Historical continuity of Democrats and Republicans

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

If slavery never existed, would Southern plantation owners have still been Democratic because of tariffs?

That's a huge counterfactual. If slavery had never existed, the South would be unrecognizable from IOTL socially, culturally, politically, and economically —and by extension the rest of North America (not to mention the wider world) would be as well. It's highly unlikely the United States still finds itself divided between Federalists and Republicans or Whigs and Democrats in such a world, if it even exists at all.

Somewhat more manageable is if the South somehow abolished slavery after the Revolution, the most likely scenario being via a gradual system of emancipation like what Jefferson proposed in Virginia —but even then we're talking about social changes so massive it's difficult to speculate with any degree of accuracy. Do free blacks stay in the South, or do they resettle elsewhere? (Ohio? the North? Liberia?) What replaces the plantation system? Does the South industrialize, or do they remain a primarily agricultural society? Without slavery's appetite for land as a driver of westward expansion, do Texas and the Southwest ever become part of the Union? How are other social causes effected by the absence of the abolitionist movement?

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

I don’t think the parties switched, but I also hate when people on Atlas say, “If you’re a Democrat and you think Woodrow Wilson is an HP, you’re uninformed”.

Depends on who is saying that. There are people who want to rehabilitate Wilson, but for the most part that is basically one side lobbing a distasteful figure at the other as one would lob a hand grenade.

That being said, Wilson was still by no means a Conservative though he certainly drew on some of the broader principles of traditional conservatism owing to this background and thus is no accident that Wilson is doing the same things as John Adams. The fact that he does these things does not put John Adams on the left, or Wilson on right, but what it does illustrate is that intellectual and academic influence is not siloed behind rigid walls and elements can jump from one side to the other simply because an important figure was exposed to that at one point or another.

Is anyone actually saying liberals can't criticize Wilson? I should think we're all capable of acknowledging that someone from our ideological heredity was not a good man or a good president, if that is your contention. Tracing my political philosophy to Jefferson doesn't mean I have to believe going to war with Britain in 1798 would have been a good idea. There's ideology, and then there's application and pragmatism. Two people can agree on the first and divide over the second and third; indeed, such has been a recurring theme throughout history (looking across the pond, the Sinn Féin split of 1922 comes to mind).

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

I don’t think the parties switched, but I also hate when people on Atlas say, “If you’re a Democrat and you think Woodrow Wilson is an HP, you’re uninformed”.

Depends on who is saying that. There are people who want to rehabilitate Wilson, but for the most part that is basically one side lobbing a distasteful figure at the other as one would lob a hand grenade.

That being said, Wilson was still by no means a Conservative though he certainly drew on some of the broader principles of traditional conservatism owing to this background and thus is no accident that Wilson is doing the same things as John Adams. The fact that he does these things does not put John Adams on the left, or Wilson on right, but what it does illustrate is that intellectual and academic influence is not siloed behind rigid walls and elements can jump from one side to the other simply because an important figure was exposed to that at one point or another.

Is anyone actually saying liberals can't criticize Wilson? I should think we're all capable of acknowledging that someone from our ideological heredity was not a good man or a good president, if that is your contention. Tracing my political philosophy to Jefferson doesn't mean I have to believe going to war with Britain in 1798 would have been a good idea. There's ideology, and then there's application and pragmatism. Two people can agree on the first and divide over the second and third; indeed, such has been a recurring theme throughout history (looking across the pond, the Sinn Féin split of 1922 comes to mind).

Not sure what you are responding to, nothing I said implied anything of the sort. What I am referring to is the desire of partisans at both sides to throw historical figures at the other side as if they were hand grenades, something we have all criticized at one time or another. It is similar to the "Hitler is a Socialist" meme but slightly different. In this case, it is taking an actual liberal and then highlighting the moral failings to damage the other side.

I was agreeing with your response to darklordoftech.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

I find it interesting that we often hear that slavery is “America’s Original Sin” and we hear of “America’s Puritan Roots” whenever there’s a discussion about alcohol or sex, but the Puritans and the slaveowners hated each other. The slaveowners were Cavaliers, the enemies and polar opposite of the Puritans.

It's because the perception of the Puritans has changed so drastically in the past 100 years, from that of tolerant and liberal-minded individuals to censorious and prudish. Most Americans don't understand the Puritans as how they actually were in the context of their time, and instead project backward views and attitudes onto them they didn't hold. For most of their history, the Puritans nearly always found themselves opposed to despotism and on the side of liberty.

Slavery was sinful to the Puritans because it infringed on the equality of man under God. If that sounds like liberal rhetoric, it is no accident. Liberalism as an ideology owes its existence to radical Protestant theology, and its tenets flowed directly from it. Almost any historian would agree that the Puritans were the radicals of their day and on the "left" of the political spectrum, so I'm frankly tired of RINO Tom's revisionist attempts to prove otherwise.

