1828-1932 (with hindsight) or 1940 (without hindsight) Democratic
Even during the Civil War?
The "random" draft was enforced at four times the rate in (poor, immigrant Catholic, Democratic) New York City than in (rich, WASP, Republican) Massachusetts. Federal Marshals would literally round up all the men on boats coming in to New York harbor from Europe and send them to the front lines. What's more, a rich (AKA, WASP Republican) draftee could avoid service by, at first, paying a $500 fee, or later paying a poor to fight in his place. Draftees, particularly immigrants, were put in the front ranks of soldiers during combat and suffered enormous (above 50%) casualties.
The identity of the people the Union was sending to their deaths explains a lot about their strategy during the war - constant high-casualty attacks whether or not they had any chance of success and regardless of how many casualties might be caused. Democratic general McClellan was famously sacked for objecting to that strategy.
Yes, the Republicans did free the slaves, and the significance of that cannot be discounted, although one might point out that the life of the post-war southern black sharecropper was not much different from the life of the southern black antebellum slave - and that
hundreds of thousands of now-unemployed ex-slaves starved to death after the war. So they freed the slaves, but did next to f[inks]-all (or in a huge number of cases,
far worse than f[inks]-all) to actually improve the lives of said slaves. Its main effect was to improve the lives of the slaves' descendants who moved to Northern states 50 years later or received legal protection from discrimination 100 years later,* not the lives of the slaves themselves. But while viewing the civil war as a Republican crusade to free the slaves
is accurate** (though they were far more concerned with
ending slavery than
helping the slaves), one must also consider how it was a rather cynical exercise by the Republicans in the mass slaughter of their political opponents, on
both sides of the lines.
I don't vote for people who want me dead. Same reason I'd leave the GOP during the AIDS crisis.
Also, when I was considering what party I'd be a part of, my major consideration was which party would be more likely to nominate someone with my particular set of views, and my demographic profile, for any given office. A libertarianish type such as myself would fit in very well with the "Barnburner"/"Loco-Foco"/"Young America" faction of the Democratic Party at the time, but would have a very hard time being nominated in the Republicans. Moving on to demographics: Of course, neither party would nominate an openly-atheist candidate at the time, but the Democrats were associated with non-religious types like Stephen Douglas, Andrew Jackson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Jefferson etc. And of course, neither party would nominate an openly-gay candidate either, although the Democrats elevated the transparently-closeted James Buchanan and William King to high office. And while it wasn't unheard of in the GOP, it would be far, far more likely at the time for someone of Catholic immigrant descent to be nominated for office by the Democrats.
So I'd have to say the Democrats have the decisive advantage on the "down with people like me" front during the Civil War period, on either an ideological or demographic basis.
*I apologize for being a little too into libertarianism-as-secular-religion in my old account and being obsessed with "freedom of association" to the point of opposing protections against discrimination. "Freedom of association," like all "rights" (which are, in actuality, really legal fictions when you have an entity with a monopoly on force), is not some magical cure-all that improves every situation, if only there were more "freedom of association."
**I also apologize for previously hawking the mendacious DiLorenzo crap that is was really about tariffs on my old account. I'd been sucked a little too far into the Lew Rockwell vortex at that point.
