Correlating hundreds of individual voting records and voluminous social, cultural, and economic data, Paul Bourke and Donald DeBats take full advantage of the evidence and supply us with an unprecedented study of how people in the 1850s developed political identities and made political choices. In this long-awaited book, Bourke and DeBats show in compelling richness of detail how these decisions more often resulted from private considerations than from the highly publicized appeals of parties and their candidates.