What? I agree the Puritans in many respects are the forbearers of the American Radical tradition, but depicting the folks who planned the Salem Witch Trials as reactionary fundamentalists is hardly a novel take and not unique to the last 100 years. (Have you read The Scarlet Letter?) If anything, the interpretation you are offering is the more "revisionist." (That is not inherently a bad thing! Sometimes our notions about history are wrong and need to be revised.) The idea of the Yankee Congregationalist as a hard, intolerant, disdainful figure of the conservative elites is very old. You can argue that such is incorrect and lacks nuance, but it's not a new idea.

The pedant in me would point out that the Puritans were not strictly speaking "on the left," as the left/right divide begins in the Assemblée Nationale in 1789, but I know what you mean —and it's pretty indisputable that what we broadly refer to as liberal society (democracy, separation of powers, free market economics, universal education, the idea that people have a professional "calling" the pursuit of which gives meaning to their lives) starts with the Puritans. Dichotomies are always fraught, but I don't think anyone would seriously argue Charles I and his supporters were not functionally the conservative party in the English Civil War (using conservative in its Classical or pre-modern sense) and it was the Glorious Revolution, carried out by English Protestants for the overthrow of Charles' literal and ideological heir, that provides the settings for Locke's original exploration of liberal ideology. It's not an accident that the American Revolution began in New England, or that the post-1865 liberal order was instituted by Yankees and their descendants in the Northwest.

Doing research on an unrelated topic earlier this week, I ran across this quote that I think speaks to what you're getting at: "Liberalism as a principle of government is only possible for a people that practices rigorous moral discipline." (Report from the Citizens of Hamburg, 1909) Of course this refers to liberalism as a system rather than an ideology, but the two are related. The extent to which they are distinct, I think, accounts for much of the disagreement here.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Once again this thread does not disappoint. That is a really excellent post —there might be points on which I might dissent, but on the whole I found it very compelling. The treatment of the Glorious Revolution is not one I've run across before, but fits nicely with what we know about how reform and revolution play out over generations. (For an American analogy, how members of the original Liberty party felt about the Republicans and Abraham Lincoln.)

I would caution against equating Fitzhugh too much with the Southern aristocracy as a whole. He is useful as the most extreme manifestation of attitudes that existed among the plantation class —but therefore definitionally, most of those would not have gone so far as to suggest, for instance, that the American Revolution was a mistake or that the very idea of a republic is folly. And, of course, there were slaveholders who Fitzhugh despised (Jefferson) who were notwithstanding very much part of the ruling elite.

On the whole, though, insofar as "liberal" denotes an advocate for the liberal system, I don't really disagree. I think this gets as well at the distinction between "liberals," "Liberals," and "Radicals" which I have teased once already, and will once again leave hanging for another day.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

(I'd written out a lengthy reply and the time-out ate it —gah!)

There is a desire here it seems to paint a broad brush whereby every Radical Republican is a marxist and every Democrat is a Conservative plantation owner. I think therein lies the problem here, one of over generalization as well as discounting other political issues which by the 1870s were beginning to rise to the forefront again as the Civil War receded to the background and especially so with the Panic of 73 a year later.

THIS.

While today's progressives are quite understandably inclined to sympathize with Radical Reconstruction given the obvious benefits for modern America had it succeeded (and I am one of these people), at the time many so-called Liberal Republicans—Sumner, Chase, Greeley—objected to the most extreme proposals for Reconstruction precisely because they went against their liberal, democratic values. To illustrate this by way of an imperfect example, it is easy to imagine many liberals today having problems with a plan to defund the police that included the permanent mass disenfranchisement of current and former law enforcement officials and confiscation of private property. Similarly, many Republican radicals were genuinely torn between their commitment to protecting the rights for former slaves and the sometimes illiberal means necessary to uphold Reconstruction. Whether the ends justify the means is a conversation for another thread, but it should at least be possible to understand why they felt this way.

Yankee brings up economics/class issues as a motive for the Liberal–Democratic alliance in 1872, and it's worth remembering that many of the first generation Radical Republicans were in fact former Democrats or Free Soil men —Hamlin, Hale, Frémont, Wilmot, and Chase, to name a few. Those who remained in the Republican party after 1874 were mostly former Whigs, reflecting the reversion to a class-based party system as Reconstruction faded into the background. An interesting case is that of Charles Francis Adams, a Conscience Whig-turned-Free Soil man who became a Democrat after 1872, voted for Tilden in 1876 and Hancock in 1880.

