American politics is the model of politics that developed in the United States from the adoption of the Constitution in 1787 into the modern era, with major political realignments occurring in 1800, 1828, 1854, 1896, 1932, 1968-1972, and 2016. American politics, as a two-party system, has historically been marked by competition between the rival ideologies of "liberalism" and "conservatism", whose definitions and constituencies have changed over the centuries, yet reflected the clash of polarized interest groups. Major parties in American history have included the Democratic-Republican Party and Democratic Party on the political left and the Federalists, National Republicans, Whigs, and Republicans on the political right, with various third parties such as the Anti-Masons, Nullifiers, Free Soilers, Know Nothings, Liberal Republicans, Populists, Roosevelt Progressives, LaFollette Progressives, Socialists, Dixiecrats, and American Independent Party helping to bring issues such as states' rights, nativism, abolitionism, civil service reform, social liberalism, the regulation of trusts, workers' rights, and the Civil Rights movement to national prominence. American politics has experienced at least six party systems since its inception, marked by the reshaping and even mass defection of voter blocs over the two political camps' stances on pressing issues, such as the coalescence of anti-slavery forces into the Republican Party in 1854 and pro-slavery and pro-states' rights forces into the Democrats, the rallying of economic interventionists behind the New Deal coalition and the limited-government "Old Right" behind the "Conservative coalition" during the 1930s, and the polarization between the cultural liberals and economic progressives of the Democratic Party and the cultural conservatives and economic neoliberals of the Republican Party after 2008.
History[]
Pre-Revolution: Whigs and Tories[]
American politics has its origins in the politics of 17th-century Great Britain, marked by the rivalry of the Tories (who stood for the older view of a hierarchically organized feudal society and an established church) and Whigs (who gave more rein to the social and political individualism that was associated with growing economic enterprise and the philosophy of John Locke). During the 18th century, these parties existed mainly in Parliament and developed no campaign structures among the general population, but, starting in the 1780s, the Whigs established party clubs in London and other cities and towns to increase the party's strength among the electorate, while, in 1790, the Tories formed a council of party leaders to regularly dine together and plan their campaign. These party divisions carried over to the Thirteen Colonies, with the writings of British libertarian Whigs such as John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon shaoping the mind of the American Revolutionary generation. As the British government and colonial interests seeking more freedom began to clash in the 1760s and 1770s, Americans who took the side of the Crown called themselves Tories and those who placed themselves in opposition were generally known as Whigs. After independence in 1776, former Tory leaders such as James DeLancey in New York and Thomas Hutchinson in Massachusetts fled or were expelled, along with most of their followers, but the victorious Whigs soon experienced new party divisions within their ranks.
American Revolution: Populists and Conservatives[]
By the late 1770s, ideological divisions had begun to develop in most of the rebellious American colonies, with the Patriots being divided into conservative and populist factions. Both sides supported republican government and social and economic individualism, but they split over the question of how far the principle of equality being advanced by some patriot politicians and publicists should be carried. During the early 1780s, the conservatives generally supported and the populists opposed payment of the public debt and giving more authority to state governors. Populists favored and conservatives opposed legislation to issue paper money and to permit delay in payment of private debts. Conservatives voted to stop the confiscation of property owned by former loyalists, while populists supported continuation of such seizures; independents usually held the balance of power in the state legislatures.
Conservatives were concentrated in and around the coastal cities of Boston, Salem, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Annapolis, and Charleston and in the tidewater regions of Virginia and the Carolinas, while Populists came from the inland valleys of New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia and the highlands of Pennsylvania, North Jersey, Virginia, and the Carolinas, though the conservatives controlled a few backcountry constituencies like the Berkshire mountain region of western Massachusetts and the wilderness area of Virginia that became the state of Kentucky. Most Episcopalians and Quakers were conservatives, while most Baptists were populists. Congregationalists and Presbyterians divided on the basis of residence, dewllers in the coastal areas tending to be conservatives and inlanders tending to be populists.
In Pennsylvania, divisions emerged over the radical state constitution of 1776, with the pro-constitution populists becoming known as the "Constitutionalists" and their conservative opponents calling themselves the "Republicans" to differentiate themselves from that state's substantial body of Tories. The Republicans dominated Philadelphia and conservative German farmers in Lancaster and York counties along the Maryland border, while the Constitutionalists held sway in the rural Susquehannah Valley around Harrisburg (which they made the state capital) and among the Scots-Irish in the western highlands. The two groups established party organizations to conduct election campaigns and formed caucuses in the legislature. Battle lines were tightly drawn and the percentage of independents was much smaller than in any other state. Party lines tended to be drawn between democratic Constitutionalists and the moderate, propertied, and "respectable" Republicans. The Constitutionalists were able to successfully identify the 1776 state constitution with the Revolution itself for a time, and a Philadelphia mob attacked the home of Republican leader James Wilson in 1779; a riot ensued, and 6 people were killed and 20 wounded. Gradually, the more moderate elements in the rural counties swung to the Republicans, and the state constitution of 1776 was scuttled in 1790 and replaced by a more conservative basic law.
In New York, the populist faction was organized around Governor George Clinton, who used government patronage to assemble the first state party machine in American history, dispensing 15,000 state jobs at the peak of its power. The more conservative and moderate forces in state politics gathered behind the aristocratic Schuyler family, led by General Philip Schuyler and his son-in-law Alexander Hamilton; the powerful Livingston family decided that they feared Clinton even more than they disliked the Schuylers and joined Hamilton in forming an "Anti-Clintonian" party that became a formidable competitor in state politics.
In Virginia, a relatively conservative faction developed on the Northern Neck, the peninsula between the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers. The populist bloc took root in the "Southside", the region south of the James River, where farms were smaller and society more democratic. More than a quarter of the members of the House of Delegates, particularly those from the Shenandoah Valley and the central piedmont (including young James Madison) avoided regular identification with either faction, and, in most districts, members were elected on the basis of personal and local considerations.
In Massachusetts, there was little party organization before 1787, but political divisions were as bitter and rancorous as those in Pennsylvania. Conservatives concentrated in Boston and Salem and attracted support from fishing villages on Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard and from hamlets in the Berkshires, charging that the more radical faction in state government supported an agrarian law to equalize property and a revolution. Their populist opponents, scattered across the Connecticut River valley and in the Narragansett Basin, complained that the overgrown rich in the coastal seaports were seeking to put down the "smaller sort of folks". Populists usually held the upper hand in the state legislature, while the governorship passed back in forth between conservative James Bowdoin and the populist John Hancock. After economic depression struck in 1786, conservatives in the legislature blocked a "stay law" to postpone the collection of debt, and state courts ordered numerous foreclosures on small farms. Finding the state government unresponsive to their demands, a body of armed Connecticut Valley farmers led by Daniel Shays marched on Springfield to prevent the state court sitting in that city from carrying out further foreclosures. The rebels were routed by the state militia after initially threatening Boston and holing up in Worcester; Shays fled to Vermont. In the spring of 1787, a move by populists in the Massachusetts legislature to pardon leaders of the rebellion failed by a vote of only 100 to 108. Conservative leader Theodore Sedgwick warned that a very large party in both branches of the legislature "filled with a spirit of republican frenzy" were attempting the same objects by legislation which "their more manly brethren" had attempted in Shays' Rebellion.
In most states during the mid-1780s, conservative Whigs, for whom one revolution was enough, generally held their own in gubernatorial and legislative elections, but they became increasingly fearful that egalitarian radicals would soon impose their will on exposed fragments of the decentralized nation. John Dickinson lamented the propertied and sensible class' loss of influence due to the popular spirit of the war, Henry Knox wrote to George Washington in 1786 that the creed of many small farmers was that the property confiscated from Britain during the Revolution ought to be common property for all, Alexander Hamilton warned that the government was being invaded by Levellers, and James Madison observed that Shays' Rebellion had been an "alarming symptom."
Constitutional debate: Anti-Federalists and Federalists[]
When the Constitutional Convention was held in Philadelphia in the spring of 1787, the assembled convention produced a Constitution that embodied the spirit of the Revolution in a moderately conservative structure of national government, with a major goal being to place the fundamental private rights of property beyond the reach of popular majorities. While preserving a federal system, the Constitution specifically prohibited the states from issuing paper money or legislating to impair contracts to relieve debtors, both favorite projects among populists at the state level. Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay, in the Federalist Papers, proposed a new structure of government which would serve as a barrier against domestic faction and insurrection, while a strong national government would override the tendency of the governing party in one or two states to swerve from good faith and justice. Madison wrote that the Constitution's great object was to secure the public good and private rights against the danger of faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government. He argued that factionalism was caused by differences over religion, forms of government, and the various and unequal distribution of property. Madison argued that economic factionalism could not be avoided without suppressing freedom, and that the surest way to avoid such a danger to republican government would be to divide economic interests into a landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, and many lesser interests, thus focusing politics on functional and regional differences rather than on rivalries between the "haves" and "have-nots".
Populist strategists and spokesmen like Samuel Adams in Massachusetts, George Clinton in New York, and Patrick Henry in Virginia fought ratification of the conservative Constitution in their respective states, and four-fifths of the Populists opposed ratification, while an even larger share of conservatives were pro-Constitution. The Anti-Federalists, as opponents of the Constitution were called, could not match the Federalists' national organization, directed by much of the former high command of the Revolution. The inability of the Anti-Federalists to mount an effective national campaign provided a demonstration that seemed to bear out Madison's thesis, as populist appeals might work state by state, but when the issue was framed in national terms, the moderates and conservatives appeared to have the advantage. Thomas Paine, the Revolution's most articulate publicist of egalitarianism, was absent in France during the French REvolution, while Thomas Jefferson was serving as Ambassador to France and did not publicly align himself with the Anti-Federalists. In some states, such as Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, and Virginia, the vote on ratification was close, but, by 4 March 1789, 11 states had ratified and the Constitution was declared adopted. North Carolina ratified eight months later, and Rhode Island voted 34-32 to ratify the Constitution on May 1790, by which time George Washington had been President for more than a year.
First Party System: Federalists and Republicans[]
Formation of parties[]
While the Founding Fathers warned against the formation of political parties, factionalism immediately took root in the new United States. The United States initially appeared heading toward being a one-party democracy, as at least 18 of the 24 members of the first US Senate and 37 of the 65 members of the US House of Representatives identified with the Federalist Party that had won ratification of the Constitution. The Anti-Federalists were in disarray, as their strongest potential leader, Thomas Jefferson, had been persuaded by Washington to join the administration as secretary of state. The Federalists of 1789 were more of a committee formed to manage the national polity than a political party in the Founders' pejorative sense. However, political cleavages formed within the First Congress, as Virginia, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York developed rival claims for preeminence. An ideological divide soon began to form in response to Alexander Hamilton's ambitious economic program, partly caused by personal rivalries.
Hamilton's economic program included formation of a national bank, assumption of prior national and state debts by the federal government (bringing huge profits to speculators who had invested in these securities when their market value was low), and enactment of a tax on whiskey to shift some of the tax burden from Northeastern business to Western farmers. This program was immediately attacked by those who feared collaboration between a strong national government and aggressive business interests, and critics accused the 34-year-old treasury secretary of being a secret monarchist and an aspiring Julius Caesar. Hamilton argued that government support for commerce and manufacturing served the long-term interest of the entire nation. Though a political Whig, he attached little value to social equality, having risen from humble origins to the apex of conservative New York society through his marriage to Elizabeth Schuyler. Hamilton believed that enlisting the interest of wealthy investors and enterprises was vital to the success of the new nation, as he saw the wealthy's vices as more favorable to the prosperity of the state than those of the "indigent." Hamilton was strongly committed to a strong national government, a supreme power to which all members of a society were subject.
Thomas Jefferson at first gave gingerly support to part of Hamilton's program in exchange for the selection of the Potomac River as the site of the nation's new capital, the District of Columbia. By February 1791, however, Jefferson had grown disillusioned with the government as mass discontent gathered in the South, and Jefferson plotted with George Mason to augment the numbers in the lower house so as to get a more agricultural representation to put their interest above that of the "stock-jobbers." In May 1791, Jefferson and James Madison visited New England, ostensibly to observe its vegetation and wildlife, but secretly to speak out against Hamilton's program, including the national bank and the federal assumption of state debts. They met with Robert Livingston and George Clinton, persuading them to settle their differences and make common cause against the Schuylers and Hamilton, and with Aaron Burr, a newly elected Senator who was building his own political machine among the urban masses (including the egalitarian Tammany Society).
The 1790 midterm elections produced some of the "augmentation" that Jefferson had hoped for, with Madison becoming the opposition leader in the House in response to Congress' approval of a national bank. Of the 65 members of the House, 17 usually voted with Madison, 15 consistently voted against him, and the rest shifted back and forth. Most members from Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia, and a few from Pennsylvania and New York, usually followed Madison's lead, while the delegations from New England were solidly against him. At the same time, both political factions developed ties to the national press, with the Federalists obtaining the backing of John Fenno's Gazette of the United States and the Anti-Federalists winning the support of Madison's Princeton classmate in forming the National Gazette. Madison's political views had shifted to supporting the less well-off minority, as his loss of influence to Hamilton and his friendship with Jefferson alienated him from the Federalists. He supported the libertarian republicanism of the kind cherished by Virginia over the growing force of New York and New England mercantile capitalism, and he believed that the upper-class northern libertarians like the Livingstons could align with the South to grant the agrarian cause the superiority of numbers that Madison claimed for "republicanism".
