The Democratic Party is the nation’s oldest existing political party. Officially founded as the Democratic-Republican Party by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in 1800, it played a critical role in the political and economic history of the 19th-century United States. Immigrants, the urban working class, subsistence farmers, and Southern plantation owners formed the core groups that supported the Democrats in the CiviL War and Reconstruction eras.
Democrats generally believed in a narrow construction of the U. S. Constitution, limited powers for the federal government, and economic policies that led to expansion and settlement of the nation’s vast territories for the benefit of ordinary white people. Democrats controlled the political system in the country from 1828 through 1856 by winning six of the eight presidential elections and dominated Congress for much of the 1840s and 1850s. The party’s power and prestige greatly diminished when it split into Northern and Southern wings over the slavery issue in 1860. From 1860 to 1928 the Democrats controlled the White House only 4 out of 18 times.
The modern Democratic Party emerged from the presidential election of 1828 under the leadership of President Andrew Jackson of Tennessee and Martin Van Buren of New York. Van Buren, a talented and dedicated professional politician, forged a national network of strong ties between Democratic political leaders that stressed commonalities between the humble farmers and working class of the North and the yeomanry and cotton growers of the South. They were adamantly opposed to the new Whig Party’s strongly pro-manufacturing economic plan and especially to a national banking system. A central bank, Jackson and other Democrats asserted, represented a dangerous and unprecedented concentration of power that threatened states’ rights and the vision of a “small” democracy articulated by Jefferson.
Jackson, an ardent supporter of the political philosophy of Thomas Jefferson, was, like Jefferson, a Southern slaveholder. Despite their undeniable appeal to Northerners and Southerners of more modest means, Democrats soon became identified with a proslavery agenda. In 1828 Congress decided to increase TARiee rates. Outraged wealthy Southern plantation owners attacked the “Tariff of Abominations.” South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun, then serving as vice president, published a series of anonymous letters criticizing the tariff.
When an even higher tariff was adopted in 1832, Calhoun resigned his office and reentered the Senate, where he could openly express his opposition. Calhoun argued that South Carolina should “nullify” the tariff, in essence declaring it void in their state. The conflict was ultimately resolved with a compromise tariff, but nullification became an important argument used by the South to derail proposed action against slavery, and a disturbing reminder that Democrats were divided by regional interests.
Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, the identification of the Democratic Party with Southern slavery became even stronger. Democrats worked for the successful annexation of Texas and the unsuccessful annexation of Cuba as slave states. Led by President James Polk, a Tennessee Jacksonian, Democrats supported the Mexican-American War and refused to ban slavery in the territory acquired as a result of the war. Democrats insisted on the inclusion of a stricter Fugitive Slave Act in the Compromise of 1850.
Slavery was responsible for the death ofthe Democrats’ major opposition party, the Whigs, as well as the birth of its new opposition, the Republican Party. Slavery was also a deeply divisive issue among Democrats themselves, especially after the Mexican-American War. Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois tried very hard to satisfy both wings and ended up destroying the party that he loved. Douglas was the driving force behind the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which abolished the traditional slave-versus-free line between North and South and opened up the territories to slavery. Democratic president James Buchanan’s administration created a firestorm of protest with his overtly pro-Southern policies in Kansas and elsewhere from 1856 to 1860.
In the election of 1860, the Democratic Party finally split between proslavery secessionists and more moderate Unionists. At the Democratic convention in Charleston, South Carolina, the party failed to nominate a candidate due to disruptions by secessionist Southern delegates. Northern and Southern Democrats then met separately several weeks later, with Northern Democrats choosing Douglas as their presidential candidate, while Southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckenridge to carry their banner. This split effectively guaranteed victory for Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln. With Lincoln’s victory, South Carolina seceded from the United States on December 20, 1860, and by February 1, 1861, was followed by six additional states. Delegates from these states met soon after at Montgomery, Alabama, to draft the Constitution of the Confederate States of America and elect as president the former U. S. Senator Jefferson Davis.