Also, it's worth noting that while, yes, "radical" can usually be read as "left-wing" in the nineteenth century, radicalism is not socialism or Marxism and it is a very, very bad idea to confuse the two. (The direct lineal descendants of the English radicals are the Liberal Democrats, for instance.) The radicals didn't become socialists, they were supplanted by them as radicalism grew obsolete and its policy prescriptions insufficient to address the political situation of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. So it's fine to say the Radical Republicans were left wing for their time, but there are important differences between their worldview and that of contemporary progressives that are not entirely contextual.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Found this down a rabbit hole while researching the 1836 election: a very interesting source on the 1840s Democratic party in New Hampshire. The author summarizes the Whig program as "Let government take care of the rich, and the rich will take care of the poor" and describes the Democrats as the party of the laborer. He notes that many Whigs have accused the Democrats of "radicalism" and "agrarianism" —Webster's 1864 dictionary defines socialism as "a new name for agrarianism."

While the source is obviously heavily biased toward the Democratic worldview, I thought it was illustrative of what that worldview was.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Here’s an interesting question - what was the earliest point at which someone would have, if you asked them to briefly explain the differences between the two major parties (or you looked it up in an encylopaedia), responded that the Democrats were the more liberal/left-of-centre party, and the Republicans the more conservative/right-of-centre party?

Probably quite recently, but that tells us basically nothing about the parties' ideological pedigrees: prior to the twentieth century Americans used conservative to mean "moderate," while "liberal" broadly suggested a nationalistic/capitalistic outlook. In the nineteenth century radical is the commonest term for a left-of-center worldview, and it is applied to the Democrats and their antecedents as early as 1796 or before, while the corresponding term (ultra)—though less common—was being used to describe the American right decades before the GOP took the stage. More often, if one wanted to suggest a party or candidate was a died-in-the-wool reactionary prior to 1850, one would just call them a Federalist —it got the point across and was a fairly effective smear long after the Federal party* ceased to exist.



*Much as with the Jeffersonian "Democratic-Republicans," who in fact called themselves Republicans only for lazy political scientists to apply the "Democratic-" antecedent centuries later (thus confusing the Jeffersonians' relationship to the Jacksonians, who really did call themselves Democratic Republicans, and the National Republicans led by Henry Clay), it appears the nominative form of the name of Alexander Hamilton's political organization was Federal, and Federalist is an adjective used to describe people or things associated with that party.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

I'm not sure who would suggest that Walter Mondale isn't part of the liberal Democratic tradition, but I would love to hear Henry's taken on how Reagan is actually a radical Western Republican.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

I don't have a lot of time right now, but three general observations:

(1) The vast majority of white Americans—Protestant and Catholic—would have described evangelical abolitionists as fanatics at any point prior to the Civil War. Your analysis is further marred by the fact that it cites Southern Catholics almost exclusively, at a time when Protestant and Catholic churches alike were dividing along sectional lines. (To give an example from the Protestant side, Northwestern Christian University—today Butler University—was established by the Hoosier Disciples of Christ in 1849 under the direction Ovid Butler, a prominent editor and abolitionist, as a counter to the denomination's other school, Bethany College in Kentucky, whose president was noted slavery apologist Alexander Campbell. When the Civil War began, Butler's sons went into the Union Army, while Campbell's fought for the Confederacy.) If Catholics as a group were on average more hostile to abolitionism than Protestants, it is because most American Catholics at the time were poor Irish and German immigrants who received pro-slavery propaganda warning of the millions of freed slaves who would come North to take their jobs with ready ears. For obvious reasons, well-to-do New England Congregationalists did not share these concerns. There were, in fact, several prominent Catholic abolitionists active in the Antebellum period —Orestes Brownlow comes to mind.

(2) But even discounting all of that, as has been remarked many times in this thread already, there is liberalism as a sociopolitical system and there is liberalism as an ideology. There is a reason libertarians and other modern-day reactionaries often stupidly call themselves "classical liberals." The well-to-do Congregationalist Yankee upper classes of the 1860s were certainly liberal in the sense that they facilitated the rise of the modern industrial market economy. They were not, by any stretch of the imagination, "left wing" unless one focuses exclusively on slavery (as you are wont to do). It is perfectly possible to be both pro-slavery or indifferent to the institution and also left-wing on the class and economic issues which were the basis for partisan rivalry in the nineteenth century, excepting the period from 1854 to 1874. When I have run across "liberal" in contemporary (1860s) sources, it is usually in reference to a nationalist and, yes, socially conservative program favored by the upper middle classes who went on to become robber barons and industrialists during the Gilded Age.