French Revolution[]
In the 1792 presidential election, Aaron Burr indicated some interest in opposing John Adams for Vice President, but the "republican interest" caucus in Philadelphia backed George Clinton instead; Adams was safely re-elected Vice President with 77 votes, though Clinton won all the votes of New York, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia, and one from Pennsylvania, for a total of 50. Party divisions were deepened by the French Republic's declaration of war on Britain in 1793; Thomas Paine's participation in the new rebellion seemed to signify the extension of liberal ideals. Even when the French revolutionaries attacked not only monarchy but traditional Christianity, many enthusiasts for democracy threw up their caps and declared France to be a "sister republic." From the start, American conservatives and moderates such as John Adams expressed reservations about the "republic of thirty million atheists." Jefferson justified the Reign of Terror in 1793, arguing that it would be better for a few innocents to be martyred than for the revolution to fail. Many in the United States supported pitching in on the French side, but Washington swiftly declared American neutrality, supported by Jefferson. The arrival of Edmond-Charles Genet, the new French ambassador, in Charleston on the day Washington declared neutrality set off tumultuous demonstrations in support of France, and Genet openly commissioned American privateers to prey on British shipping and urged Americans to join French forces in Louisiana for an attack on Spanish-owned New Orleans. John Adams wrote that only a yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia prevented the outbreak of a revolution. Supporters of the French cause formed the "Democratic Society", and Philadelphia soon came to have an English-speaking and German-speaking Democratic society. Similar clubs, calling themselves Democratic or Republican, sprang up all over the country, numbering 35 by the end of 1794. These clubs were active in several Republican congressional campaigns in 1794, and, in Charleston, the local Democratic club petitioned to be adopted by the Jacobin Club in Paris. Genet's subsequent marriage to George Clinton's daughter symbolized the union of egalitarian spirit in the two countries.
The Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania in 1794, set off by farmers furious over the whiskey tax, and controversy over the 1795 Jay Treaty with Britain further hardened party lines. Madison and other Republican strategists sought to combine the old Anti-Federalist base with Federalists who had grown dissatisfied with some, or all, policies of the Washington administration. A few leading Anti-Federalists had crossed over to the Federalist side, while some others who had argued for ratification had become Republicans; however, outside of New England, the great majority of Anti-Federalists, such as James Monroe and Albert Gallatin, had moved smoothly into Republican ranks. In Pennsylvania, remaining supporters of the radical 1776 constitution (including Scots-Irish Presbyterians in the west) joined forces with the newly organized Democratic clubs. In Virginia, enough Anti-Federalists lined up with Madison and his followers to make the Republicans the majority party in 1795, though the Federalists retained pockets of strength in the tidewater and the Shenandoah Valley.
Jefferson resigned from the administration in 1793, followed by Hamilton in 1794; Washington continued to regard himself as above parties and deplored the development of party spirit in the nation, lashing out at the "self-created societies" in 1794. He blamed the Whiskey Rebellion on the clubs, which had disseminated suspicion, jealousy, and accusation toward the whole government. Madison criticized the administration for attempting to connect the societies with the insurrection and the congressional Republicans with the Democratic societies. In 1796, Jefferson privately lamented that "an Anglican, monarchical, and aristocratical party has sprung up" in place of "that noble love of liberty and republican government which carried us triumphantly through the war."
In 1796, both parties operated under the assumption that Washington would not seek a third term; Washington only announced this intention weeks before the election. Federalist members of Congress supported Adams and Thomas Pinckney, while the Republicans supported Jefferson for President; Livingston was blocked by Burr from receiving unified backing from New York, while Southerners criticized Burr for being unsettled in his politics. The Federalists relied on local notables to carry their ticket to victory, while the Republican organizations in several states campaigned vigorously to turn out votes for Jefferson, with Gallatin campaigning in western Pennsylvania and Burr barnstorming through New England. Adams carried all of New England, New York, New Jersey, and Delaware and picked up a few votes in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina to achieve a narrow majority of 71. Jefferson was elected Vice President with 68 votes, having placed second behind Adams' narrow majority of 71 votes and ahead of Pinckney's 59 votes and Burr's 30 votes. With Washington gone from the scene, party warfare blazed through national politics without restraint, with the Republicans attacking the Federalists as beholden to the "money power" and as being closeted monarchists. John Taylor of Caroline suggested that Virginia and North Carolina should consider secession to escape the yoke imposed on the Union by Massachusetts and Connecticut.
The Federalists responded by accusing the Republicans of contemplating treason and plotting to plunge the country into the same failures of revolutionary France. After the XYZ Affair of 1798, public opinion in the United States swung heavily against France, and the French invasion of the Reformation's birthplaces of Switzerland and the Netherlands produced shock and outrage among American Protestants. The Federalist majority in Congress whipped through the Alien and Sedition Acts to make it a crime to speak, write, or publish anything with intent to defame public officials, and made it easier for the government to deport political antagonists who were not citizens. The Republicans respunded by persuading the legislatures of Virginia and Kentucky to enact resolutions condemning and defying the Sedition Act. However, residents of the Southeastern seaboard feared an attack on American ports by the French Navy, and Federalist Senator James Lloyd (F-MD) believed that a declaration of war on France would be necessary for the government to lay its hands on traitors. Adams, a scorner of parties and partisan politics, rejected Hamilton's urges to take a militant stand against France, preventing a "patriotic war" against France.
Realignment of 1800[]
By the time of the 1800 presidential election, anti-French feeling had subsided and the Republicans were in the poilitical ascendancy. Madison urged the Republicans to campaign on a platform of peace even with Great Britain, a sincere cultivation of the Union, the disbanding of the US Army on principles of economy and safety, protestations against violations of constitutional principles, and distrust of the federal mails for political communication. Gallatin argued that Burr should be included on the Republican ticket to help carry Pennsylvania and New York, while the Federalists teamed Adams with Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. Both parties used their strength in state legislatures to alter electoral systems to their advantage, with Virginia shifting from choosing presidential electors by congressional district to a statewide winner-take-all system to ensure that Jefferson would win the state's entire vote, as the same game was playing off in New England and other Eastern states in favor of the Federalists. In Massachusetts, the system was changed from popular vote by congressional district to the legislature to guard against a single anti-federal vote. In New York, the Federalists defeated a move by the Republicans to change from choosing the electors by the legislature to having them elected by district. The Republicans deployed the stronger party organizations in most of the battleground states, with Burr once again leading the Republican canvass in New York, moving from poll to poll and frequently encountering Hamilton, with whom he debated the issues of the day before the assembled voters. Burr's tireless campaigning - including a ten-hour speech in the seventh ward - won New York City and the state for the Republicans. In Pennsylvania, Governor Thomas McKean began the practice of making political removals and appointments for partisan considerations, expecting political jobholders to work for the party cause. In Virginia, party workers treated voters to rum punch or other votes on election day. In New York City, Hamilton's Federalist organization fought toe-to-toe with Burr's, using government patronage to build up their organizations. The Federalists pressed for a straight party vote, just as the Republicans had done.
The Federalist campaign in New England received major support from the Congregationalist clergy; in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire, where Congregationalism was still state-established, church members regarded Federalism as their protector against disestablishment. The Connecticut Valley, where the Shaysites had been strong, became the most staunchly Federalist region in the nation, as evangelists identified supporters of Jefferson with profanities of language, drunkenness, gambling, and lewdness. Jefferson's reputation as a religious skeptic reinforced the dislike of conservative Calvinists for Republicans in general. Evangelicals, on the other hand, rallied to the Jeffersonian cause, with the Presbyterians being split between the pro-Federalist, rationalist "Old Lights" and the evangelical "New Lights", who supported Jefferson. The presence of Burr, a grandson of Jonathan Edwards, on the Republican ticket offset Timothy Dwight's impassioned Federalism among evangelicals. Baptists and the recently founded Methodists (formed in the United States in 1784), both of whom were winning masses of converts among rural families in the South and on the wstern frontier, tended to be ardently Republican, attracted by the egalitarian enthusiasm that antagonized conservative Congregationalists and Presbyterians. The Republicans also appealed to the evangelicals' opposition to state-established religion; a New Jersey Republican circular argued that Jefferson was being branded an "infidel" because he was not a fanatic who believed that Quakers, Baptists, or Methodists should pay the pastor of other sects, that Catholics should be banished for not believing in transubstantiation, or a Jew for believing in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Quakers, concentrated in Pennsylvania and Delaware, were largely Federalist due to their pre-Revolution conservatism. Episcopalians were Federalist, except in New England, where their resentment against paying taxes to support established Congregationalism drew some of them to the Republicans. The small number of Catholics, mainly Irish in New York and French Canadians in upper New England, plus a few old families in Maryland and Pennsylvania, were overwhelmingly Republican. The switch of New York from the Federalists in 1796 to the Republicans in 1800 won the election for the Republicans; the swing of electoral votes was not massive, but it was enough to produce the first major party realignment in American history. Adams performed better in Pennsylvania and North Carolina than he had in 1796, but it was not enough to offset New York's switch. The strength of the Republicans in the frontier states of Kentucky and Tennessee was essential to their victory.
The Federalists never again won a national election, but instead became a vessel for New England parochialism and reactionary social attitudes. The Federalists had drafted and ratified the Constitution, launched the new government, established the executive authority of the presidency under Washington, enacted Hamilton's economic program, and law-abidingly turned over control to the Republicans after the 1800 election, but their failure to understand the underlying nature of American democracy - and their behavior like hierarchical Tories rather than conservative republicans - resulted in their failure.
One-party hegemony[]
The election of Thomas Jefferson as President in 1800 ushered in a period of almost 60 years during which the party representing the liberal tradition was normally dominant. The Jeffersonians slashed expenditures for national defense, reduced the national debt from $83 million in 1800 to $27.5 million by 1812, allowed the Bank to expire in 1811, and substantially shifted the values and ideological assumptions on which the direction of national government was based. However, Jefferson and his colleagues had no intention of returning to the loose confederation of states that had existed before the Constitution, nor were they inclined toward social or economic collectivism; they proved to be more radically individualistic than the Federalists had been. The Jeffersonians focused on pursuing egalitarian ideals, such as a society in which all individuals were equal in fact and legal rights.
Jefferson appointed Madison as secretary of war and Gallatin as secretary of the treasury, and the new administration cleaned Federalists out of politically sensitive posts in the national civil service, such as firing 6 of the 15 Federal superintendents of the 16-member Internal Revenue Department outright, and laying off the other 9 when Gallatin reorganized the department in 1802. Of the 146 customs officers appointed directly by the President, 50 were fired. Jefferson replaced all but one of the customs officers in New York and Pennsylvania. Deprived of political patronage, nascent Federalist organizations in most parts of the country outside New England withered. Mercantile interests and the Congregational clergy in New England sustained Federalism as a potent force in that part of the country, and the party remained fairly active in New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware; however, Federalism went into steep decline in the critical states of New York and Pennsylvania, and the Republicans were soon virtually unchallenged in most of the South and West. Republican candidates continued to run against John Adams in spirit, such as the high national debt, the whiskey tax, the land tax, and the raising of a "useless standing army."
Republican organizations were most developed in states where the Federalists continued to be serious contenders for power; both parties organized around party caucuses in the state legislatures of New England, while legislative caucuses also exercised some authority over party organizations in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. The politicians who manned state and local Republican organizations were drawn for the most part from the ranks of "new men," and the party was strongest in the rural hinterlands, while maintaining effective organizations in boomtowns like New York and Baltimore.
Jefferson was a moderate Whig before going to France as ambassador in 1784, but he was influenced by Enlightenment radicalism during his time in Paris, and became a critic and antagonist of all kingds of establishment. He came to dislike cities and its urban masses, believing that democracy was achievable only in an agrarian society in which most people owned their own land and thus had maximum freedom. However, the social vision and political philosophy of Jefferson often differed from those of fellow Republicans such as Madison, Gallatin, Clinton, Burr, Monroe, the Livingstons, and Sam Adams. Gallatin dissuaded Jefferson from dismantling much of Hamilton's economic system, arguing for its utility, and Madison disrupted Jefferson's idea that every constitution and law should automatically expire at the end of 19 years. The most concrete effect of Jeffersonian ideology on American politics was the broad extension of suffrage. Qualifications for voting were liberalized in most states, including New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Maryland, where property-owning requirements had been particularly high; by 1824, virtually all adult white males were eligible to vote in all states except South Carolina, Rhode Island, and Louisiana. Electoral districts were reduced in size to that it was easier for voters, particularly in lightly settled rural areas, to get to the polls. Voter turnout increased from 20% in 1796 to 31% in 1800 and 42% in 1812.