During the Civil War, Confederate politics and government led to the development of a single party system, made up of former Democrats and Whigs, that was highly disorganized and ineffective. In the North, Democrats became the opposition party. The party divided into two wings, “War Democrats” and “Peace Democrats.” The War Democrats were the majority for most of the years between 1861 and 1865. They supported Lincoln and the war and were careful not to bring the dreaded name of “traitor” down upon their organization.
As the war went on, however, more and more Democrats criticized what they thought to be the Lincoln administration’s unconstitutional abuse of power in the prosecution of the conflict. Two issues particularly were successful in mobilizing Democratic voters against Republicans during the war: Lincoln’s unpopular suspension of habeas corpus and his emancipation of Southern slaves. Although the Republicans kept a majority in the Congress, there were significant Democratic gains in the House and Senate in the elections of 1862.
Some Democrats went so far as to argue that the war should be brought to an end, even if that meant accepting secession. These Peace Democrats, or Copperheads, felt the war victimized working-class and immigrant families. They also feared that freedmen would compete with white laborers for the same jobs. By 1864 the Copperheads were a powerful faction in the Democratic Party, and they were able to insist that a peace plank be included in the party’s platform for the presidential elections in that year. Renewed Union successes on the battlefield caused Democratic nominee George B. McClellan to repudiate the plank, and thereafter the Copperheads waned in importance.
After the war, the Democratic Party remained in the minority and, indeed, reached the lowest point in its history. Republicans regularly, and successfully, attacked Democrats as acting disloyally during the war. “Not every Democrat was a traitor,” crowed Republicans, “but every traitor was a Democrat.” During the first year of Reconstruction, a bitter dispute developed between Democrats and Republicans over the extension of citizenship and the franchise to African Americans. Encouraged by President Andrew Johnson, many Democrats opposed what they called the “Africanization” of the South.
Democrats continued to attack Republican-led Reconstruction. In the years immediately after the Civil War, Democratic Southern state legislatures passed a series of restrictive racial laws known as the Black Codes. The primary purpose of the codes was to keep African Americans subordinate by controlling freedmen and keeping them in a state close to slavery. Northern Republicans, particularly a militant faction of the party known as the Radical Republicans, were outraged.
Congressional Radicals were able to impose an especially harsh Reconstruction on the South that effectively kept Southern Democrats out of positions of power. Barred from participating in the political system through legal means, a great number of Southern Democrats worked to reestablish a system of white supremacy through illegal means, namely terrorism. The Ku Klux Klan and other groups kept African Americans from voting by harassing and even killing those individuals who presumed to exercise their civil rights.
As the decade of the 1860s closed, support for congressional Reconstruction was waning. Ulysses S. Grant won the election of 1868 handily and overcame a serious challenge from anti-Reconstruction Democrats and Republicans to win a second term in 1872. Increasingly, the Democratic cry that Republicans had denied votes to competent white Southern voters while enabling “unfit” African Americans to vote resonated with Northerners. Perhaps the biggest boost for the Democrats, however, was the depression of 1873. Dissatisfied with the Republican handling of the economy, voters returned Democratic majorities to Congress in 1874. Two years later, a disputed election between Democrat Samuel J. Tilden and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes led to a series of compromises that awarded Hayes the presidency while bringing an end to Reconstruction.
The election of 1876 solidified a status quo that remained in place for the remainder of the 19th century. The Republicans controlled the majority of Northern voters and had a virtual monopoly on the presidency. Every president elected between 1860 and 1912, with the exception of Grover Cleveland, was a Republican. The Democrats, meanwhile, dominated the “Solid South” and were powerful in a number of Northern localities, particularly New York City. African Americans, most of them still living in the South, were largely denied a voice in politics. It would take another depression, beginning in 1929, to transform the Democratic Party from its 19th-century origins as a proslavery and states’ rights political organization into its current liberal incarnation.
Further reading: Jean Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998); Jonathan Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Joel Silbey, A Respectable Minority: The Democratic Party in the Civil War Era, 1860-1868 (New York: Norton, 1977); Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005).
—Michael Ward
World History