(3) Once again, the "clash of civilizations" narrative that you are pushing here has a certain amount of merit ... as it pertains to the Civil War. In the sense that Northern society circa. 1860 represented a democratic, progressive force in world history relative to the feudalistic and reactionary South, I agree with your assessment of the ideological direction of the parties. That analysis does not hold water prior to 1854, however, and it is doubtful at best following the de facto end of Congressional Reconstruction in 1874/76. As was observed by another poster in another recent thread, quoting politicians and public figures from the 1850s is not a good way to understand the 1830s!

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

(1) The point, Henry, is that abolitionists made up a minority of the population as a whole prior to 1860. I never claimed Orestes Brownlow was representative of the average Catholic. It is not surprising that most American Catholics were anti-abolitionist, because most Americans were  anti-abolitionist. Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, even Congregationalists —practically every major Christian denomination except Quakers —produced many prominent pro-slavery theologians of both Northern and Southern origin in the period between 1830 and 1850. It is very strange to me that, as evidence of your claim that Catholics were uniquely reactionary among Antebellum religious groups, you cite the Know-Nothings —objectively the most reactionary and anti-democratic American political movement to come out of the first half of the nineteenth century. If Catholics were put off from what you call "liberalism" by a xenophobic, reactionary cult-like order that wanted to purify America of foreign influences, perhaps that's because those people were not exactly good radicals themselves.

That said, it is a historical fact that the institutional Catholic Church was fiercely opposed to the doctrines and organizing of the early labor movement and remained a staunch enemy of labor unions and socialist political parties well into the twentieth century —so I'm not going to argue that the Catholic clergy was something other than politically reactionary. Where there are notable exceptions to that rule (Father Edward McGlynn comes to mind), they were denounced and in some cases actually excommunicated. Globally, the most noteworthy exception to this rule was the British Labour party, whose advocacy on behalf of Catholics as a religious minority earned them a pass from the Vatican in their regular attacks on socialism.

Fundamentally, though, while Republicans in the post-war period loved to decry the party of "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion," the majority of Democrats in this era were Protestants. Trying to portray the Democratic party as an agent of the institutional Catholic Church is propagandistic in the extreme. Catholics as a group supported the Democratic party because (a) they were mostly poor immigrants, and the Democratic party was the party of poor immigrants; and (b) the Whigs and Republicans were always talking about how they weren't "real" Americans and shouldn't be allowed to vote.

(2) I find your argument in this section frankly hard to follow, but I will do my best.

It is easy to find Americans of all political stripes who supported the 1848 revolutions: attacking the conservative monarchies of Europe was a popular cause with Americans in the first half of the nineteenth century, who (rightly) saw themselves as engaged in a common struggle against the stubborn remnants of a feudal order past its time. Even President Polk, hardly a radical egalitarian, was sympathetic to the revolutionaries, remarking of the overthrow of the Bourbons in France:

"all our sympathies are naturally enlisted on the side of a great people who, imitating our example, have resolved to be free. That such sympathy should exist on the part of the people of the United States with the friends of free government in every part of the world, and especially in France, is not remarkable. We can never forget that France was our early friend in our eventful Revolution, and generously aided us in shaking off a foreign yoke and becoming a free and independent people. We have enjoyed the blessings of our system of well regulated self-government for near three-fourths of a century, and can properly appreciate its value. Our ardent and sincere congratulations are extended to the patriotic people of France upon their noble and thus far successful efforts to found for their future government liberal [!!!] institutions similar to our own."[/size]

(Among those Americans sympathetic to the revolutionaries, incidentally, were the many thousand Irish and German Catholics who arrived in the United States during this period, many of them fleeing the reactionary governments that followed their unsuccessful attempts to introduce liberal democracy on the continent.)

Much has been made of the link between the abolitionists and socialist movements, and not without cause. There was obviously a fair degree of overlap between people who supported freedom for working people everywhere and people who found slavery morally unacceptable, for what I hope are obvious reasons. (I would love to discuss this more at length in another thread, because it is a subject that fascinates me, and that I find particularly amusing in light of the attempts by Dinesh D'Souza and other associated halfwits to argue that slavery was a byproduct of Democrat socialism.)  However, obviously the vast majority of abolitionists were not socialists, and the movement drew significant support from upper middle class New Englanders whose views on issues apart from slavery were notably less-than-liberal. Hence the split between male abolitionists and suffragists when the Fifteenth Amendment failed to extend the vote to women as well as black men; hence the failure of Congressional Reconstruction to attack private property with the same vigor it went after the political legacy of slavery.