Republican fissions[]
In 1802, Hamilton came to believe that the future of the Federalist Party lay in alliance between political and religious conservatives. Most Congregational and Episcopal and many Presbyterian clergy were already enthusiastic Federalists, and Hamilton proposed the formation of a "Christian Constitutional Society" to elect to public office candidates pledged to uphold the Constitution and apply Christian principles to government. The Republicans, meanwhile, pushed through the Twelfth Amendment to provide for the separate election of President and Vice President. In 1804, Jefferson dropped Burr from the Republican ticket and replaced him with Clinton, causing Burr to offer himself as a gubernatorial candidate for the Federalists in 1804. Burr was easily defeated by the Clintonian Republican candidate due in part to Hamilton's opposition, resulting in Burr's killing of Hamilton in a duel at Weehawken, New Jersey. He left behind no stable political party when he died, and the Republicans easily won the 1804 election. Madison was elected President in 1808 with Clinton as Vice President, and the Republicans held large majorities in both houses on Congress, controlling most state governments outside New England. Even John Quincy Adams went over to the Republicans, as he could not abide the grumpy Sedgwicks and Ameses who dominated Massachusetts Federalism, and considered himself too large for any party.
John Randolph of Roanoke, the Republican floor leader in the House of Representatives, turned against the administration during Jefferson's second term and led the libertarian "Tertium quids" into opposition. In New York, the renewed feud between the Clintons and Livingstons after 1807 led to fission within the Republican ranks. DeWitt Clinton, Governor Clinton's nephew, was appointed to dispense patronage, allowing some well-connected Federalists to stay in their state jobs while distributing an ample supply of plums to deserving Republicans and was appointed Mayor of New York City. The Livingstons won a majority on the Council of Appointment in 1807, replacing a large number of Clintonians with Livingstonites and firing DeWitt Clinton as Mayor of New York. In 1812, DeWitt Clinton ran for President as the candidate of a coalition of national Federalists and New York Republicans who felt their state was not getting its fair share of federal spoils. Capitalizing on opposition to the War of 1812, Clinton carried New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and all of New England except Vermont, for 89 electoral votes against Madison's 128.
Clinton used his position on the Erie Canal Commission to bolster his popularity in western New York, where his faction had formerly been weak. Opposition to the Clintonians in the state Republican Party centered on the Upstate state senator Martin Van Buren, who placed great emphasis on party regularity, in contrast to Clinton's more personal style of politics. Van Buren established close relationships with the remaining Livingstons and with Tammany Hall, already the dominant force in New York City politics, creating the "Albany Regency" as an alliance of ambitious young upstate politicians. By 1817, Van Buren's Tammany-backed "Bucktails" controlled the state party machinery, but Clinton managed to have the nominating authority shifted to a state party convention in which the western part of the state was heavily represented, enabling Clinton to defeat Van Buren in the gubernatorial election. Van Buren retaliated by gaining control of the Canal Commission, distributing thousands of construction jobs to loyal Bucktails. By 1821, the Bucktails were able to outvote the governor on the Council of Appointment. Van Buren swept out state employees, county sheriffs, judges, and district attorneys in windrows. In 1824, Clinton returned to the governorship, bolstered by the success of the Erie Canal, but his death in 1828 enabled Van Buren's nomination as Andrew Jackson's Vice-President. Clinton had championed developmental populism, refusing to share in Jefferson's anti-market capitalism and anti-urban views and having no misgivings about massive government expenditures on public works, while allying with the stockjobbers and money men of Wall Street and believing that a rising tide lifted all boats; his political descendants would be numerous.
As President, James Madison had to deal not only with contentious Clintonians in New York, but also with a new breed of Republicans in Congress, including Henry Clay of Kentucky and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. Though overwhelmingly Republican, many of the 142 new members of the House elected in 1811 expressed a belligerent nationalism that seemed more Hamiltonian than Jeffersonian. Both Clay and Calhoun favored federal government support for internal improvements, such as roads and canals, to facilitate development of the West. They directed their antagonism at Great Britain, the traditional object of Jeffersonian loathing, pressing for conflict with the British to produce territorial gains for the United States. Clay used the powers of Speaker of the House to build a personal political machine in the House, appointing all House committees and assuring that most members put loyalty to him above obedience to the administration. He soon came to rival Madison both as party leader and shaper of national policy. Madison proved ineffective as President, deliberating endlessly over nuances of policy, and stumbling into the War of 1812 under the influence of the "war hawks" and British provocation.
Though the war was poorly managed, the Republican Party came out of it even stronger than it had been before. When the conflict with Britain seemed to be going badly in the fall of 1814, leading New England Federalists convened secretly in Hartford, Connecticut to formulate demands for increased regional autonomy. Talk of secession was in the air. By the time the convention's negotiating committee got to Washington in January 1815, however, the war was over, settled on terms reasonably favorable to the United States. A few spectacular American naval victories, together with Andrew Jackson's triumph at the Battle of New Orleans, enabled patriotic Americans to regard the war as a success. Republican orators and publicists branded the Hartford Convention an act of subversion during wartime, ending what was left of Federalism as a national political force. James Monroe, who succeeded Madison as President in 1817, was determined to make the Republican Party supreme as a prelude to abolishing parties altogether. Madison fully shared Jefferson's and Madison's prejudices against parties, but he lacked the power of reflection that led them at time to concede that a party system might be useful or at least inevitable.
The struggle for succession[]
In the election of 1820, Monroe seemed to get his wish; the Federalists failed to put up even a token candidate for President, and Monroe was reelected with the votes of all the electors except one, who believed that only George Washington deserved unanimous approval. The first year of Monroe's second term had scarcely passed away before the political atmosphere became inflamed to an unprecedented extent, as the Republican Party was shattered into fragments, with no fewer than five Republican candidates for President in the field. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, Secretary of the Treasury William H. Crawford, and US Senator Andrew Jackson competed for the Republican nomination in 1824. Monroe preferred Calhoun, but, because lack of competition had weakened the Republican Party's internal cohesion, he had no influence over the choice of his successor. Crawford was the choice of some leaders of state Republican organizations with a states' rights orientation, including Van Buren in New York, Thomas Ritchie in Virginia, and Isaac Hill in New Hampshire; Crawford came closest to carrying on the true Jeffersonian faith. Calhoun, deciding to seek the more easily obtained office of Vice President, dropped out. However, the other three candidates used the caucus' endorsement of Crawford to link him to the old guard, already an unpopular image in American politics. Adams, Clay, and Jackson persuaded their respective state legislatures to pass resolutions placing their names in nomination.
Adams put together a solid bloc of support in New England (over the opposition of Hill's machine in New Hampshire), including many former Federalists who, like himself, had switched parties. Clay and Jackson competed for support from the new states of the West, which in a close election would hold the balance of power. Clay's flamboyant personality and generous distribution of political favors had won him a devoted following in his own state of Kentucky, also attracting support from Ohio and Missouri through his power in the House. Elsewhere in the West, and also in much of the South, Jackson's military reputation made him the more popular figure. Jackson's supporters in 1824 included many who would not later be Jacksonians; he initially appeared to be a nationalist, well disposed toward a protective tariff and internal improvements, and closer to Adams and Clay than to old-line Jeffersonians like Van Buren and Crawford. His 1824 candidacy was promoted in parts of the Northeast and South by former Federalists who seem to have assumed that because he was a military hero he must be a conservative. In New York, several well-known Federalists put together a "People's Ticket" of electors for Jackson and carried the state. When the Electoral College met, Jackson had the most votes but was short of a majority, while Adams was second, Crawford third, and Clay in fourth. Calhoun was elected Vice President by a large majority, and Adams - with Clay's help - won the presidency, in turn promising to name Clay Secretary of State.
Second Party System: Democrats vs. National Republicans/Whigs[]
The Jacksonian Coalition[]
Ahead of the 1828 presidential election, Jackson solidified his hold on the political situation in Tennessee and won the backing of the states' rights Jeffersonian organizations that four years before had supported Crawford, the most of important of which was the Albany Regency. Some of the former Federalists who had supported Jackson in 1824 found themselves content with the policies of the Adams administration and backed the incumbent President for reelection in 1828. Jackson continued to draw support form a number of young politicians who had begun as federalists, including future Chief Justice Roger Taney and future President James Buchanan. After becoming President, Jackson appointed more former Federalists to executive branch offices than had all former Republican presidents combined. Another important addition to the Jacksonian coalition was a large share of the rapidly growing body of evangelical Protestants, mainly Methodists, Baptists, Campbellite Presbyterians, and Disciples of Christ (a new denomination founded in Ohio in 1827). During the 1820s, the Second Great Awakening, which recreated the spiritual excitement of the 1730s, was sweeping through the mountain glens of western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, western Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Though evangelical preachers were critical of Jackson's participation in a duel and his harsh treatment of the Indians, they applauded his egalitarian spirit and were pleased to find that he shared their religious orientation. Evangelicals, who had already been drawn to the Republican Party by Jefferson, became for the most part confirmed Jacksonians; evangelical preacher Peter Cartwright claimed, "Every convert to Methodism in those times became a Republican if he was not one before."
By the beginning of 1828, it was clear that a formidable coaliiton was assembling to deny Adams reelection. Adams did little to put together a political organization of his own. Clay and Webster complained that he neglected to reawrd his political supporters. During the administration of John Quincy Adams, adherents of Adams and Clay began referring to themselves as National Republicans, partly to express their inclination toward a nationalist ideology, but probably even more to suggest that the Jacksonian opposition was made up of state or local deviationists not entitled to be identified with the national party. Some of the Jacksonians responded by identifying themselves as "Democratic-Republicans." Ever since the founding of the Democratic societies in the 1790s to express solidarity with the ideology of the French Revolution, members of the more egalitarian wing of the Republican Party had sometimes called themselves Democrats as well as Republicans. During the 1820s members of the coalition of Northern party bosses, Southern and Western agrarians, and Southern slave-ownerse who for varying reasons opposed a strong national government began referring to themselves collectively as "the Democracy." In the 1828 campaign, Jackson's party took the title Democratic-Republican. After Jackson's election, members of the party increasingly spoke of themselves, and were identified in the press, simply as Democrats.
Despite the egalitarian ideology of the Jeffersonians and Hamilton's attempt to build a mass base for Federalism among religious conservatives, the First Party System's parties were primarily associations of political elites, and almost restricted clubs. With the renewal of party competition in the second half of the 1820s, and the extension of the suffrage instituted by the Jeffersonians, a new kind of politician appeared who produced a new kind of party that was more useful to democracy. Competing politicians from what was to become the republican tradition had mastered the arts of mass politics, even outdoing their more egalitarian opposition in building efficient party organizations and publicizing themes that appealed to the aspirations, prejudices, apprehensions, and patriotic impulses of a broad slice of the voting public.
Although the Republican Party was in the process of changing its name to Democratic, most political observers in 1828 and the period that followed had no difficulty recognizing Jackson's Democrats as direct descendants of Jefferson's Republicans. Jefferson himself, before he died in 1826, endorsed Jackson for President. Jackson maintained that his political philosophy was based on the principles set forth in Jefferson's first inaugural: "A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned." Martin Van Buren also traced the Jacksonian Democrats to the Anti-Federalists and the earlier populist parties at the state level, maintaining an unbroken succession of political views, and sons generally following in the footsteps of their fathers.
Jackson's electoral success was accompanied and aided by major changes in the structure and behavior of parties. Though both the Federalists and Jefferson had used government patronage to reward their political supporters, the Jacksonians were almost systematic in distributing federal jobs to loyal party workers, creating a "spoils sytem". The Jacksonians went beyond their predecessors in developing a party press to communicate their arguments and point of view to a mass audience. Behind the national organization of the Democracy were several strong state machines, notably those of New York, New Hampshire, Virginia, and Tennessee. Each was dominated by a single strong party leader, maintained close ties with a widely read newspaper, and espoused agrarian populism. Foremost of the democratic organizations was Van Buren's Regency in New York. The leaders of the Regency accepted the party was a political instrument through which individuals could pool their resources for control of the government, enabling people from humble origins to compete successfully against politicians bearing "great names." Although the Regency concentrated on winning elections, an underlying thread of ideology held it together. Though he often worked closely with the New York business community, Van Buren remained an instinctive Jeffersonian agrarian who argued that the mainstay of the Democratic Party must be the farmers and planters, whose interests led them to resist "the seductive influence of the money power." He also regarded the mechanics and working classes as natural recruits for the Democratic coalition, while the continued dominance of the Democrats depended on politically mobilized farmers. IN New Hampshire, Isaac Hill built a party machine even more tightly disciplined than the Regency. From 1828 until the realignment of the 1860s, New Hampshire became the most Democratic state in the nation, as Hill issued fiery populist editorials and directives to the state legislature from his office in Concord and mobilized the party around themes of class war and antagonism toward business.
The Richmond Junto, led by Thomas Ritchie of the Richmond Enquirer, espoused an egalitarian ideology but retained the Jeffersonian assumption that a society based on small freeholders would preserve a place for a cultivated gentry. Ritchie conducted the Junto as a kind of gentleman's club established to carry on the political tradition of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe.
