The Original Gerrymander Was a Salamander-Shaped District in 1812 Massachusetts

In March 1812, readers of the Boston Gazette, a Federalist newspaper, found an odd creature printed in its pages. It had a long, curling body, a clawed foot, a beaked head and a pair of wings, and if you looked at it closely you could see that its outline was a map: a string of towns in Essex County, north of Boston, stitched together into a single state senate district that wound around the edge of the county like a lizard sunning itself on a rock. The caption gave the beast a name, "The Gerry-Mander," after the governor who had signed the law creating it, Elbridge Gerry. The joke stuck. Two hundred years later the word is used in every state, has spawned verbs and adjectives, and has outlived almost everything else about the man it mocked, including the way he said his own name: Gerry pronounced it with a hard G, like Gary. The word drifted toward a soft G, the way it is usually said today, and nobody bothered to correct it.

In short: The term "gerrymander" comes from a 1812 Massachusetts state senate district drawn to help Governor Elbridge Gerry's party, lampooned in a newspaper cartoon as a salamander. The practice is older than the word and has grown far more precise, from hand-drawn maps to software that tests thousands of plans. The story shows that the problem has always been about who holds the pen, and that reform has always come from voters, not mapmakers.

Who Elbridge Gerry was

The irony starts with the man. Elbridge Gerry was no back-room hack. A merchant from Marblehead, he signed the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation, served in the Continental Congress, and was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. There, he was one of the three delegates still present at the end who refused to sign the finished Constitution, largely because it lacked a bill of rights and because he feared it concentrated too much power in a distant national government. He was, in other words, a man who worried a great deal about the abuse of power.

He was elected governor of Massachusetts in 1810 as a Democratic-Republican, the party of Jefferson and Madison, in a state where the Federalists were strong. In early 1812, the Democratic-Republican legislature redrew the state senate districts to protect its majority, and in February Gerry signed the bill. By several accounts he disliked it. He signed anyway. That turned out to be enough to attach his name to it permanently.

How the salamander was made

The district that drew the most attention ran through a set of towns in Essex County, linked in a long arc that kept Federalist-leaning towns in other districts and gathered Democratic-Republican strength where it could do the most good. Legend has it that someone looking at a map of the new district remarked that it looked like a salamander, and someone else replied that it was a "Gerry-mander." The stories about exactly who said it, and where, differ, and the precise origin is disputed by historians. The image itself is usually credited to the engraver and artist Elkanah Tisdale, who added the wings and claws that turned a district into a dragon.

The scheme worked, at least in the short term. In the state senate elections that spring, the Federalists won more votes statewide, but the Democratic-Republicans kept control of the state senate. It is the first well-documented case in American history of a party winning fewer votes and more seats because of how the lines were drawn, and it is the pattern every gerrymander since has tried to reproduce.

It did not save Gerry himself. He lost the governor's race that same spring to the Federalist Caleb Strong. But he landed well. James Madison chose him as his running mate in the 1812 presidential election, and Gerry became vice president in March 1813. He died in office in November 1814, the second vice president to die before his term was over, and the country moved on to a war that had already burned the Capitol.

The practice was older than the word

Gerry gave the gerrymander its name, not its existence. Mapmaking for advantage was already part of American politics when the Constitution was new.

The best-known early example involves James Madison himself. In 1788, as Virginia drew its first districts for the new House of Representatives, Patrick Henry, an opponent of the Constitution who dominated the state legislature, worked to make sure Madison would struggle to win a seat. The district Madison ran in was arranged to include counties thought to be hostile to him, and his opponent was a formidable one: James Monroe. Madison campaigned through the winter, debated Monroe in the cold, and won anyway. Two future presidents, one district, and a map designed to stop one of them.

Through the nineteenth century, legislatures drew and redrew congressional districts as party fortunes changed, sometimes several times in a decade. Some states elected their whole House delegations at large, statewide, which let the majority party win every seat. Congress responded in 1842 with a law requiring single-member districts, the first federal attempt to set rules for how House members are chosen. Later laws added requirements that districts be contiguous and compact and of roughly equal population, but those standards were rarely enforced and eventually lapsed.

When the lines stopped moving at all

For much of the twentieth century, the most common distortion was not clever line-drawing but no line-drawing. Many state legislatures simply refused to redraw as people moved from farms to cities. Rural districts with small populations kept the same representation as urban districts with many times more people. In some states, a minority of the population elected a majority of the legislature, and that minority had every reason to keep things as they were.

The Supreme Court ended that in a series of decisions in the 1960s. Baker v. Carr, in 1962, held that federal courts could hear challenges to malapportioned districts. Wesberry v. Sanders in 1964 required congressional districts to have roughly equal populations, and Reynolds v. Sims that same year applied the rule to both houses of state legislatures. Chief Justice Earl Warren's majority opinion in Reynolds contains the line most often quoted about the principle: "Legislators represent people, not trees or acres."

One person, one vote fixed one problem and created a new opportunity. Now every legislature had to redraw every ten years, and every redraw was a chance to shape the outcome.

The bestiary keeps growing

The 1812 cartoonist set a tradition that has never really ended: when a district looks strange enough, someone gives it a nickname, and the nickname does more to rally opposition than any legal brief.