But while this is very interesting, it is also somewhat moot, because socialism is not liberalism. So if you want to say that the bankers and industrialists who ruled the Gilded Age like petty tyrants were "liberals" promoting a program of "liberalism," I guess I am okay with that, provided that we establish that liberalism is not synonymous with leftism, and after 1880 or so was arguably in opposition to it. The liberalism of the Gilded Age was of the strain that survives in Europe as the Liberal Democrats, the FDP, and other similar parties that are identified broadly with the right. I think I have said before, but if not I will say now, that I consider the Bourbon Democrats to be objectively on the right, and arguably to the right of some Republicans (Henry Teller, for instance, or Sherman in his later years). Historians who deal with this period in European history often write about "conservative liberals," and I suppose I would not object to that characterization of a certain kind of Republican who existed after 1880 or so.

(3) Frederick Douglass was one person, and while obviously a man of exceptional intelligence, I wouldn't say he was terribly representative of the average Republican for what should be obvious reasons. It shouldn't be surprising that Douglass far preferred the social systems of the North to those of the South, and I doubt if many Northern Democrats would have argued that the country should become more like the former Confederacy in the 1880s. In any case, I don't see how this quote is very significant. Practically every political party that has existed since 1789 has called themselves the party of progress and their opponents the party of the past; it's not a unique or particularly interesting rhetorical formula.


I feel like we're losing the train of the conversation here, though. My position throughout all of this has been:

(a) The Federalists and their successors (the Whigs from 1834 to 1854 and the Republicans from ~1874 through to the end of the nineteenth century and beyond) represented the established monied interests and the New England upper classes, who were mostly Protestants;
(b) The Jeffersonian Republicans and the Democrats (except for the period from 1854 to 1874) represented those left behind in the tumult of the Industrial Revolution and who did not share in the massive wealth being created in nineteenth century America: namely, poor farmers and immigrants, wage laborers, and religious minorities, who for various reasons disliked and resented the hegemony of the aforementioned ruling class;
(c) In the South, the reactionary planter class initially favored the Federalists and later the Whigs as a check on the democratic impulses of their lower classes (including slaves), but gradually switched over to the Democrats as sectional politics became more important and the Jacksonian obsession with "states' rights" became a convenient cover for their pro-slavery and anti-democratic agenda in light of the growing national anti-slavery majority;
(d) After the Civil War, this group stayed with the Democrats and successfully leveraged racial politics to establish a one-party state throughout the former Confederacy which necessitated that aspiring politicians of all ideological persuasions become Democrats if they hoped to be elected;
(e) The Republican party, by contrast, was organized primarily on opposition to the institution of slavery and was initially dominated by its powerful liberal wing, who nominated ex-Democrat John C. Frémont in 1856, and whose strength was augmented by the addition of radical ex-Whigs;
(f) Beginning in 1872, and in earnest after 1874, the exodus of liberals and leftists from the Republican party made it so that by 1880, the average Republican supported an essentially right-wing economic program designed to serve the interests of wealthy industrialists, while in the Northern states the Democrats were at least nominally more welcoming of economically left-leaning politicians (Eugene V. Debs was elected as a Democrat in Indiana during this period), despite personal and regional idiosyncrasies we have discussed at length;
(g) While the conservative-liberal Republicans and the liberal-conservative Democrats bickered over the tariff and monetary policy, each torn internally between moderates and hardliners, the political left was developing on the margins via a series of third parties, culminating in the joint nomination of William Jennings Bryan by the Democrats, Populists, and Silver Republicans in 1896, a fusion made possible by the Democrats' Jeffersonian pedigree and popularity with two key components of the left coalition: immigrants and farmers.


If we want to debate the role of religion in shaping emergent nineteenth century industrial capitalism or views on women's liberation, I'm happy to have that conversation, but so much time has passed since this thread was started that I wanted to clarify what we're talking about.

P.S. While this strays into the realm of subjective historical interpretation, I will submit as an olive branch that whether the Whig/Republican economic program was inherently conservative or liberal in character, it was certainly necessary for the rise of the industrial proletariat, and so from an accelerationist point of view there is an argument to be made that Republican governance in the 1880s and 90s was at least conducive to leftist ends —if that's your sort of thing.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

3) Fair enough, but look at the electoral maps of the Gilded Age. It's not like the sectional divide went away; to the contrary, it remained as present as it had during the Civil War. The United States did not return to the antebellum, more class-based system where men voted their class regardless of region, but remained deeply divided between North and South. Looking at those late 19th century maps, I know which side I'm on, and so does Frederick Douglass.