Emerging opposition[]
When Calhoun broke with the Jackson administration in 1830 on the issue of his version of states' rights versus the supremacy of the federal government, he tried to rally the old libertarian wing of the Republican PArty into a new political alignment based on the South. Outside South Carolina, he had surprisingly little success. Jackson's personality, and even more the ideological consensus represented by the Democratic Party, continued to command majority support in most of the South. At the other end of the political spectrum, various small groups of radical egalitarians pressed to go much further than the Democrats in attacking established wealth and emergent capitalism. In New York in 1829, the Working Men's Party, originally a dissident faction in Tammany Hall, campaigned for a moratorium on private debt. Eight years later, the New York Equal Rights Party - popularly known as "Locofocos", proposed the abolition of state charters for corporations and other "artificial" bodies, and the elimination of state licensing requirements for practice of any profession, business, or trade not hurtful to the community. Van Buren's Democrats, the Locofocos charged, had become a "monopoly aristocratic party."
Neither Calhounites on the right nor Locofocos on the left had much success at mobilizing opposition to Jacksonian hegemony. A more significant effort, sowing seeds for the future, was raised by the Anti-Masonic Party, organized in Upstate New York in 1827 and soon active in Pennsylvania and parts of New England. In the late 1820s public wrath was directed at the Freemasons in a strange burst of popular frenzy after a defector from the Masons disappeared and was believed murdered. Some opponents of the Regency and its counterparts in other states decided to use this uproar to break the Democrats' hold on the socially conservative evangelicals, for whom Masonry must have carried connotations of deism and occult science. Particularly with rural sectarian audiences who were firm believers in a literal interpretation of the Bible, the Anti-Masons had no difficulty in demonstrating that freemasonry was not sanctioned by holy writ. Though the Anti-Masons made some headway in Upstate New York, their greatest successes were in Vermont and Pennsylvania. In Vermont the party campaigned for the full agenda of evangelical issues, including temperance, Sunday-closing laws, and free public education. In 1831 the Anti-Masons won the governorship and in the following year carried the state for their party's national ticket. In Pennsylvania the Anti-Masons drew most of their support from Germans in a crescent of southeastern rural counties and Scots-Irish in the southwest around Pittsburgh. Both groups felt they were being discriminated against in the distribution of state benefits. In 1829 the Anti-Masonic candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania, Joseph Ritner, won 45% of the vote; 6 years later, with the Democrats split, Ritner was elected Governor.
In New York, the principal strategist for the Anti-Masons was young Thurlow Weed, editor of the Albany Journal, whom the Regency had already recognized as a dangerous adversary. Business interests had always played a part in American politics, but Weed was the first to harness business resources to political organization in any systematic way. He treated the rising capitalists of New York and Albany as political allies whose aspirations he understood and whose vision of the nation's economic future he shared. In 1835, Weed organized a rival group of toughs to ensure the personal safety of non-Democratic voters in Albany, where his own ward had been controlled by Captain James Maher's Democratic gang for several years. In 1836, several Democratic heroes, paid off in worthless and counterfeit banknotes, shook the dust of Democracy off their feet and moved into Weed's camp, enabling Weed's organization to control the ward. In 1824, Weed struck up a friendship with the youth William H. Seward, forming a fruitful political partnership.
In 1831, the Anti-Masons nominated William Wirt as their presidential candidate. Wirt, Attorney General under Adams, had himself once been a Mason and announced that he felt no animus toward Masonry. He took Thaddeus Stevens under his wing, and Stevens burned with reformist fire against the ponderous Democratic-Republican combination that had dominated his state's politics since the time of Gallatin. Among Pennsylvania's Anti-Masons, Stevens led a wing of ideological purists against a more moderate faction. By the end of the 1832 campaign, Weed recognized that Anti-Masonry did not provide the basis for a viable national party. The 1831 convention had attrated delegates from 13 states but none from the South. Within New York, the large share of Masons who were eager to vote against the Regency were hardly attracted by a party that called itself Anti-Masonic. Some other issue was needed to pull together an effective coalition, and Jackson soon provided that issue with his impassioned war to wreck the Second Bank of the United States.
Bank War[]
While Jackson did not make destroying the Second Bank of the United States a campaign issue in 1824 or 1828, the "Bank War" began in 1832 when Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, believing they could trap Jackson between his western supporters and eastern pro-Bank Democrats, moved to renew the charter before the coming presidential election. Nicholas Biddle, president of the bank, agreed to give "careful and friendly consideration" to newspapers that supported rechartering. Congress passed legislation renewing the Bank's charter at the beginning of July 1832, only for Jackson to issue a scathing veto. Jackson determined to kill the Bank before the Bank could kill him, and he was easily re-elected in 1832. Francis Preston Blair, editor of the Globe, suggested that Jackson transfer federal deposits from the Bank to the struggling state banks. THe proposal to withdraw federal funds from the Bank deeply divided the Democratic Party; members of the financial community who had aligned themselves with the Democracy, particularly in the Bank's headquarters of Philadelphia, were appalled at the idea. When the secretary of the treasury, a Philadelphian, resisted Jackson's order to remove the federal deposits, Jackson replaced him with Roger Taney, who carried out the President's directive to withdraw its public money. As federal funds flowed out of the Bank, Biddle began calling loans, resulting in the Panic of 1834, the first of a series of economic disasters in the 19th century that much of the public associated with DEmocratic policies.
The Whigs[]
Jackson's war on the Bank helped bring together a new, fairly cohesive national party composed of former National Republicans, Anti-Masons, conservative Democrats, and some state parties that had not previously developed a national connection. Thurlow Weed suggested that the new party be called Republican, as a means of emphasizing its commitment to political and economic liberty. Clay and others rejected this proposal, probably fearing that it would touch off antagonisms left over from the struggles of the 1790s. The name finally chosen was Whig, first used by a New York journalist and given currency by Clay in a major speech in 1834. The name was intended to recall both the patriot party of the Revolution and the British Whigs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as opponents of Jacksonianism saw their rival as "King Andrew" and themselves in the tradition of forebears who had fought Charles I, James II, and King George III. Borrowing from British liberal theorists, the Whigs set forth the "Whig theory of government," under which the executive is supposed to act primarily as an administrator carrying out the will of the legislative branch. By 1840 the Whigs had elected governors of 20 states, including Massachusetts, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and Louisiana. In 1834 Seward, who had moved with Weed into the Whig Party, ran for Governor of New York and lost narrowly to William L. Marcy. Four years later, the political firm of Weed and Seward finally connected, and Seward became the first Whig governor of the Empire State.
Unlike the Federalists and National Republicans before them and the Republicans most of the time after, the Whigs were fully competitive in most of the South. Kentucky and Tennessee were Whig bastions in national elections, supporting Whig candidates for President in every election from 1836 through 1852 (even in 1844 against James K. Polk, a Tennessean Democrat). In Georgia, the states-rights party formed by Governor George Troup, originally anti-tariff and sympathetic to nullification, gravitated into the Whig camp and carried the state for the Whig ticket in 1840 and 1848. In Louisiana, rivalry between an "American" party and a "Creole" party devolved into competition between Whigs and Democrats. Most members of the American party became Whigs, and most Creoles became Democrats, though both successor parties included some ethnic mix. With the help of large majorities out of Plaquemines Parish, a Creole stronghold already notorious for voter fraud, the Democrats usually held the upper hand, but the Whigs managed to carry the state in 1840 and 1848. Even in Virginia the Whigs, though they never won the state in a presidential election, became ascendant in the old Federalist strongholds of the Northern Neck and the Shenandoah Valley, while the Democrats continued to dominate the more populist Southside.
In most parts of the country, the Whigs attracted support from voters who favored the program of federally nourished economic development that had been initiated by Hamilton and was championed in the 1830s by Clay and Webster. The Whigs' economic program was built around Clay's proposals for high tariffs, federal expenditures on internal improvements, and establishment of a third Bank of the United States. The Whigs, however, went beyond their Federalist and National Republican predecessors in adding cultural and moral appeals to economic arguments. Significantly, it was in the 1830s that the word "conservative" came into use as a political term. It had been introduced a little earlier in England by the Tories; the National Republican platform of 1832, on which Clay ran for President against Jackson, promised to maintain the Senate as "pre-eminently a conservative branch of the federal government." The Whigs used the term to denote association with "law and order," social caution, and moral restraint, while a Whig journal saw their opponents as "a radical, innovating, hopeful, boastful, improvident, and go-ahead party - a Democratic, a Loco-Foco party!" Many Whigs depicted the contest between their party and the Democrats as a struggle between social virtue and vice. The Whigs' moral and cultural conservatism overrode economic class, with Horace Greeley opining that workingmen looking to improve their circumstances by honest industry and go on Sunday to church rather than the grog-shop would be impervious to "Loco-Focoism". Most Whigs saw no inconsistency between social conservatism and promotion of economic progress, the link between conservatism and progress coming from the Puritan tradition of removing peacefully the roots of social and political evils to avoid bloodshed. The Whigs' support for economic progress did not necessarily attract them to the dreams of "empire" that excited the imagination of many Americans, particularly in the South and West. Most Whigs opposed the Mexican-American war, while most of the ardent expansionists were Democrats.
Participation by the Whigs in campaigns for moral causes like temperance, free public schools, and Sunday-closing laws helped win them the support of many of the evangelicals who had briefly rallied under the Anti-Masonic banner. Weed and Seward brought most of New York's Anti-Masons into the Whig camp. Thaddeus Stevens did the same with the reformist faction from Pennsylvania's Anti-Masons. Vermont, where the Anti-Masons had enjoyed their greatest success, became the most heavily Whig state in the nation. Not all Anti-Masons, however, became Whigs. Benjamin F. Hallett, who led the Massachusetts delegation to the 1831 Anti-Masonic convention, returned to the Democracy on economic issues and became the first chairman of the newly formed Democratic National Committee in 1848. Moral conservatism also helped the Whigs break the hold the Jacksonians had gained on the old Northwest - Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. Many western evangelicals, particularly among the Methodists, continued to support the Democrats, but some of the denominations that had been predominantly Jeffersonian began to shift toward the Whigs. In Michigan, most Presbyterians and Baptists favored the Whigs, and a similar trend was reported among the more socially reformist branch of Baptists in Illinois.
There was more than a tinge of anti-Catholicism and nativism to the Whig moral program, as there was to the broader Calvinist and evangelical Protestant involvement in the social issues of the time. In the 1844 election, the Whigs formed working alliances at the local level in New York with the nativist American Republican Party. Some Whig politicians, including Seward and young Abraham Lincoln, saw the danger of turning their party into an agent of Protestant exclusivism. Though Catholics in most parts of the country were even more overwhelmingly Jacksonian Democrat than they had been Jeffersonian Republican, Seward in the early 1840s achieved a cooperative relationship with Bishop John Hughes, Catholic prelate of New York. Hughes, claiming that New York's public schools were Protestant in everything but name, sought state aid for Catholic schools. Seward, stunning many members of the Whigs' Protestant constituency, endorsed Hughes' proposal on the ground that immigrant children should be instructed by teachers speaking the same language with themselves and professing the same faith. When Democrats in the state legislature hedged on the issue, Hughes entered a Catholic slate in several city districts in the 1841 legislative elections, draining off enough normally Democratic votes to enable the Whigs to pick up several seats. Although the legislature still refused to authorize state aid for Catholic schools, it passed a bill, signed by Seward, prohibiting instruction in any religious sectarian doctrine in the public schools, thereby depriving Protestantism of its semi-established status.
During the 1830s, political organizations made increasing use of steamboats, canals, and ultimately railroads to hold state and national party conventions, stage "monster" rallies, and generally manage politics on a grand scale. In 1840, the Whigs came together on a ticket composed of General William Henry Harrison of Ohio for President and the Calhoun Democrat John Tyler of Virginia for Vice President. The Whigs shrewdly accepted the Democrats' caricature of "Old Granny" Harrison as a man who would be perfectly content to "Spend the rest of his days in a log cabin with a barrel of cider." In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, two imaginative party workers set up a reproduction of a log cabin with a cider barrel by the door; the idea caught on and similar displays soon appeared in hundreds of cities and towns. Whig publicists launched an alliterative slogan, "Tippecanoe and Tyler too!", Weed and others raised a huge campaign war chest to finance an army of canvassers soliciting votes for "Old Tip". Harrison carried 19 of the 26 states for an electoral vote majority of 234 to Martin Van Buren's 60; the Whigs for the first and only time won majorities in both houses of Congress. After only one month in office, Harrison died of a cold, and Tyler succeeded him in the White House. After Tyler vetoed a bill to establish a Third Bank of the United States that Clay had pushed through Congress, the Whigs read him out of the party. All members of the cabinet except Webster resigned, causing Clay and Webster to split. In 1844, the party was in a shambles, and the way was open for the return of the Democrats under Polk.
In 1848, the Whigs tried again with a celebrated military commander, always a device favored by Weed. This time they chose Zachary Taylor, hero of the recently concluded Mexican War. The party was beginning to buckle under the slavery issue, but, assisted by even deeper division among the Democrats, it held together long enough to win the election. Taylor died little more than a year after taking office, and his running mate, Millard Fillmore, became President. Fillmore belonged to a faction of New York Whigs favoring conciliation of the slaveholders that was hostile to the wing led by Seward and Weed, resulting in the party's national structure crumbling.
