Political Parties

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POLITICAL PARTIES

Political parties played an important role in nineteenth-century America and ultimately had an impact on the secession of the Southern states and the Civil War (1861–1865). The Democratic Party emerged under the leadership of President Andrew Jackson, who proclaimed himself a man of the people. Opposition to him arose in the form of the Whig Party, which formed in the 1830s and lasted until the 1850s. Whigs resisted the growth of presidential power, promoted internal improvements and the creation of a national bank, and opposed territorial expansion. But neither party held to a rigid set of policies.

Civil War-era Americans viewed political parties as devices to protect and preserve the freedoms promised in America's founding documents. The failure of the existing parties to address perceived threats to these values in the 1850s led to a partisan realignment. The ensuing Civil War and Reconstruction shaped the identities of Republicans and Democrats for decades to come.

the coming of war

In 1852, the national conventions of the Whig and Democratic parties endorsed the Compromise of 1850 as the final solution to the divisive question of slavery in the United States. Neither party addressed the tremendous increase in foreign immigration, which in half a dozen years had added significantly to the Roman Catholic portion of a hitherto overwhelmingly Protestant country. In the minds of many Americans, the existing parties were avoiding important issues. The result was factionalism within the existing parties and attempts to found new parties. Anti-immigrant nativists formed the American Party. Responding to the Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854, which overturned the Missouri Compromise on slavery, antislavery extensionists formed the Republican Party. As a result of the formation of the new parties, the Whig Party ceased to function, and although the Democratic Party continued it divided into factions, its southern wing increasing in strength and its northern wing losing many native-born Protestant voters.

In the late 1850s, the Republican Party broadened its appeal beyond the slavery issue. It gradually edged out the American Party as an opponent to the Democrats in the North but remained sectional. This alarmed some Southerners, who saw secession as the best way to combat the Republican threat. President James Buchanan, however, insisted that the Democrats' policies of strict construction of the Constitution and limited government could preserve the Union. In 1860, Southern and Northern Democrats failed to agree on the protection of slavery and ran separate candidates for the presidency. Some former Whigs and American Party members created a Constitutional Union Party to contest both the Republicans and the Democrats. The Republicans' concentrated strength in Northern states that had many electoral votes enabled Abraham Lincoln to win the presidency with only 39 percent of the popular vote, precipitating the secession of seven Southern states. Four other states joined the Confederacy following the April 1861 bombardment of Fort Sumter in and Lincoln's call for volunteers to suppress the rebellion.

the civil war and political parties

At first, most people in the North and South greeted the war as the type of calamity that required mutual support and cooperation, not partisanship, within communities. In the first Northern elections after the war started, partisans in many states worked together to forge Union slates to fill local or state offices. The Republicans were still claiming the name Union Party during Lincoln's reelection campaign in 1864. Most Democrats had long since become disillusioned, however. A faction of radical Republicans believed that the government needed to maximize its power to prosecute the war efficiently and resolve sectional differences permanently. They favored emancipation of slaves, confiscation of rebel property, the conscription of soldiers, and modernizing the North's banks, manufacturing, and railroads—positions that were anathema to most Democrats. Moderate Republicans preferred crafting policy in ways that answered Democrats' charges that Republicans intended to elevate African Americans and cared nothing for the wartime suffering of white Northerners—protecting the slave property of loyal individuals, for example, or reviewing draft quotas and procedures.

Democrats, too, factionalized. Peace Democrats (called Copperheads by Republicans) believed the Confederates were unbeatable on the field of battle but would return to the Union of their own accord if the Union faithfully protected constitutional rights. This strategy was well-suited to rebuilding the Democratic Party in the South after the war. Other Democrats believed that advocating peace smacked of defeatism and might destroy the party's legitimacy in the eyes of Northern voters. They supported the war but sharply criticized the Lincoln administration's conduct of it. The Democrats thus articulated popular wartime discontents, compelling Republicans to justify and sometimes moderate their policies. United at the beginning of the war, Northerners dissolved into hostile political factions because of the war.

Partisan activity no longer occurred only at election time. Some Republicans formed Union Leagues to help the war effort (and hector Democrats) year round; some Democrats joined the Order of American Knights to oppose the Union Leagues. Partisanship led to charges of disloyalty. Rumors of Copperhead plots to liberate Confederate prisoners of war circulated among Republicans in the Midwest. Churches, schools, and businesses, never politicized before, became in some communities places of political confrontation between supporters and opponents of the war. Off-duty soldiers sometimes attacked Democratic newspaper offices that published what the soldiers considered disloyal articles. Women took more interest in politics than they had previously and showed increasing sophistication in their arguments on political topics. Turnout in elections was high. Some states allowed soldiers to cast absentee ballots; commanders furloughed others home to vote. Soldiers favored the Republicans by a much larger proportion than did the civilian population, reflecting in many cases deep and abiding anger against the Peace Democrats. Negative views of the opposing party helped cement party identification for a generation to come.

The Confederacy, unlike the Union, had no acknowledged political parties. Like Lincoln, however, President Jefferson Davis sought to centralize the conduct of the war and resorted to measures like impressment of property, conscription, and heavy taxation to carry on the war. Professing support for the Southern cause but insisting that such measures threatened individual and states' rights, critics, including his own vice president, lambasted Davis on a daily basis. Without parties, the choices at election time lacked clarity and turnout was low. Those tired of the war responded as best they could, sometimes by avoiding military service and secreting property.

the legacy of war

Andrew Johnson, who succeeded to the presidency upon Lincoln's assassination in 1865, had been a lifelong Democrat who hoped to base reunification on the creation of a National Union Party embracing political moderates North and South. Republicans feared that the president's desire to accommodate white Southerners would undermine the freedom of the former slaves and set the stage for renewed sectional clashes. Republicans waved what was referred to as the bloody shirt of Civil War remembrance to reinforce the existing parties. Although the enactment of black suffrage in Southern states introduced the Republican Party there, with African-American voters flocking to the party that had freed them, many white southerners refused to accept the party's legitimacy. A long campaign of violence and intimidation brought conservative Democrats to power in every Southern state by 1877. These redeemers, as they were called, limited African-American voting and set the stage for what would later become a solidly Democratic South.

The legacy of the Civil War would thus shape the political identity of the political parties for the next hundred years. Memories of the war known as the Lost Cause sustained the Southern wing of the Democratic Party, which strongly supported states' rights and Jim Crow segregation laws. The Republican Party, on the other hand, identified itself as the Party of Lincoln, which had ended the institution of slavery. These identities, forged in the Civil War, would be recast by the Great Depression (1929–1941) and Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal (1933–1944).

bibliography

Altschuler, Glenn C., and Blumin, Stuart M. Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Frank, Joseph Allan. With Ballot and Bayonet: The Political Socialization of American Civil War Soldiers. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998.

McKitrick, Eric. "Party Politics and the Union and Confederate War Efforts." In The American Party Systems: Stages of Political Development, edited by William N. Chambers and Walter Dean Burnham. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Neely, Mark E., Jr. The Union Divided: Party Conflict in the Civil War North. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Rable, George C. The Confederate Republic: A Revolution against Politics. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.

Silbey, Joel H. The American Political Nation, 1838–1893. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991.

Smith, Adam I. P. "Beyond Politics: Patriotism and Partisanship on the Northern Home Front." In An Uncommon Time: The Civil War and the Northern Home Front, edited by Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller. New York: Fordham University Press, 2002.

Phyllis F. Field

Americans at War