As you say it is much to late (or perhaps too early ) to respond to the whole of your post, but you have made this same or similar comment enough times to prompt me to reply to it now: do you just look at the state winners and conclude that there was a "solid North" that supported the Republicans throughout the later nineteenth century? Because the assertion that party politics in the Gilded Age were not first and foremost about class is laughably false. Of course, fraud and intimidation as well as a relentless racist propaganda campaign served to keep the lower South solidly in the Democratic column, and upper New England was almost as reliable for the Republicans; but the lower North and even to an extent the upper South remained competitive, especially down-ballot —a reality that is not reflected by the monotonous electoral college maps of the period. In 1880, no fewer than twelve states (146 electors) were decided by less than 5% of the vote; in 1884 it was 13 (172 ev); in 1888, 14 (189 ev). By contrast, in 1860 only 10 states (85 ev) were decided by fewer than 5% of the vote, almost all of them in the South —of the free states excluding California and Oregon, only Illinois did not vote for Lincoln by at least 7% of the vote, this owing of course to Douglas' influence. To state that the country twenty or thirty years later was similarly polarized along sectional lines is demonstrably false.

Yankee has already addressed the class dynamic, so I will not go into it further except to say there is a reason why we call it "the Gilded Age" and not "the Yankee Age" or "the War of Right-Wing Catholic Aggression."

I will also say, that while I have my own prejudices and favorite figures of this era, and enjoy the the subjective debates we have in the "who would you have voted for" threads and interactive TLs over on Individual Politics, when we are trying here to conduct a more-or-less objective analysis of the period, I do not think it helpful to approach these discussions from the point of view of arguing for your "side," and I somewhat resent the implication that I am somehow on the side of 'not Frederick Douglass.' I hope I am mistaken in my impression of this your last comment.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

The institutional Catholic Church was not only opposed to organized labor and socialist movements, but liberal democracy itself, which as you later note were indeed different things. I can only say I'm a bit surprised that the Labour party were advocates for Catholics, since in the early 18th century they were mostly Tories, but I guess things had changed a little since then .

You know at the risk of being disrespectful, I would almost surmise that you view ones politics as genetic or hereditary. All Catholics have to be reactionaries because of the Pope, All Yankees have to be liberals because of Cromwell and even the poorest of Southern dirt farming Johnny Cash type has to be a far right reactionary.

This is not how the world works. People's political outlook is at once idiosyncratic and is derived from their socio-economic status, their surroundings, and their treatment by the dominant forces economic, religious, societal, racial and ethnically speaking.

Catholics in Britain were an oppressed minority, many occupied down market laboring jobs and were exploited by the wealthy classes, and you find it surprising that a "Socialist/Social Democratic" party would oppose religious discrimination and support workers rights?

Because Catholics are evil, Yankee. Bloody Mary burned heretics at the stake and the Stuart monarchy waged war against parliament. Ergo every Catholic is a reactionary and every anti-Catholic bigot is a liberal crusader!

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

It is very difficult to frame an argument when you are always jumping from decade to decade like this, Henry. Obviously the Democrats of the 1880s are very different from the Democrats of the 1830s, and so on. But indeed, what matters in determining ideology is not the personal wealth of individual politicians or lawmakers —which is why it is so ridiculous that you continue to hold up the fact that certain leading Democrats were slaveholders in the period before 1850 as conclusive proof they were conservatives —but as you say, the policy aims of the respective parties. When we examine the period prior to 1850, we can see that the Democrats had the broad policy aim of distributing wealth more equally among the large mass of the people, while the Federalists and whigs had the broad aim of increasing the wealth of a few, which they believed would "trickle down" to the rest of the country.

(1) Unless you are specifically talking about the period from 1850 to 1865, it is inaccurate to say the Democrats were uniquely the pro-slavery party. As has been addressed many times in this thread, the Whigs and Federalists drew strong support from the slaveholding class until their collapse following the Kansas–Nebraska Act, and many of the most boisterous defenders of slavery (Alexander Stephens, for instance) continued to support various Whig successor parties right up until the outbreak of the Civil War. John C. Calhoun was a founding member of the Whig party in the 1830s, and Henry Clay actively sought a political alliance with the nullifiers in 1833 to strengthen the anti-Jackson coalition. Prior to 1850, slaveholders in the Western interior generally preferred the Whigs to the Democrats because the former supported the river improvements on the Ohio and Mississippi that allowed them to transport the produce of slavery to New Orleans where it could be sold to a global market. Even as late as 1861, slaveholders in Kentucky were reluctant to join their neighbors in Tennessee and Virginia in bolting the Union because they rightly perceived free and unencumbered passage along the Ohio essential to their interests. Before the Whigs, the Federalists drew strong support from slaveholders in the Carolinas up until their collapse in 1800, after which they effectively ceased to be a functioning party at the national level —Thomas and Charles C. Pinckney, Patrick Henry, John Marshall, Edward Rutledge, and of course George Washington were slaveowners.

