When Andrew Jackson ran against John Quincy Adams in 1828, 4,568 of the 1,148,018 votes were cast for, in the language of that era’s news reports, “Scattering.”1 No record remains of who composed that category, but an absence of information can in itself be information. One reason for the absence of information about fringe candidates is that voting in the early years of the United States was conducted very differently than today; back then there was no equivalent of a Federal Election Commission. Nor, in the earliest years of the republic, did states have procedures for office seekers getting their names on the ballot. In many jurisdictions eligible voters (also very differently from today) simply gathered at an appointed time and place and voted by voice or holding up a hand. It is very likely that when, for example, John Adams ran against Thomas Jefferson in 1796, local election officials simply ignored any isolated voices calling out for Yankee Doodle or the town drunk. American democracy soon took a step forward by providing greater privacy. In an increasing number of jurisdictions in the early nineteenth century, voters came to the polls with the names of their chosen candidates already written down on their personal ballots, which they placed in a box. A remnant of this system remains in today’s prepared ballots via the write-in option, as does the news media’s reporting of isolated votes under a category such as “Other” or some equivalent to “Scattering.”
One can well imagine, however, that with the birth of the United States, some number of quirky candidates availed themselves of this new democracy. But in fact they precede the creation of the United States. Just as democracy was evolving in monarchical England, so too its embryo existed in colonial America. While England’s monarchs appointed and empowered colonial governors, colonists elected representatives to legislatures that exercised limited home rule. And among those seeking to be elected there already were, evidently, fringe candidates. How else to explain the first stage comedy to be written by an American, The Candidates, by Robert Munford?
Munford wrote the play in or around 1770, when what would become the American Revolution was starting to bubble up in that year’s Boston Massacre and in violence erupting in New York between British soldiers and the Sons of Liberty. Writing in the stylized traditions of Restoration Comedy, Munford named the mainstream candidates Mr. Wou’dbe and Mr. Worthy. The fringe candidates seeking office—unsuccessfully but, if you’re into his kind of writing, hilariously—were Sir John Toddy, a drunk; Mr. Strutabout, an egomaniac; and Mr. Smallhopes, a single-issue candidate whose issue was horsemanship.
Although these characters were fictional, Munford did not create them out of thin air. Indeed he was sufficiently concerned that the actual likes of such candidates might take action against him that he put an eighteenth-century version of today’s disclaimer—Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental—in the play’s prologue. Which, in his words, was this:
While some may make malicious explanations,
And know them all still living in the nation . . .
I boldly answer, how could he mean you,
Who, when he wrote, about you nothing knew?
As it turned out, Munford need not have worried. Being the first American known to have written a comedy did not mean his writing was good. Assessed as, at best, an amateur effort with amusing moments, The Candidates was never produced.2