The Whigs and Democrats were both parties of "interest", in that they represented competing economic and social interest groups, but they were both committed to individualism and personal freedom, with one party more egalitarian and the other more concerned with economic progress and moral order. In response to the rising party competition, turnout in presidential elections rose from 27% in 1824 to 57% in 1828 and 80% in 1840. The downside of the increased turnout was a sharp rise in vote fraud, with party machines recruiting armies of voters (particularly among recent immigrants) to act as "repeaters" in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. In New York, Tammany Hall regularly hauled "cart-loads of voters, many of whom had been in the country less than three years," from poll to poll so that they could cast multiple votes for the Democratic ticket. Whig organizations responded in kind. The Whig machine in Baltimore in 1849 employed among its repeaters Edgar Allan Poe, who was carted drunk from poll to poll before finally collapsing in a tavern and dying of alcoholism and exposure five days later. After 1840, both major parties usually adopted a platform setting forth the principles and issues on which they sought election.
Disruption of parties[]
The social and moral disputes of the 1850s, however, led swiftly to the deterioration of both parties as the Whigs sank into extinction and the Democrats temporarily fractured. The slavery issue split the major parties in the 1840s, as the Liberty Party came to elect a few state legislators in Massachusetts in Maine in 1844 and win increasing support in New England, spoiling the 1844 election for Clay by depriving the Whigs of abolitionist voters. In 1848, the shoe was on the other foot, as the Democratic Party had been deeply divided by the Wilmot Proviso, which would prohibit the extension of slavery in all territories acquired from Mexico. The proviso stalled in the Senate, where Southern Democrats looked to the leadership of Calhoun, who demanded that Congress categorically renounce any authority to prohibit slavery in the territories. Many northern Democrats followed Polk in favoring conciliation of the southern slaveholders, but a significant segment of the northern Democracy felt that the party must dissociate itself from the extension of slavery. The division among the Democrats was particularly bitter in New York, where the pro-spoils system "Hunkers", led by Marcy, resisted any action that would risk losing the South from the Democracy. The other factions, the radical "Barnburners", backed the Wilmot Proviso. Both factions sent rival delegations to the 1848 Democratic national convention, and both sides refused to share New York's seating arrangements. Neither the Calhounites nor the Barnburners were satisfied with Democratic presidential nominee Lewis Cass' pro-"popular sovereignty" approach towards slavery, and several Southern delegates walked out of the convention, while many Barnburners decided the time had come for independent action.
Martin Van Buren agreed to accept the nomination of a new Free Soil Party, a broadened and somewhat less radical descendant of the Liberty Party. Van Buren was able to make the principal argument that the long-term welfare of the Democracy, and the nation, required that the party shed its Calhounite influence, even at the cost of losing an election or two. That fall, Van Buren received support from some northern Whigs, including Charles Sumner. Van Buren won 45% of his 292,000 total national votes in New York, making his greatest inroad among the Democrats, and carrying all but one of the nine New York counties at the heart of his old Regency machine. Van Buren thus spoiled the election for Cass, giving Taylor a victorious plurality in the state and tipping the scales in favor of the Whigs. In 1852, the slavery issue had fatally split the Whigs as a national party, as their alignment with the moral program of northern Protestantism brought them into collision with the institution of slavery, thereby antagonizing and alienating their own southern wing. When the national Whigs hedged on the issue, they cut themselves off from the moral support that had helped make them competitive in New York, Pennsylvania, and the old Northwest. At the same time, the presence in the Whig national leadership of opponents of slavery like Seward and Stevens made the party anathema in the South. Burgeoning Whig parties in states like Georgia, Florida, and Alabama collapsed. By 1852, the solid Democratic South, except for Kentucky and Tennessee, was once more a political reality.
Nativist explosion[]
In the mid-1830s, a second deeply divisive issue swept through the nation that for a time seemed to eclipse even the salience of slavery and further weakened the parties. Nativism and anti-Catholicism had long been staples of American politics; with the great influx of Catholics, mainly from Ireland and Germany, in the 1830s and 1840s, anti-Catholic sentiment re-ignited, particularly among working-class Protestants in the big cities. Prejudice against Catholics among middle-class and working-class Protestants was legitimized by the Protestant intelligentsia. Anti-Catholicism became associated with the reform program of Protestant social activists campaigning for the abolition of slavery, free public schools, and the prohibition of liquor. Riots against Catholics erupted in Boston and Philadelphia, and a pitched battle between Protestants and Catholics in New York was narrowly averted. In the 1840s a secret society was formed to promote legislation against immigration. The members were called Know Nothings, because they were pledged to tell outsiders they knew nothing about the society's existence.
Since more than 90% of Catholics in most cities voted Democratic, many Whig politicians made what capital they could out of nativism. Most Whig leaders resisted having their party turned into a vehicle for Know-Nothingism, with Seward, Lincoln, and Greeley dissociating themselves from nativism. Disappointed with the Whigs, the Know-Nothings in 1854 formed their own political party, which they called the American Party. In its very first election, the American Party scored practically a clean sweep in Massachusetts, winning the governorship, every seat in the state senate, and all but two of the 378 seats in the state house of representatives. Know Nothing state tickets also triumphed in Delaware and, through fusion with the Whigs, in Pennsylvania. In 1855 the American Party again won in Massachusetts and added victories in Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maryland, and Kentucky. American Party tickets also ran strong races in Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana and won some minor state offices in Texas.
Nativism seemed on the verge of carrying the country. Some American Party leaders and sympathizers acknowledged that the party's victory in a national election could produce violence. John Bell, normally a sensitive and conservative politician, declared that it would be better that "a little blood shall sprinkle the pavements and sidewalks of our cities now, than that their streets should be drenched in blood hereafter" as the result of deadly conflict between nativist and foreign armed bands. In some states, particularly in the South, the American Party moved into the vacuum created by the demise of the Whigs. But the Know Nothings were more successful than the Whigs had ever been at reaching across class lines to attract working-class voters. In Baltimore, the Know Nothings received great accessions from the Democrats, transforming the Eighteenth Ward from a Democratic stronghold into the banner ward on the Know Nothings. This ward, adjacent to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad shops, was inhabited mainly by mechanics and workingmen. In New Orleans, the American Party was controlled by ward clubs, located in neighborhoods inhabited by workingmen who had moved to the city in the last ten or fifteen years, not hesitating to use violence to achieve political success. Some of the recruits to Know Nothingism may have half-consciously sought an issue that would transcend the deepening division between North and South over slavery, as the 1854 meeting of the American National Committee in Cincinnati adopted a pledge of loyalty to the Union and promised to discourage and denounce any attempt coming from any quarter to destroy or subvert the Union or weaken its bonds. However, nativism failed to inspire a unifying nationalism, as Know-Nothingism was overwhelmed by the "irrepressible conflict" over slavery that had to be settled before the Republic could proceed. Northern and Southern wings of the American Party were soon quarreling over slavery, just as the Whigs and Democrats had done. In 1856, Know Nothing candidate Fillmore won just 20% of the national popular vote and carried only Maryland; the American Party soon after ceased to exist.
Third Party System: Democrats vs. Republicans[]
Origins[]
During the 1850s, the Democrat-Whig party system failed either to resolve or to continue delaying the increasingly bitter national controversy over slavery. One of the major reasons was that neither party had developed a truly cohesive national party in the 1850s, as both major parties were associations of state party organizations, some of which were little more than personal followings of particular politicians. The Democrats represented the liberal tradition and the Whigs the future republican tradition, but neither major party had sufficient ideological coherence to override the competing passions and interests that divided them internally.
The newly-formed Republicans were from the start a coalition party. Unlike the Liberty and Free Soil parties of the 1840s, the Republicans were far from being a single-issue party. Besides standing for resistance to slavery, they were committed to an extensive program that include, among other things, federal support for rapid industrial development, distribution of western public lands to small farmers, free public education, moral reform, and, above all, preserving a single and indivisible Union. As a result of their stand against slavery, the Republicans had almost no support in the South or among slave-owners in the border states. Elsewhere, they were more of a national party, with a shared ideology and a centrally coordinated organization, than either the Democrats or the Whigs had been.
The alignment created by the 1860 election did not break completely with the patterns of the past. New England and the South were aligned almost solidly on opposing sides, with the crucial shifts coming in New York, Pennsylvania, and the states of the old Northwest, all of which had previously been normally Democratic and now swung decisively to the Republicans, producing a new majority coalition. The 1860 election was complicated by the division of the Democracy into two parties, northern and southern, which had split during the summer of 1860 on the issue of slavery. It was made additionally complex by the appearance of a fourth contender, the Constitutional Union Party, which sought to rally voters who regarded preserving the Union as more important than either checking or extending slavery, with John Bell of Tennessee as its presidential candidate. Lincoln swept all of the North except New Jersey, winning 180 electoral votes, 28 more than the required majority. John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, the candidate of the Southern Democrats, carried most of the South and the border states of Maryland and Delaware. Bell carried Virginia (where he defeated Breckinridge by only 156 votes), Kentucky, and Tennessee, and Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, the candidate of the regular Democratic Party, won only Missouri and three of New Jersey's seven electoral votes. Voter turnout, which had declined in the early 1850s, rose to 82%, the second-highest level in American history.
Lincoln won only about 40% of the popular vote, but this was because he received almost no votes at all in the South. Of the 18 states of the North and West, Lincoln won solid majorities in all except California and Oregon, where he gained narrow pluralities in three-way contests with Douglas and Breckinridge, and New Jersey, which he lost by 4,000 votes to Douglas. While Lincoln was being elected President, the Republicans were winning the governorships of every northern state and were achieving majorities in both houses of Congress. Like the Jeffersonians and Jacksonians before them, the Republicans seemed to embody a social force whose time had come.
Lincoln won majorities in most counties in the North were the Whigs had been strong and made some important additions. In New York, he swept both the old Clintonian strongholds in the western part of the state and the former bastions of the Regency in the central region, leaving the Democracy in control of only New York City, Brooklyn, western Long Island, and some counties in the Hudson Valley. In Pennsylvania, he carried the former Whig counties in the southeast and southwest and added the great swath of northern-tier counties, many of which had been represented in Congress by Democrat-turned-Republican David Wilmot, and the formerly Democratic counties of the northeastern anthracite and coal-mining region. In Ohio, Lincoln prevailed in the south-central farming counties that had voted reliably for the Whigs and added the six northeastern counties around Cleveland that had voted Free Soil in 1848, plus the rich agricultural counties of the northwest and Hamilton County (containing Cincinnati) in the southwest. In his home state of Illinois, Lincoln broke the long Democratic hegemony by carrying the eight northeastern counties around Chicago that had voted Free Soil in 1848 as well as the prosperous northern and central farming counties that had been normally Whig. Southern Illinois, largely settled from the slave state of Kentucky, voted overwhelmingly for Douglas.
Rise of the Republicans[]
The Republican Party was formed in response to the indignation in the North over the passage of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, which opened the western territories to slavery. Horace Greeley wrote in the New York Tribune that the passage of the act by "the traitors in the Senate...is one further step of Southern chivalry toward effecting the brutal degradation of mechanical and laboring men, white and black, in the United States." Neither the Democrats nor the Whigs, many northern voters concluded, could be trusted to resist the imperial ambition of the southern planter class. The single-issue Free Soil Party had turned out to be too narrowly based to win the decisive victory in the North that was needed to produce a majority in the electoral college. What the anti-slavery cause required was a new political combination that would draw on the full range of economic and moral issues that had helped animate the Whigs and that at the same time would attract many of the Democrats who in 1848 had deserted their party to vote for the Free Soil ticket.
During the winter of 1854. hundreds of small gatherings in communities throughout the North were called to protest passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Several cities of the old Northwest claimed to be the founding site of the Republican Party; on 20 March 1854, a meeting of Republican organizers at Ripon, Wisconsin led to Alvin E. Bovay concluding, "We went into the little meeting held in a schoolhouse Whigs, Free Soilers, and Democrats. We came out of it Republicans." The name Republican was chosen to recall Jefferson's party and because it brought to mind a "common weal," as it could apply both to a party and to an individual. It was also associated by Germans, vital to the new coalition in Wisconsin as in other Midwestern states, with Republicaner, the name taken by participants in the unsuccessful Revolutions of 1848 in Germany. Greeley declared that the name "Republican" would "fitly designate those who have united to restore the Union to its true message of champion and promulgator of liberty rather than the propagandist of slavery."
In many parts of the North, the Whigs did not make way for the new party without a fight. In Illinois, Lincoln resisted the Whigs' amalgamation with the Republicans, whom he viewed as too radical. In New York, William H. Seward and Thurlow Weed argued that the Whigs were still the best hope for those who aimed to contain slavery without splitting the Union. By the summer of 1855, however, the Whigs had been finished off in many of their former northern strongholds by the Know Nothings. The only real alternative to the Democrats for politicians who rejected unalloyed nativism was the emerging Republican Party, which in the fall of 1854 won victories in state elections in Maine, Vermont, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Indiana. Weed, Lincoln, and finally Seward joined the new alignment.