(2) Even despite the vicious political rhetoric of the Antebellum period, in which candidates for public office were frequently denounced as cannibals, devil-worshippers, bloodthirsty murderers, and worse, nobody ever suggested the Democrats were a "Tory" party —quite the opposite. (I know this is not your specific contention.) The label most commonly applied to the Jacksonians was "agrarian." Agrarianism was, in fact, an early form of wealth redistribution; Webster's dictionary from 1864 defines socialism as "a new name for agrarianism." Keep in mind that even by 1850, the majority of Americans in all sections of the country still lived on farms. Land was the predominant form of wealth, more common in the West than hard currency, and selling land to poor landless men and new immigrants at low prices might be seen as an early precursor to universal basic income —an effort to ensure that every citizen had the means to support himself and his family, and that land (i.e. wealth) did not become concentrated in the hands of a rich few. This was the reason for Jackson's (misguided) policy of only accepting hard money as payment for land —requiring buyers pay in coin was an attempt to keep land out of the hands of speculators who would buy up all the land in an area and sell it back to the people at a massive markup. The Whigs, by contrast, portrayed themselves as the friend of speculation and the business interests. It is popular in the present day to ridicule agrarianism as "outdated" or evidence that the Democrats were just very stupid people who wanted everyone to live on farms, but I would argue it was no more unrealistic than any other leftist policy that has since been overtaken by the progress of society.

(3) After 1850 I would agree that Democrats were no longer functionally a liberal party; while they continued to use liberal rhetoric in their appeals for votes, in practical terms their only function was to serve as the political arm of the slave power, and they became increasingly reliant on appeals to racial prejudice to keep poor whites in the party. At this point the genuine liberals bolted the party, leaving only the craven and the genuinely pro-slavery to carry on the Democratic organization. After 1868, prominent Democrats (including Salmon P. Chase) began to advocate for a "new departure" —a return to the populist economic issues that had served them so well in the period before 1850. This succeeded in attracting some liberal elements back from the Republicans, while other leftists spurned both parties in favor of the Greenbacks and later the Populists. As I've said previously, I would consider the Bourbon Democrats of this period to be an essentially reactionary force —if not conservatives, then conservative liberals —and while I don't believe personal ideology should really play a factor in these discussions, I would take the average "Mugwump" or Republican "Half-breed" to a Bourbon Democrat any day of the week. Nevertheless, it is important to note that in the 1870s, the Democrats were the preferred of the two major parties among the labor movement, and men such as Eugene Debs were Democrats during this period. That isn't an accident.

(4) The stated purpose of Federalism and later Whiggery was to advance the interests of the capitalist class. You can take the accelerationist view that such was necessary to bring forward the evolution of genuine leftism, or you can argue that the wealth generated by the first half-century of the Industrial Revolution really did "trickle down" to the masses. What you cannot escape is that the Federalists and later Whigs supported policies that they and everyone else believed were to the benefit of the commercial interests, and were opposed by the socialists, labor organizers, and radical egalitarians of their day. There is a reason why Thoreau was a Democrat! There is a reason why the Working Men's party folded into the Jacksonian organization after the 1820s. In terms of the relative social and economic platforms of the two parties, the Federalists and later Whigs generally took the more conservative side of the argument, opposing disestablishment of the state church in Connecticut, the expansion of the vote to non-landowners in Rhode Island, supporting the Alien and Sedition Acts, etc. Unlike slavery, there was no bipartisan support for these measures at the time. The few Federalists and Whigs who deviated from the party line were abandoned by the party establishment, leading them to ally with the Democrats.

(5) The Republicans of the 1850s were quite clearly the party of the bourgeoisie. At a time when the principal struggle in society was between the representatives of the rising middle class and the entrenched Southern feudal class, this was arguably a left-wing position from an interpretive standpoint; at the very least, it is the side leftists should come down on. Hence Marx's support for the early Republican program, as you have noted. After 1869, Republican economic policy becomes decidedly more pro-business, and while still attracting significant support from workingmen due to (a) support for tariffs, (b) waving the bloody shirt, and (c) the Democrats' by this time outdated views on commerce and industry, they weren't a leftist party. One could make a fairly convincing argument, however, that after 1880 or so there was a significant proto-progressive minority within the Republican party; it was this minority that succeeded in nominating Benjamin Harrison in 1888 and later Theodore Roosevelt in 1904 and William Howard Taft in 1908. The first battle between the conservative and proto-progressive Republicans was at the 1884 convention, however, where the Mugwumps attempted to prevent the nomination of James G. Blaine. When their efforts failed, many deserted the party to support—yes—the Democratic nominee, Grover Cleveland (a decision they presumably came to regret).

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

1) Fair enough, but on the whole the Federalists and Whigs were more antislavery than their opponents, I think you'd agree, owing to their bases of power in the Northeast, even if there existed many individual pro-slavery Federalists/Whigs and antislavery Republicans/Democrats.

