
and Car Manufacturing Company, which had 177 feet along the Potomac, opened in
1851, closed in 1855, struggled to reopen, and closed for good in 1858. It was the only
manufacturing establishment on the Potomac and is included in figure 1. See also
Hurst 1991: 9-13.
538 Social Science History

6 These figures exclude whole blocks used for education, industry, city government, or
canals.
7 For a fuller study of ownership of vacant lands in Hamilton, Ontario, see Doucet
1982.
8 In Hamilton in 1852,40 percent of the vacant land was owned by nonresidents (Dou-
cet 1982:177).
9 See Purvis 1996: 71-74 for the sequence of additions annexed to the city; see also
ibid.: 80 for an account of the difficulties that home owners confronted in Newport
that differs from the argument presented here.
10 Table 4 relates only to individuals whose occupational details can be located. High-
status: professional, major proprietor, manager, merchant, wholesaler, major pub-
lic official; mid-status: agent, minor proprietor, minor official, clerk, master crafts-
person, skilled craftsperson, proprietor, skilled worker; low-status: apprentice,
unskilled worker, semiskilled worker. A full occupational-status dictionary is avail-
able on request.
11 Because we have a slightly lower percentage of the Alexandria population mapped,
the calculation of the density of the mapped populations gives Newport a 4 percent
greater density than Alexandria.
12 The calculation of the rate of home ownership is based on the heads of households
of the two cities for whom we have been able to locate a residence: 2,754 in .Alexan-
dria and 3,690 in Newport. The figures exclude Alexandria's slave population, which
made up 10 percent of the city's population. Only 13 percent of Alexandria's free
black heads of households were home owners; the white home ownership rate was 21
percent of heads of hou.seholds.
13 While age is, as many urban historians (Doucet and Weaver 1991: 305-42) have
noted, a factor in any comparison of home ownership rates, the difference between
rates of home ownership in Alexandria and in Newport appears more a function of
opportunity than of age. 7 he average age of the home owners in Alexandria (49) was
older than the average age of the home owners in Newport (44).
14 See DeBats and Lethbridge 2005: 84-98. The existence of a "core population" does
not imply exclusivity; core populations are approximate designations of the percent-
age of a total population contained within the boundaries. In figure 5 the Alexan-
dria renting and owning shapes contain 60 and 63 percent, respectively, of the total
mapped populations of renting and owning groups; in figure 6 the Newport renting
and owning shapes contain 60 and 56 percent, respectively, of those groups.
15 See DeBats 2004 for a fuller discussion of the political engagement of the German
and Irish populations in Alexandria and Newport.
16 Figure 7 captures only 53 percent of the Irish-born population of the city; to extend
the catchment to 60 percent would add several very small and scattered residential
pockets.
17 Of the 1,192 slaves in the city in 1859, 472 were rented in. For a fuller discussion of
the extent of wealth inequality in the two cities, see DeBats 2008a: 29-35.
18 There were 214 free black heads of households listed in the Alexandria city tax
 Political Consequences of Spatial Organization 539

returns. The distribution of their taxable assets (valued at $48,246) was extreme,
with the top 20 percent owning 90.8 percent of the taxable assets of the entire free
black population.
19 These cores caught 55 percent of the Prussian-born population of the city, amount-
ing to 333 individuals, 137 in the Mill core and 196 in the Saratoga Street core.

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