Free Soil Democrats also gravitated toward the new party. In Indiana, Oliver P. Morton led a small band of dissenters out of the state Democratic convention "amidst hisses and taunts" after they had endorsed Kansas-Nebraska. In Ohio, Salmon P. Chase, denied renomination for a second term in the Senate by the Democrats because of his anti-slavery views, ran successfully for governor on the Republican ticket. In the spring of 1855, adherents of the new party formed the national Republican Association, whose first president was Jackson's old journalistic mouthpiece, Francis Preston Blair. Grown rich through his publishing business, Blair aspired to play for a second time the role of midwife to a party in the Jeffersonian tradition. He and his two sons, Francis Preston Blair Jr. and Montgomery Blair, anticipated that enough Democrats would join the new party to overwhelm its Whig contingent, much as the Jacksonians had outweighed the followers of John Quincy Adams in the old Republican party in the 1820s. The opposition of many of the Free Soil Democrats to slavery had little in common with that of former Conscience Whigs like Charles Sumner. In 1857, Frank Blair led the Free Soilers to victory in the St. Louis municipal elections with the slogan, "White Men for Our City, and Our City for White Men."
The great majority, however, of recruits to the party - about four out of five, according to one estimate - were former Whigs. They were attracted not only by their opposition to slavery but also by the Republicans' endorsement of the Whigs' economic program, which called for internal improvements and a high tariff. To this was added enthusiasm for the rapid development of the West through homesteading by small farmers, a cause championed by Greeley and others. One of the reasons the Kansas-Nebraska Act had rankled so deeply was that, by opening up the West to "the slave system, characterized...by the plantation, the production of staple crops, and non-industrialization," it challenged the "free labor" approach to national development.
Seward, who had been elected to the Senate from New York in 1849, seemed the natural leader of the new party. He was on the record as having predicted an "irrepressible uprising" of public opinion against slavery, while holding out hope that slavery would "give way to the salutary instructions of economy, and to the ripening influences of humanity." Seward was a strong backer of the Whig economic program, but his opposition to nativism had won him support among Catholic and foreign-born Democrats. However, he hung back in favor of serving another four years in the Senate, and "the Pathfinder" John C. Fremont, the son-in-law of Missouri Jacksonian Thomas Hart Benton, was selected as the Republican presidential nominee in 1856. The party platform invoked the names of Washington and Jefferson, while calling for the exclusion of slavery from the territories, giving rise to the memorable campaign slogan "Free labor, free speech, free men, free Kansas, and Fremont!" Fremont's showing in the fall was impressive: victory in all of New England, New York, and ever state in the old Northwest except Illinois and Indiana, for 114 electoral votes to 174 for the Democratic candidate, James Buchanan of Pennsylvania. Studying the election results, Weed and other Republican strategists spotted two important gaps in the party's performance: in the crucial state of Pennsylvania, the coalition of former Whigs led by Thaddeus Stevens and the Free Soil Democrats led by David Wilmot had not broken the hold of Democratic voting habits that dated from the time of Gallatin; and beer-drinking German-Americans in the Midwest, put off by the Republicans' identification with nativism and prohibition, had for the most part remained loyal to the Democracy. The first of these problems was dealt with, first, by increasing emphasis on the Republicans' support for a protective tariff, popular in both the industrial cities and the coalfields of Pennsylvania, and, second, by putting much of the party's electoral business in the hands of former Jacksonian Senator Simon Cameron. The German problem was met by playing down some of the moralistic aspects of the old Whig program. By 1858, Democratic orators in the Midwest were reduced to warning German audiences that Republican victory would mean an "end to walks, kisses, and cooked meals on Sunday." In 1860, most German-Americans followed their leader, Carl Schurz, into the Republican ranks.
As the 1860 election approached, Republican prospects seemed distinctly favorable. The controversy over slavery had deepened, and the incumbent Democratic administration was blamed for the financial panic of 1857. The shrewder Republican leaders recognized, however, that the party still needed a broad platform if it was to avoid the fate of the Free Soilers in 1848. Greely wrote to a friend that he knew that anti-slavery would not be the winning issue, but "a tariff, river-and-harbor, Pacific Railroad, free-homestead man may have as good a candidate as the majority will elected." In the industrial towns and mining regions of the East, the Republicans emphasized the tariff issue more than opposition to slavery. Andrew Gregg Curtin, Republican candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania, promised to respond to the "vast heavings of the heart of Pennsylvania whose sons are pining for protectionism."
The 1860 Republican primaries saw Seward decide that his time had come for the presidency, Chase of Ohio claim to have a wider appeal among Democrats, Cameron put himself forward as Pennsylvania's favorite son, Greeley and the Blairs busied themselves on behalf of Speaker of the House Edward Bates of Missouri, and Abraham Lincoln of Illinois transformed into a serious candidate after Republican National Committee secretary Norman Judd's legions of delegates gave an uproarious yell in favor of Lincoln's nomination at the convention in Chicago. Lincoln defeated Seward after promising to make Cameron a cabinet member and offering the vice-presidency to ex-Democrat Hannibal Hamlin of Maine. Marching clubs known as "Wide Awakes" paraded through northern cities and towns, whipping up enthusiasm for the Republican ticket. Just before midnight on 6 November 1860, Cameron wired Lincoln that he had won Pennsylvania and New York, landing him in the presidency.
Republican ideology[]
Lincoln once said that the two great parties had stolen each other's clothes; the more egalitarian of the parties, the Democrats, had become the defenders of slavery, while the Republicans, descended from the conservative Federalists and Whigs, championed human rights and social justice. Ironically, it was the Republicans who strongly associated themselves with the individualistic and socially progressive philosophy of Thomas Jefferson, and Lincoln said that he "never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied" in Jefferson's Declaration of Independence.
At the same time, the metaphorical "bodies" remained the same, even as the "clothes" were switched. The Democrats, despite the incubus of slavery they now carried, and despite the adherence of some prominent businessmen and wealthy individuals, particularly in New York, remained in most parts of the country the party of those, other than Blacks, who had not yet made it in American society or who viewed market capitalism with suspicion or dread. The Republicans, while firmly committed to equality before the law and acting as social liberators against slavery, were from the beginning the party more identified with moral puritanism and emerging industrial capitalism.
The Republicans rejected the Enlightenment and British utilitarian argument that self-interest was the only legitimate starting point for moral philosophy; Lincoln argued that one of the worst aspects of slavery was that it forced "good men into insisting there is no right principle of action but self-interest." Lincoln saw individual freedom now as "natural liberty" to do what one pleased, but as "civil liberty" to do "that only which is good, just, and honest." The Republicans believed that ordered liberty could be best achieved through political nationalism and economic capitalism; while the Republicans' opposition to slavery was increasingly invoked by Lincoln throughout the American Civil War, the issue on which the war began was the question of whether the nation was a pragmatic confederation of states, or an indissoluble political and social union. The secession of seven Southern state before Lincoln's inauguration and of four more when Lincoln resorted to arms to put down the rebellion directly challenged the Republicans' concept of nationalism, and Lincoln argued that the nation took precedence over the Constitution. The outcome of the war marked the consolidation of nationality under democratic forms, establishing the territorial, political, and historical oneness of the nation.
The Republicans claimed that free-enterprise industrial capitalism provided the economic setting most conducive to republican democracy, seeing no conflict between equality under the law and economic competition. Lincoln's idea of a free economy mirrored the Jeffersonian view" men and their families worked for themselves, on their farms, in their houses, and in their shops, taking the whole product to themselves, and asking no favors of capital on one hand nor of hired labor or slaves on the other; he also said that he did not believe in any law that would prevent a man from becoming rich during a 1859 speech to striking shoemakers in New Haven. Lincoln also saw property as the fruit of labor, and that property was desirable and a positive good in the world, as "that some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise."
The Republicans were not shy about using the federal government to help achieve their economic and social objectives. While carrying on a war of enormous magnitude accompanied by deep social discord, the Republican majority in Congress pushed through an unprecedented body of domestic legislation: the Homestead Act of 1862 to make public land in the West available free to settlers who would promise to develop it, the Agricultural College Act of 1862 to establish agricultural and mechanical colleges, the creation of the first national paper currency and suppression of the currency formerly printed by state banks, the National Banking Act of 1863 to provide capital essential for industrial investment, chartering of the Union Pacific Railroad in 1862 (leading to the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad in 1869), the establishment of the Immigration Bureau in 1864 to attract labor from abroad, and the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery in 1865.
The war itself helped stimulate industrial enterprise, and the government awarded contracts to Phil Armour to supply beef to the Union Army, to Thomas Scott to rationalize the railroad industry, to John D. Rockefeller to underwrite the consolidation of the petroleum industry, J.P. Morgan to arrange financing for arms manufacturers, to Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, Collis P. Huntington, and Charles Crocker to finance construction of the Central Pacific Railroad, and to Jay Cooke to market federal government securities. The Hamiltonian strategy of wedding business interests to strong national government once more led to dynamic economic growth, at the cost of rampant materialism, increased economic disparity between rich and poor, and widespread governmental correction.
Civil War[]
During the American Civil War, Lincoln invoked the need for party unity to prevent his ouster, appointing Seward as Secretary of State, Chase as Secretary of the Treasury, Cameron as Secretary of War, Bates as Attorney General, Montgomery Blair as Postmaster General, and Gideon Welles as Secretary of the Navy. The Republican Party was factionalized between Chase's Radical Republicans and Blair's racially conservative faction, whose views drew fire from Republicans in Congress. The Radicals wanted to move faster and farther on slavery and race issues than Lincoln at first was prepared to go; he attacked slavery as a moral evil, but was initially no believer in social equality between the races and at first supported the colonization of most Blacks to the Caribbean or Central America. As the war continued, Lincoln's sense of human mutuality and respect for Blacks deepened, and he developed hopes that a postwar South would see former Southern Whigs rally to the Republican Party and form state administrations of moderate conservative character. The Radical Republicans, however, supported immediate emancipation, enrollment of Black troops in the Union Army, and confiscation of property owned by supporters of the Confederacy.
The deep division in the North was between virtually all Republicans and those, mostly Democrats, who favored a negotiated settlement of the war and a conciliatory approach to the southern slave-owners. Lincoln held radicals and moderates together in a coalition that withstood assault from opponents who aimed at a fundamental change in national policy. At the same time, Jefferson Davis suffered grievously from lack of a comparable party apparatus in the South. The founders of the Confederacy abjured political parties in the spirit of Washington, resulting in deadlock and ultimate chaos. Lacking a common party interest, some Southern governors held back troops and pursued their separate courses, defying Davis' national policies.
In 1862, war weariness in the North produced a reaction against the Republicans, enabling the Democrats to recapture the governorship of New York and control of several state legislatures. Democratic majorities in both houses of the Indiana legislature refused to pass an appropriations bill, leaving the state treasury bare and forcing Lincoln to dip into federal funds to keep Oliver P. Morton's administration solvent. By 1863, prospects appeared bleak for several other Republican governors seeking re-election. Governor Curtin of Pennsylvania was challenged by a Democratic opponent who promised to test the constitutionality of the national conscription act, passed earlier that year, and federal government employees from Pennsylvania were assessed 1% of their salaries to help pay Curtin's campaign expenses and given free railroad passes before being sent home to vote. The War Department authorized field commanders to furlough as many Pennsylvania soldiers as could be spared. Workers at the Philadelphia arsenal were marched to the polls "like cattle to the slaughter." Curtin won narrowly by 15,000 votes. In Connecticut, Governor William Alfred Buckingham was opposed by a Democrat who called for an end to the war. Soldiers were sent home to vote, and Connecticut arms manufacturers were advised that future contracts might depend on large turnouts among their workers for the Republican ticket. Buckingham squeaked through with a margin of only 3,000. In Ohio, Democratic Copperhead leader Clement Vallandigham ran for Governor, only to be arrested for seditious utterances. Federal resources, including furloughed troops, federal employees sent home to vote, and funds assessed from government jobholders, were poured into Ohio.
In 1864, Lincoln himself confronted seemingly formidable opposition for reelection from the Democratic candidate for President, George B. McClellan. Lincoln ran as the candidate of a hastily assembled National Union Party, a coalition of Republicans and Democrats who supported continuation of the war. Former Senator Andrew Johnson (D-TN) was put on the ticket for Vice President to give an appearance of bipartisanship. Republican organizations at the national and state levels retained their identities and carried most of the load in Lincoln's campaign. Henry Jarvis Raymond of the New York Times served as chairman of the National Union Party, assessing campaign contributions from all federal government employees; from Pennsylvania alone, 10,000 soldiers were given furloughs so they could go home to vote.
The capture of Atlanta by William Tecumseh Sherman in September 1864 probably did more than all the party machinery combined to assure Lincoln's re-election. The National Union Party swept every state in the Union except New Jersey, Delaware, and Kentucky, the Unionists increased their majorities in both houses of Congress, and Republicans returned to control of every northern statehouse.
