Voting and ‘the necessities of life’

Fewer and fewer of us have been going to the polls in recent elections, too many of us claiming it’s just downright inconvenient.
If you think that’s the case today, consider William Henry Perrin’s description in Southwest Louisiana Historical and Biographical (New Orleans, 1892) of getting to the polls in the days when St. Landry Parish was called “Imperial St. Landry” because it was the size of a small empire and sprawled across practically all of southwest Louisiana.
“The scattered settlers from the Atchafalaya River on the east to the Sabine and Calcasieu on the west were under the necessity of going to Opelousas to vote and to attend the courts of the district,” he wrote. “Appreciating the fact that the undertaking ... was an onerous one, they strove to combine pleasure with business.
“When, for instance, an interesting and stirring campaign was inaugurated, our pioneer fathers took pretty much the same interest as we do today. They would, as the election drew nigh, make their preparations to attend it. A number of them would get together when time came to start, and, well supplied with the necessaries of life, mount their horses or bronco ponies, and start on the eventful journey. From a week to ten days were required to make the trip, cast their ballots, and return. As there were no houses or taverns along the route, they would camp where night overtook them.”
Reading between the lines, you get the idea that some of these guys (this was before women got the vote) were so well supplied with “the necessities of life” that darkness sometimes overtook them well before the sun set — and it appears that these rugged citizens had ample opportunity to get themselves well into the spirits of campaigning once they got to the polling place. Liquor, it appears, was about as all pervasive then as bumper stickers are today. That led, at minimum, to rowdiness on election day and sometimes violence.
According to an anonymous writer for The Century magazine who visited south Louisiana in 1870, elections were “attended with great excitement. Primed with their favorite tafia [a rotgut rum] or cheap whiskey … voters are noisy and turbulent.” He said fist fights were “the order of the day,” and that a man who didn’t sport a shiner on the day after election day was sometimes accused of not giving full support to his candidate.
The need to travel long distances to vote was one of the reasons lawmakers decided November was the best month for farmers and other country folk to get to the polls. The fall harvest was over, it was too early to start getting the fields ready for spring planting, and in most of the country the weather was still good enough for voters to negotiate the muddy trails that were the roads of the day.       
Federal legislators decided Saturday and Sunday were no good because voting on either of those days would keep voters from going to church. Monday was also thrown out because that would require a good number of people to hit the road on Sunday to get to their voting place on Monday. That would also keep them from going to church.   
So the first Tuesday in November was selected because by then the harvest was in, the weather wasn’t yet too bad, and voters could go both to church and to the polls.
The fact that the harvest was finished also meant that voters had a little bit of change in their pockets to buy the needed “necessities of life” to tide them over while they traveled.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, Cajuns and Other Characters, is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.