The War Democrats were pro-war members of the Democratic Party who supported President Abraham Lincoln’s wartime policies during the American Civil War; they were opposed to the anti-war faction of the Democratic Party, the “Copperheads”. The War Democrats were predominantly conservative Democrats who had a deep belief in American nationalism, and several of their leaders, such as the 1860 Democratic presidential nominee Stephen A. Douglas, were leaders of the pro-modernization, pro-market, pro-reform, pro-capitalism, pro-free trade, and internationalist “Young America” movement of the 1850s. Lincoln appointed several War Democrats to military commands and to political positions to secure their political support, and, in 1864, he selected the leading War Democrat Andrew Johnson as his vice-presidential running mate. After 1863, the War Democrats came to support abolitionism, but they supported Johnson’s lenient approach towards postwar Reconstruction and proved unwilling to severely punish former Confederates or strongly protect the rights of African-American freedmen. Johnson’s defeat at the hands of the former Copperhead Horatio Seymour in the 1868 Democratic presidential primary marked the demise of the War Democrats, many of whom (such as John A. Logan and Edwin Stanton) had left to join the Republican Party, and the rest of whom remained with the Democratic Party.
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