Reconstruction[]
Lincoln's assassination on 15 April 1865, one week after General Robert E. Lee's surrender to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, removed a vital link that helped hold the Republican coalition together. President Johnson initially seemed to tilt toward the Radicals, as he believed that "treason must be made odious...and traitors must be punished and impoverished." however, his fears of the effects of black participation in politics caused him to reassess his former low opinion of the Southern planter class, and he soon restored them to power in the Southern state administrations established under his authority. The new Southern state governments began enacting "Black Codes" that severely limited the political and economic rights of former slaves. The Radicals, who had previously trusted that the President's support could help them prevail against "the prim conservatives, the snobs, and the male waiting maids" in Congress who had once resisted emancipation, soon found that the President was in an adversarial position. They passed the 1866 Civil Rights Act against Johnson's veto and enacted the Fourteenth Amendment, establishing equality before the law. Johnson looked elsewhere for political support, and leading Democrats who shared Johnson's views on Reconstruction claimed the President as their own. Governor Horatio Seymour of New York advised Johnson to resist efforts by the Republicans to keep up hatred towards the South, believing that the Radicals' plan for reconstruction was meant to keep the Republicans and New England alike in power.
The Blairite faction within the Republican Party took the hope that the party could be made into an instrument of the former Jacksonian consensus, freed of association with slavery, and with the Radicals driven into a separate party of their own. However, the Radical minority and the moderate majority were appalled by the swift restoration of former supporters of the Confederacy to positions of power in the South. Even Republicans who had qualms about Black suffrage were outraged by the Black Codes. Seward attempted to steer Johnson toward a position that would win the backing of a majority of northern voters, as many Northerners were not keen on giving the vote to Blacks but would not stand for repressive state legislation that would virtually restore slavery in everything but name, as though the civil War had never happened.
Seward, Weed, and Henry Raymond attempted to keep the National Union Party alive, leaving the Republican Party to wither into a rump containing a few Radicals, but it was, by then, too late. The Republican Party had become identified in the minds of millions in the North with the cause for which so many had died and practically all had suffered. The period of party fluidity that had preceded the war was over. Party loyalties had hardened. By turning their backs on the Republican Party, Seward and Weed seemed to many to be turning against the cause itself. At an 1866 National Union Party convention in Philadelphia, former Copperheads played highly visible roles. In New York, the Republican Party was drawn into an electoral alliance with Tammany Hall. In October, Raymond, who had remained Unionist national chairman, gave up the struggle and returned to the Republican ranks, while Weed stuck to the end and raised money for the Unionist-democratic fusion ticket. Radical Republicans were forced to form their own fundraising campaign committee, the future National Republican Congressional Committee, on being cut off from patronage resources. Democrats responded by creating the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. The 1866 midterms saw the Radical Republicans strengthen their position in Congress, and New York saw the regular Republicans, led by Radicals Greeley and Roscoe Conkling, win a narrow victory.
The Radical majority in Congress swept aside the white supremacist state governments in the South and Republican administrations, elected with the support of Blacks enfranchised by congressional edict, took their place. Johnson attempted to resist intrusion by Congress into the affairs of the executive branch, but, on 13 March 1868, the House brought articles of impeachment against the President. The impeachment failed by one vote, and only seven Republican senators voted for acquittal. Seeking to pull the party together after the tumultuous divisions of the Johnson administration, the Republicans chose war hero Ulysses S. Grant as their presidential candidate. The Democrats, after turning aside a bid from the compulsively ambitious Chase, nominated Horatio Seymour, a moderate conservative with strong ties to the New York financial community. Many of the Jacksonians who had defected to the Republicans in the 1850s, foremost among them the Blairs, returned to the Democracy. Awarded the Democratic nomination for Vice President, Frank Blair announced that a Democratic victory would assure the restoration of white-supremacy governments in the South. It proved not to be a popular message. Grant carried every northern state except New York, New Jersey, and Oregon, plus seven southern states in which many former supporters of the Confederacy had been disenfranchised, for a total of 214 electoral votes to 80 for Seymour.
Grant, a military genius, had little political interest of skill. He finally came down on the side of the Radicals, and he made no objection to the continuation of the patronage machine that Lincoln had installed in the executive branch, while turning over the control of its operation to a quadrumvirate of Radical senators. The Radicals had won, but it was a somewhat different kind of Radicalism than what had existed during the war and immediate postwar years. Stevens had died just a few weeks after Johnson's acquittal, and active leadership of the Radicals had passed to the Senate quadrumvirate of Roscoe Conkling of New York, Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, Oliver Morton of Indiana, and Zachariah Chandler of Michigan. The Republican Party had established itself as more than a wartime or single-issue phenomenon and had made itself, for a time at least, the dominant force in national politics and government. The victorious Republican leaders, while much concerned with the spoils of office, were determined to put into effect the doctrines of nationalism, market capitalism, and traditional Protestant morality that had formed their party's ideological core from the start.
The Gilded Age[]
The period from Grant's first election as President in 1868 to the early 1890s is titled the "Gilded Age" - an era of widespread corruption and ruthless business conduct, but also a time of astonishing economic growth and intense religious vitality. The era has also been called the "golden age of parties," as party organizations had more influence on election outcomes than at any time before or since, and parties in the electorate commanded enthusiastic mass followings.
The Republicans' secure control of the national government ended with the Panic of 1873 and the withdrawal of Union troops from the conquered South in the mid-1870s. From 1874 to 1894, the Democrats won almost as many presidential contests as the Republicans - three for the Republicans and two for the Democrats. And, though the Republicans controlled the Senate for all but four of those 20 years, the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives for all but four. There were only three two-year congressional terms during which one party simultaneously controlled both the presidency and both houses of Congress (the Republicans in 1881-1882 and 1889-1890, and the Democrats in 1893-1894).
Party competition was close at the national level and in states like New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Ohio, Indiana, California, and Oregon. Party rivalry was also intense in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, though the Republicans usually prevailed. As a result, the parties developed far more elaborate organizations than had existed before the Civil War, like "armies drawn up for combat," as W.D. Burnham wrote. At that time, cartoonist Thomas Nast popularized the symbols of the Republican elephant and the Democratic donkey; in 1875, the Congressional Record referred to the party associated with the successful military defense of the Union as "this gallant old party" and the Cincinnati Commercial referred to it as the "grand old party" in 1876, leading to the Republicans' acronym "GOP" catching on in 1884.
Elections were marked by torchlight parades, gigantic rallies, and massive pilgrimages to the hometowns of presidential candidates who conducted "front porch campaigns." Voter turnout was consistently higher than during any other period in American history. In Congress, party unity on roll-call votes was generally high, and party cohesion reached a record high in the 1889 Senate session; 87% for the Republicans and 79% for the Democrats.
New waves of immigration into eastern and Midwestern cities, industrial towns, and mining regions produced fresh supplies of voters for a reviving Democracy. In some cities, such as Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, San Francisco, and even to some extent Chicago, many immigrants were enlisted by local Republican organizations. In Philadelphia, Republican organizers reminded Italian immigrants that the party of Giuseppe Garibaldi in Italy was called the Italian Republican Party and assured them that the American Republicans stood for the same ideals. But in most cities and industrial towns Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Poland, and Bohemia generally felt more comfortable in Democratic ranks. Jews, on the other hand, were heavily Republican. In many states the Republican Party carried more than a tinge of the nativism that had contributed to the party's emergence in the 1850s. The Whig program of moral reform, which the Republicans now championed, included support for causes like prohibition and the outlawing of commercial activity on Sundays - causes that most European immigrants, even German Protestants, found offensive if not threatening. Particularly after the founding of the Prohibition Party in 1869, most Republican politicians felt obliged to go on the line for government regulation of morals. As the pace of immigration increased, Republican-controlled legislatures in Illinois and Wisconsin passed laws prohibiting the use of any language except English in public schools, causing heavy defections among previously loyal foreign-born Republicans, particularly Germans.
Tammany Hall, the principal Democratic organization in New York City, provided a kind of model for what could be done through the mobilization of the new immigrants. Judges allied with the Tweed Ring naturalized several thousand new citizens and expanded the number of registered votes by 30%. Tammany during the Tweed era was not only corrupt but politically inefficient and chaotic. William M. Tweed was unable to command the obedience of other politicians, instead purchasing with cash bribes the support of state legislators, county supervisors, and even his immediate associates. Cash-flow problems drove Tweed and his cronies to dig deeper and deeper into the public till. Between 1867 and 1871, New York's municipal indebtedness tripled, finally arousing concern among members of the city's financial community, who through purchase of municipal bonds had permitted their interests to become intimately intertwined with that of the city government. After Tweed and his closest associates were packed off to jail in 1871, John Kelly assumed leadership of Tammany and began to build a disciplined machine. He transformed Tammany from a horde into a political army, establishing centralized control over Democratic nominations for all city offices and bringing graft down to tolerable levels. The machine shifted from simple vote-buying to providing useful services for the often non-English-speaking residents of the New York slums. The machine provided buckets of coals, baskets of food, rent payments, funeral expenses, clothing, and material benefits to those in need, as well as providing bail, cutting the red tape to receive licenses or permits, and getting charges dismissed. Kelly preferred to deal with "swallowtail" conservative Democratic attorneys and businessmen such as Samuel Tilden, William Grace, and Abram Hewitt, and Tammany became the supreme power in New York City and an important force in state and national politics.
Partly through observation of the Tammany model and partly through independent recognition of opportunity, Democratic politicians in other eastern and midwestern cities formed similar organizations. In Illinois, Minnesota, Michigan, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, bodies of traditional rural Jacksonian Democrats were joined, and eventually overshadowed, by immigrant-based machines in Chicago, St. Paul, Detroit, Jersey City, Boston, Hartford, and New Haven (all of which, except for St. Paul, had earlier been Whig or Republican strongholds).
While the Democrats were making headway in eastern and midwestern cities, the Republicans during the early 1870s remained dominant in the national government and most northern states. The Republican senators Conkling of New York, Cameron of Pennsylvania, Morton of Indiana, and Chandler of Michigan, joined by John A. Logan of Illinois from 1871, put together a national machine, based largely on patronage, that was far more extensive and politically formidable than that of the Jacksonian Democrats in the 1830s. The senators supported Black suffrage in the South in part because they believed Black voters could turn the South into an impregnable bastion of Republicanism that would guarantee Republican majorities in the electoral college even if they party should lose some of its northern citadels. The Republicans had always been responsive to business interests, but Conkling and Cameron in particular drew the party close to the business community, raising huge war chests from corporate contributions and establishing interlocking relationships between business and political leaders. Senators, elected by state legislatures until 1913, had special reason to maintain control of state party organizations, and they had access to the means under the Grant administration.
Following a different track was James G. Blaine, who directly appealed to voters rather than depending on command of a patronage-fed organization. However, he was fully as susceptible as the bosses to the lure of financial corruption, with charges of graft hanging over his career and his "Burn this letter" message causing suspicion. Blaine belonged to a class of conservatives including Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, and Richard Nixon who often saw further and better than most of their contemporaries but were ultimately undermined by their own cynicism.
The moderate faction of the Republican Party, like Senator Carl Schurz of Missouri and the seven Republican senators who had voted to acquit Johnson, favored a more conciliatory approach toward the white supremacists on the South and a slower pace on civil rights, and many of them became involved in the Liberal Republican movement of the 1870s due to their concerns over corruption in the Grant administration.
The Liberal Republicans of the early 1870s were reformist in that they attacked the spoils system and promised more honest administration of government, and some of them leaned toward freer international trade in contrast to the Republicans' prevailing protectionism. But they proposed no programs of government help for the economically less fortunate and showed no inclination to redistribute wealth between the haves and have-nots. To the contrary, they attacked "the fallacy of attempts to benefit humanity by legislation." Their solution to the southern problem was much the same as Johnson's and the Blairs' had been: turn power over to the former white ruling class.
In 1872, the Liberal Republicans, backed by several influential newspapers, ran their own national ticket. They nominated Horace Greeley for President and Benjamin Gratz Brown for Vice President, and the dispirited Democrats in Baltimore allowed their leaders to gavel through endorsements of the Liberal Republican ticket. Greely proved an easy target for the Republican tactic of "waving the bloody shirt" - reminding Northern voters that the Republican Party had upheld the Union during the Civil War; Greeley had put up part of the bail that got Jefferson Davis out of prison in 1867.
Grant was easily re-elected with 286 out of a possible 366 electoral votes, and Greeley died a few weeks after the election, causing his electoral votes to scatter among five Democrats and independents. Three southern states, Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas, returned to the Democratic column.
For the Democrats, the 1876 presidential election seemed to offer a golden opportunity to win the White House for the first time since the Civil War and perhaps to regain their pre-war status as the national majority party. Many voters blamed Republicans for the hard times that followed the Panic of 1873, and corruption in the second Grant administration was even more flagrant than it had been in the first. Democratic state parties promising the restoration of white supremacy had regained power in most of the South. The Democrats nominated as their presidential candidate Governor Samuel Tilden of New York, who seemed acceptable to all major elements within the party. The Republicans, in contrast, were bitterly divided. The Senate bosses, now known as "Stalwarts" (formerly "Radicals"), were determined to maintain their hold on federal patronage but could not agree on a single candidate for President. Roscoe Conkling and Oliver P. Morton each sought the nomination, but neither would give way to the other and neither had the support of Pennsylvania's Cameron machine. Against them, James G. Blaine's followers were known as the "Half-Breeds." Out in the country, many rank-and-file Republicans, including many who had been drawn to Liberal Republicanism in 1872, seem to have felt revulsion toward anyone who had been in any way involved in Washington politics during the Grant administration. The Republican National Convention, after six indecisive ballots, turned to former Governor Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio, whose chief attractions were that he appeared to be a decent man with "no personal enmities."
