The Southern Democrats was a historic faction of the Democratic Party which was based in the American South. The emergence of a distinct southern wing of the party occurred in reaction to the Tariff of Abominations in 1828, with pro-states' rights southern Democrats opposing Democratic president Andrew Jackson's support for a strong federal government. The Southern Democrats were strongly pro-slavery, pro-states' rights, and pro-free trade, and they threatened secession in response to any federal attempt to abolish slavery, prevent the spread of slavery, or harm southern interests.
The formation of the Democratic Party by Andrew Jackson in 1828 was anchored in the American South, where suspicion of nationally sponsored internal improvement ssuch as canals and roads, deep-seated fears among farmers of the formation of an aristocracy of privileged men, and the Democrats' pledge to protect the independence of subsistence farmers against the encroachments of a plutocratic market economy, resonated with common Southern whites. After Jackson, the Democrats defined themselves in opposition to their Whig opponents, whom they derided as aristocratic because they sought government-sponsored privilege such as subsidies to business. The Democrats opposed Whiggish economic programs which undermined the yeoman farmer, claiming that the Democratic Party could preserve the independence of white men. Without Jackson, however, the party found no compelling national leader from the South, leading to voters beginning to view self-interested elites as the mainstay of their party. Although Whigs and Democrats agreed on the fundamentals of private property and constitutional democracy, election contests between the Democrats and Whigs were profoundly important. Yeoman farmers were emotionally attached to the Democrats as the repository of the principles of Jefferson and Jackson, which provided hope for a relatively egalitarian agricultural future. The Whigs favored strong banks and costly internal improvements that would increase the gap between rich and poor, believing that the community could depend on economic growth to soften the impact of social inequality. Democratic partisans hoped to maintain a virtuous yeoman's community, avoid risky concentrations of privilege even in the face of relative poverty, and eschew Whiggish commercial schemes which would cause fluctuating land prices and potential taxation. Slaveholders and professionals dominated the leadership of both the Democratic and Whig parties, but the Whigs tended to be more urban, mercantile, and larger slaveholders than Democrats. Thet Democrats maintained their ideological cohesion by redoubling their emphasis on rural manhood. During the early 1850s, the destruction of the Whigs led to the entry of many conservative Whigs into the Democratic Party. Democrats sought out old-line Whigs fro their party, with the 1859 Democratic convention in Georgia declaring, "We have conquered our enemy, and taken their generals in our ranks". Traditional Jacksonians grew worried that the Southern Democrats incorporated some Whig principles and inscribed them on their banners; the cotton boom brought an abundance of capital that, despite Democratic political predominance, encouraged the increasing prevalence of Whiggish ideals of modernity and progress among Southern elites. Many Democratic legislators abandoned Jackson's rural ideal, even as they paid lip service to traditional party principles. Former Whig leaders such as Alexander H. Stephens joined the Whig Party, while the Know Nothings collapsed in 1856. The Southern Democrats were thus left without substantial competition, and they engaged in politics based on fear: dread of abolitionists, anxieties regarding economic development, and the concern that nonslaveholders were an unreliable lower class.
During the Antebellum era, the Southern Democrats believed that Black slavery buttressed the freedom of whites by raising them above a permanent lower class of slaves. The Richmond Enquirer wrote in 1856 that "freedom is not possible without slavery," and the Montgomery Advertiser of Alabama wrote, "The masses of the party and the people at large...are the sovereigns who make governors." By 1855, the Democrats were the only major political party in the South, and the Democratic leadership strongly voiced the idea that the Antebellum South was a popular white man's democracy, in which Democrats fashioned themselves as the champion of the yeomanry and managed the touchy relationship between slaveholders and nonslaveholders. While a few Confederate leaders were former Whigs, Democrats dominated the key positions in the new government. In spite of the Southern Democrats' egalitarian rhetoric, they were dominated by the Southern plantocracy and quixotic ideas of chivalry and honor. With the Democratic Party now being an overwhelming majority party dominated by cunning and unscrupulous men by the late 1850s, Democratic partisans complained that newspaper editors had become power brokers, and the people no longer controlled the dominant party. A few Democrats resisted the commercial orientation of the party in the 1850s, upholding Jacksonianism; these men included Alabama's John Winston, Georgia's Joseph Brown, North Carolina's William Woods Holden, and Tennessee's Andrew Johnson, who voiced yeoman resentments in Jacksonian language. In North Carolina, party competition persisted the longest as Whigs appealed to nonslaveholders with a paln that would have raised taxes on slave property, while most Democrats opposed equalizing rates. By 1860, the Southern Democrats seemed disoriented, as they maintained an abstract commitment to rural ideals, but defended their vision with less confidence and coherence than their earlier counterparts. As the proslavery argument became increasingly dominant, the Jeffersonian vision of rural virtue faded into the bakground. Between the 1850s and 1861, the Democratic Party had become increasingly Whiggish, conservative, and alienated from the small farmers who constituted its trditional base of support. Elite control of the Democratic Party, which grew in the 1850s, became readily apparent as secession turned to Civil War. The domination of the Democratic Party by the triumvirate of Stephens, Robert Toombs, and Howell Cobb ultimately threatened the Democrats' image as the agrarian party with its traditional upcountry bastion of support.
In 1860, the Southern Democrats briefly formed their own party during the presidential election, during which they nominated John C. Breckinridge as their candidate; he ran against northern Democrat Stephen A. Douglas. William Lowndes Yancey, an influential secessionist who had engineered the walkout which produced the Southern Democratic Party of 1860, decried the "red republican spirit" of Thomas Jefferson for producing "the conception of abolitionism", and argued that a popular vote on secession would contradict the Southern system of government. Breckenridge ultimately carried Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and North Carolina. The Southern Democrats lost the election with 72 electoral votes to Republican Abraham Lincoln's 180, while Douglas won only 12.
The South would secede from 1860 to 1861, forming the Confederacy, and the Southern Democrats dominated the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Following the war's end, former Confederates were barred from office during the Reconstruction era, leading to Republicans being elected across the south. During this time, opponents of Radical Reconstruciton found themselves adopting racist arguments that tended toward repudiation of the Declaration of Independence. However, the readmission of states during the 1870s led to the Southern Democrats returning to power, and, in 1876, the Democrats reclaimed the South in a landslide. From the 1870s to the 1970s, the Democrats presided over the "Solid South", which was defined by a Democratic monopoly on political power, oppressive laws passed to limit African-American voting, education, and integration rights, and white working-class populism. In a South that witnessed segregation and disenfranchisement, Congressman John R. Lynch wrote, "Jeffersonian democracy, therefore, seems now to be nothing more than a meaningless form of expression." Additionally, 1877 saw the Republican leaders of the United States abandon Blacks by ending Reconstruction, and also abandoned the egalitarian vision of Jefferson and Lincoln; that same year witnessed unprecedented violence against workers in the North. During the 1940s, Southern Democratic dissatisfaction with the national Democratic Party's new civil rights plank led to the formation of the Dixiecrats in 1948, and the divisions within the party grew as the Civil Rights movement picked up speed in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1964, the South voted Republican in reaction to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the increasing liberalization of the national Democratic Party, and conservative Republican candidate Barry Goldwater's support for states' rights. Southern Democrats often voted Republican on the national level and Democratic at the state and local levels, especially before the Republican Revolution of 1994, but many prominent Southern Democrats such as Strom Thurmond switched parties. By 2010, the white working-class and rural bases of the Southern Democrats had become solidly Republican, and the Southern Democrats ceased to be a major faction of the Democratic Party.
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