In the 1990s, North Carolina's Twelfth Congressional District ran for long stretches along Interstate 85, in places barely wider than the highway, linking Black neighbourhoods in several cities. The district's shape was at the centre of Shaw v. Reno in 1993, in which the Supreme Court held that a district so irregular it could only be explained by race could be challenged as a racial gerrymander.

Illinois has a Chicago district that, for years, was shaped like a pair of earmuffs: two Latino neighbourhoods connected by a thin strip of land, drawn to create a district where Latino voters could elect a candidate of their choice. In Pennsylvania, the Seventh District drawn after 2010 acquired the nickname "Goofy kicking Donald Duck" for its cartoonish outline; it was among the districts swept away when the state supreme court threw out the map in 2018. In Maryland, a federal judge reviewing the Democratic map drawn after 2010 compared the Third District to a broken-winged pterodactyl, which brought the story almost full circle, from the 1812 dragon to a twenty-first-century flying reptile.

The nicknames are fun, and they make a point the public grasps instantly. But they can also mislead. A strange shape is not proof of a gerrymander; rivers, coastlines, county lines and the Voting Rights Act all produce irregular districts for legitimate reasons. And the most effective modern gerrymanders often look perfectly tidy. A neat rectangle can crack a city just as surely as a salamander can. The shape is a clue. The question is always what the lines do to the voters inside them.

Why the newspaper mattered

It is worth pausing on the fact that the word came from a newspaper. In 1812, the Boston Gazette was openly partisan, a Federalist paper attacking a Democratic-Republican governor, and nobody pretended otherwise. Early American newspapers were party instruments. Yet the cartoon did something partisan argument alone could not: it made an abstract injustice visible. A reader who did not know the vote totals could look at the beast and understand that something had been bent.

That is still how reform works. Maps are hard to read and easy to ignore. Pictures, nicknames and simple comparisons, such as the share of votes a party won set beside the share of seats it got, turn the problem into something people can see and repeat. The salamander was propaganda, and it was also true.

From crayons to computers

For a long time, gerrymandering was an art practiced with paper maps, colored pencils and local knowledge. A mapmaker who knew which precincts voted which way could do a great deal. But the work was slow, and an aggressive map might misjudge where voters would be in five years.

Computers changed the scale. By the 1990s, redistricting software let mapmakers combine census data with election results down to the precinct. After the 2010 census, the tools were powerful and cheap, and the parties had strategists ready to use them. Republicans ran a coordinated national campaign, called REDMAP, to win state legislative chambers in the 2010 elections specifically because those legislatures would draw the next decade's maps. It succeeded, and maps drawn in states like North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan gave Republicans durable advantages. Democrats drew aggressive maps of their own where they had the power, in Maryland and Illinois among others. By 2020 both parties understood the game equally well, and the software could generate and score thousands of possible maps before lunch.

The same technology, it should be said, also armed the reformers. Mathematicians and political scientists used computer simulations to produce huge sets of neutral maps and show how far a real map departed from them. Those methods persuaded state courts in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, though not the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 2019 declined to let federal courts police partisan maps at all.

What the computer era did not change is the basic motive, which would have been perfectly familiar to the legislators of 1812. The tools got faster. The goal stayed the same: let the party holding the pen keep it.

Is gerrymandering ever defensible?

In fairness to the mapmakers, there is a case for some of what they do, and it helps to separate it from the rest.

Every map involves choices. Keeping a city whole, uniting a community with shared interests, following county lines, protecting the ability of minority voters to elect candidates of their choice under the Voting Rights Act: each of these is a legitimate goal, and each one has partisan consequences, because voters are not spread evenly. Democrats tend to cluster in cities, which means that even a map drawn with no partisan intent can give Republicans an edge. A mapmaker who says every line has a political effect is telling the truth.

The difference, and it is the one that matters, is intent and degree. A map that follows neutral rules and lands where it lands is one thing. A map designed, as in 1812, to let the party with fewer votes keep more seats is another. The salamander was not an accident of geography. It was a choice.

Where the story turns

The most hopeful part of this history is the most recent. Starting in the 2000s, voters in state after state began taking redistricting away from legislators. Arizona created an independent commission by initiative in 2000. California followed in 2008 and 2010. Michigan, Colorado and others added commissions in 2018, through campaigns led by ordinary citizens of every party. The reforms are imperfect and have been tested hard, including by the mid-decade map fights of 2025, but they rest on an old intuition that cuts across party: the people who benefit from the lines should not be the ones drawing them.

Gerry, who refused to sign the Constitution because he feared unchecked power, might even have agreed. His name is attached to the thing he signed. The fix belongs to the people who keep showing up to demand something better.

What you can do

• Find out who draws the lines in your state. Our voting rights and redistricting topic page follows commissions, legislatures and courts state by state.
• Know your districts. Find your representatives to see who represents you in Congress and in the state legislature, with their contact information and latest votes.
• Make sure you can vote in every election, including the small ones. The voting page lists registration deadlines and rules for every state.
• Support groups that teach map literacy. Many voting rights organizations run workshops on reading and drawing maps. Look for them in the organizations directory.