In New York, Chandler squeezed hard on the bloody shirt, ruthlessly assessed federal employees, and poured larger sums of money into potential swing states such as New York and Indiana. The Democrats, to the extent that their resources permitted, responded in kind, emphasizing government corruption, economic depression, and the Republicans' alignment with Blacks. In the South, local Democratic parties, often aided by the Ku Klux Klan, did their best to intimidate, or "bulldoze," Black voters. Voter turnout rose to 83%, higher even than in 1860, and still a record for American national elections.
On election night early returns indicated a solid Democratic victory. New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Indiana swiftly fell to Tilden, and southern states with Democratic state administrations were producing Tilden landslides. Tilden's national majority in the popular vote seemed to exceed 200,000. As the night wore on, however, Tilden's electoral vote stuck just short of a majority. However, late votes from the Republican-controlled Southern states of South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana threatened to give the Republicans a one-vote majority in the Electoral College if Hayes lost no more Northern states. Republican agents recruited from New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois fanned out across the three disputed states, and General Sherman saw to it that proper and legal boards of canvassers were unmolested in the performance of their duties. Money was distributed freely by Republican agents to official canvassers. Democratic agents tried to bribe some of the Republican-controlled counting boards, but they lived up to Cameron's code: having been bought, they stayed bought. In December, rival returns were delivered from each of the three disputed states, and an electoral vote was challenged in Oregon, as the elector was a federal employee and thus ineligible to serve. A governmental commission decided all disputes along strict party lines, giving Hayes a one-vote majority in the electoral college. Conservative and moderate Democrats, including Tilden, were unwilling to incite civil discord, and Republican leaders promised Southern Democratic senators that the President would end Reconstruction in exchange for the restoration of Democratic administrations in Southern states.
The 1876 election ended the postwar era of clear Republican dominance in national politics, but it did not restore the Democrats as the normal national majority party. Over the next 20 years, the Democrats were usually the majority party in the House, while winning control of the Senate only twice. In 1884, the Democrats finally regained the White House when the pro-business Democratic Governor of New York, Grover Cleveland, defeated James G. Blaine, who had failed to disavow a Protestant clergyman's accusations that the Democrats were the party of "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion." Irish Catholics, who had been well disposed toward Blaine, were outraged, and Cleveland's campaign manager Arthur Gorman had handbills reporting the offensive remark spread through Catholic neighborhoods, tipping New York and the election to Cleveland.
Four years later, Cleveland again obtained a narrow plurality in the popular vote but lost in the electoral college. Cleveland recaptured the presidency in 1892 with a solid majority in the electoral college, though again with only a plurality in the popular vote. Nevertheless, the Democrats were unable to translate these relatively good electoral showings into majority party status. Between 1878 and 1896, the Democrats only once, in 1890, won a majority of the popular votes cast nationally for Congress, and never won a majority for President. The Democrats were competitive in national elections only because they had a monopoly of electoral votes in the South.
In most Northern states, the Republicans usually maintained control of state governments. From the Civil War to 1890, the Republicans lost the governorship only once in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Kansas, and Rhode Island, and never in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, or Vermont (which did not elect its first Democratic governor until 1962). Massachusetts was also nominally Republican, but in 1874 chose a Democratic governor and in 1882 elected as governor the proto-populist Benjamin F. Butler, a former Radical Republican running on a Democratic-Greenbacker fusion ticket. Statewide elections were competitive in New York, Indiana, New Jersey, Ohio, and Connecticut, but in all these states there were many counties that were invariably Republican.
In many rural areas and small towns of the North, Democrats were almost extinct; in small-town Ohio, the Republican Party came to be an institution around which men grouped themselves as best they could, and it was inconceivable that any self-respecting man should be a Democrat. The Republican hegemony in most of New England, much of New York, Pennsylvania, and the old Northwest, and almost all of the newer states of the Great Plains was accounted for, in large part, by the enduring legacy of the Civil War, as Union veterans enjoyed a sense of fraternity identified with the GOP. The GOP attracted Union generals such as Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, Carl Schurz, John A. Logan, Benjamin Harrison, Benjamin F. Butler, Ulysses S. Grant, and William Tecumseh Sherman, and, though the Democrats attracted a few former Union generals such as Winfield Scott Hancock and George Armstrong Custer, there was a pervasive feeling among Union veterans to "vote the way you shot." Oliver Morton famously said, "While it may be true that not every Democrat is a traitor, every traitor is a Democrat." John Logan, a former Douglas Democrat lieutenant-turned-Radical leader, converted southern Illinois' "Egypt" region into a Republican stronghold, fighting for steady expansion of veterans' benefits and the celebration of Memorial Day.
Additionally, the Republicans were, in the North, the party of Protestantism. Between the Civil War and 1896, Northern Methodists were about 75% Republican, as were 65-80% of Baptists, 80% of Norwegian Lutherans and 85% of Swedish Lutherans. these groups joined politically with Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Quakers who in the Jacksonian era had been principally aligned with the Whigs. The Republicans supported the Whig program of moral reform on such issues as temperance, Sunday-closing laws, and opposition to gambling, while managing to avoid being identified with the Whiggish elitism that had limited the Whigs' appeal among the more plebeian Protestant denominations. In most states Republicans backed the maintenance of morning prayers and reading from the King James Bible in public schools, and, as late as 1896, New York Republicans supported a Sunday-closing law.
While aiding Protestant moral causes, the Republicans resisted efforts by the Democratic-backed Catholic Church to channel public funds to Catholic schools. In 1875, Blaine introduced and guided to easy passage in the House a constitutional amendment that prohibited the use of public funds to support sectarian schools while specifically permitting reading of the Bible in any school or institution. Protestant ministers reciprocated by urging their flocks to "vote as we pray" and voting the straight Republican ticket.
In some Midwestern farm states, where Catholics were relatively few and the real political competition was between Yankee Protestants and Protestants with non-Calvinist origins, many German Lutherans remained aligned with the Democrats. In the East, where the chief ethnocultural division was between Protestants and Catholics, German Lutherans tended to be Republican. Identification of the Republicans with business was on the whole a political plus, as campaign contributions made by business helped swell the GOP's coffers. Even after the Panic of 1873, economic optimism among most Americans remained strong, although "big business" was already unpopular in the South and West.
Blacks were drawn to the Republicans in both the South and North as the party that had ended slavery and fitfully continued to defend civil rights, but most Blacks also supported the Republican ideology of individual enterprise. Frederick Douglass wrote that once society had enabled the humblest citizen to be given the undisturbed possession of the natural fruits of his own exertions, there was very little left for society and the government to do.
Finally, the Republicans were able to retain their dominance in most of the North because of the operational superiority of their state organizations. Hayes had angered Stalwarts by appointing reformers and former Liberal Republicans such as Carl Schurz to his cabinet. In 1880, over fierce Stalwart resistance, the Republican National Convention nominated James Garfield of Ohio to succeed Hayes. Conkling's protégé Chester A. Arthur was selected as Garfield's running mate. When Garfield became President in 1881, the battle over patronage resumed; Conkling resigned from the Senate to protest Garfield's anti-spoils system crusade, sure that the New York legislature would reappoint him, but this did not happen. Garfield was assassinated by a self-proclaimed Stalwart, Charles Guiteau, producing a wave of public disgust with the spoils system. President Arthur turned against the spoils system and signed the 1883 Pendleton Act, which established a merit system for a substantial part of the federal service. Although the bosses continued to have a say in the hiring and firing of many federal employees, the days when the federal payroll could be counted on to supply a reliable army of party workers were over. The bosses needed new sources for both manpower and campaign contributions. Some had already found them in the rapidly growing work forces of their state governments.
On Cameron's retirement in 1877, Matthew Quay became the new boss of the Pennsylvania Republican machine, systematically assessing state employees and extracting contributions from businesses affected by state government to build a larger and more efficient organization than Conkling and the Camerons' machines. In New York, Thomas C. Platt assembled an organization similar to Quay's, but his power was limited by the presence of a strong reform faction led by a young Theodore Roosevelt, Tammany's continued domination in New York City, and support by many businessmen for moderate Democrats like Cleveland. Other Quay-type Republican state machines were established in Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and somewhat less robust variants formed in some of the newer states of the Great Plains.
The Republican national organization returned to a federation of state parties that got together every four years to run a national ticket, but the national party was still more tightly organized than its Democratic opposition. Quay chaired the Republican National Committee in 1888 and took personal command of the canvass in New York which, with Indiana, was expected to determine the outcome of the 1888 presidential election. He financed a private census of every household in New York City to block Tammany's practice of inflating Democratic totals through massive vote fraud, and Harrison carried New York and Indiana while running behind Cleveland in the national popular vote. The Republicans picked up 19 House seats in the former Confederacy and the border states, thereby winning a House majority.
The main reasons the Republicans usually won in most non-southern states and at the national level was that majorities among the non-Southern public and Republican officeholders continued to subscribe to the Republican ideology of nationalism, Protestant moralism, and free-enterprise capitalism, and the effectiveness of the Republican organizations resulted to a great extent from the attractiveness of the party's ideology to the more able politicians or prospective politicians. By the late 1880s, even as governmental corruption and concern over economic concentration were beginning to cause political stress, and as a farmer revolt triggered by drought and falling prices for agricultural commodities was building in the supposedly safely Republican states of the Great Plains and Far West, most Americans believed that the ideology that Lincoln and other Republicans had introduced to national power in the 1860s was still producing good results.
The Progressive era[]
From the end of the Civil War through the early 1890s, the chief economic issue dividing the Democrats from the Republicans at the national level was the protective tariff. The Republicans, even most of the so-called mugwumps who defected to vote for Cleveland against Blaine on the corruption issue in 1884, generally favored keeping tariffs high to protect developing American industry. The Democrats, responding to the interests of their farmer and working-class constituencies, and to advice and pressure from part of the financial community, called for tariff reduction. On broader fiscal and monetary issues, there was little difference between the major parties. On some economic issues, under the leadership of Grover Cleveland, the democrats were even a shade more conservative than the Republicans.
As a result, when economic conditions were bad, as they were in the mid-1870s and the early 1890s, there was a sense among many of the economically hard-pressed that the two-party system was not responding to their grievances and needs. Right after the Civil War, the Democrats had flirted with the option of becoming the "soft money" party in national politics, presumably in the hope of appealing to debtors who would get to repay their loans in depreciated currency. In 1868, the Democratic platform endorsed the greenback idea, proposed the year before by Representative George H. Pendleton of Ohio (later author of federal civil service reform), under which Civil War bonds would be paid off in depreciated paper dollars, known as greenbacks, instead of gold, as had been promised when the bonds were issued. But the Democratic presidential candidate in 1868, Governor Horatio Seymour of New York, was a hard-money man who steered as far away as possible from the greenback proposal. After the election, which he lost decisively to Grant, Seymour complained that the greenback plank had frightened not only bondholders but all creditors and businessmen and has created the impression that the party was "putting out to sea and sailing away from land."
Disenchanted with Democrats, some of those favoring the greenback proposal formed their own party, hoping to break through the two-party system as the Republicans had done in the 1850s. In 1876, the Greenback Party nominated Peter Cooper, a wealthy philanthropist, as its candidate for President. The party's platform promised not only to pay off the national debt in paper money but also to restore silver, which had been demonetized with little fuss in 1873, as a national currency. Cooper attracted only 82,000 votes. In 1878, however, candidates running for Congress with Greenbacker support, often on fusion tickets with the Democrats, received more than a million votes - close to 15% of the national total. When the new Congress met, the Greenbacker candidate for Speaker of the House received 14 votes - close to a balance of power between the candidates of the major parties.
In 1880, the Greenbacker candidate for President, Representative James B. Weaver of Iowa, a former Union Army general, received 300,000 votes - eight times Garfield's plurality in the popular vote. Two years later the Greenbackers in fusion with the Democrats elected Benjamin F. Butler governor of Massachusetts. As it turned out, this was the party's undoing. Butler had begun in the 1850s as a Jacksonian Democrat in Whig Massachusetts, had gone on to become a political general in the Union Army whose brutal treatment in occupied New Orleans provoked international protest, and had then become a Radical Republican congressman who outdid even Thaddeus Stevens in his vengefulness toward the South. Taking up the greenback idea and the Greenback Party, Butler infused both with his personality and ambition. Inevitably nominated by the Greenbackers for President in 1884, he received only 175,000 votes. Having violated the rule that in order to survive a new party must increase its vote in each succeeding election, the Greenbackers soon expired.
The idea that a new party founded on economic discontent could win national power, however, remained alive in the minds of many citizens dissatisfied with the economic policies supported by the Republicans and democrats. When the economic skies again darkened in the late 1880s, a new political movement, based mainly on the West and South, launched a formidable challenge to the existing party system.