I would put it slightly differently, that a militant abolitionist was more likely to be a Whig than a Democrat due the the sectional/cultural issues you mention. I would not characterize the Whig party, or even Northern Whigs, as a whole as being genuinely committed to an anti-slavery policy. The Whigs' reputation for being a "moderate" party on slavery is pretty unearned in my view, as their so-called moderation always seemed to yield results that were beneficial to the slave power. Henry Clay was absolutely hated by abolitionists in the North, and he disliked them for good measure; John Quincy Adams famously distrusted him, and the abolitionist song I named my most recent attempt at a TL after includes a verse castigating Clay:

Railroads to emancipation
Cannot rest on Clay foundation ...

And for good reason! Clay's brand of Unionism blamed abolitionists for "antagonizing" the South with their attacks on slavery and sought primarily to silence criticism of the peculiar institution rather than put it on the path to extinction as the Republicans would later propose. There were individual Whigs who took an anti-slavery position (JQA and Joshua Reed Giddings being the two most famous), but with a few exceptions these tended to be of the younger generation. The majority of the party—and indeed the national population—had a dim view of anti-slavery activism and had little interest in addressing the institution one way or the other.

As for the Federalists, I tend to take a somewhat more generous view of someone like John Jay (who as governor signed the 1799 law to abolish slavery in New York) or even Washington than I do of Clay, given they actually took steps (however small) to dismantle the institution. I will point out, however, that Jefferson pursued much the same plan in Virginia as Jay successfully lobbied for in New York, and arguably did more to weaken slavery in the long term than any other founding father by keeping slavery out of the Northwest and trying unsuccessfully to outlaw it in all federal territory with his 1784 land bill. (He was still a filthy racist of course.) Anti-slavery sentiment was simply more popular with the founding generation than with the generation that came of age after the War of 1812, but with few exceptions not much was accomplished on the slavery front after the 1780s. So I would not characterize the Federalists as an anti-slavery party, merely a party that had some nominally anti-slavery members.

2) In naming themselves the "Whigs" and casting themselves as defenders of the Constitution against "King Andrew", I think there was at least some suggestion or implication that the Democrats were like Tories, but I'll defer to you on the names they called each other. But continuing on this point, it seems strange to me to refer to Jackson and his party as liberals when the sort of populist demagoguery and personal loyalty they engaged in was anathema to the liberalism of the time, which was protective of representative institutions and feared the too great concentration of power in one man. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America, he had this to say about the President:

General Jackson, whom the Americans have for the second time chosen to be at their head, is a man of violent character and middling capacities; nothing in the whole of his career indicated him to have the qualities needed for governing a free people; moreover, a majority of the enlightened classes in the Union have always been against him. Who then put him on the President's chair and keeps him there still? It is all due to the memory of a victory he won twenty years ago under the walls of New Orleans.

The Jacksonians may have been democrats, as their name implies, but I don't see them as liberals. It is the constitutional rhetoric of the Whigs, moreover, which bears much closer resemblance to how liberals in Europe spoke at the time in their battles with monarchists.

I don't know why it would seem strange. Populism is a rhetorical devise; liberalism is an ideology. The two are not inherently incompatible. It would be strange indeed if liberals in Europe and America were perfectly in agreement with their strategies for contesting and exercising power, considering the dramatic differences between American and European society during this period. Specifically, we cannot discount the significance of universal (white) manhood suffrage existing in the U.S. but not in Europe; the Jacksonians accordingly were appealing to an electorate made up of men of every class and background, while the European liberals were mostly middle-class men appealing to other middle-class men. I find it significant that during the early republic, when the electorate was (somewhat) more restricted than during the Jacksonian period, the Jeffersonians employed much the same rhetorical strategies and appeals to constitutionalism that you describe: and in that line let us not forget that John Adams was the first president to be called a tyrant recklessly concentrating power in the executive, if we are going to be taking propagandists at their word.

Furthermore, cults of personality were hardly unique to the Democrats of this period: basically every presidential candidacy of the middle nineteenth century featured extravagant efforts to transform the candidate into the cartoon of a rustic hero: thus we get "Old Tippecanoe," "Harry of the West," "Young Hickory," "Old Rough and Ready," etc. Throughout the 1830s parties were referred to in newspapers not by their proper names, but by the name of the presidential candidate —the "Van Buren party," the "Harrison party," and so-on. If personal loyalty is inimical to liberalism, there were no liberals in middle nineteenth century America.

In any event, I have never claimed Jackson was personally a liberal. He strikes me as a man who had very few beliefs that could be described as ideological, and it is significant that prior to his presidency he appealed to former Federalists and Republicans alike. What I have maintained is that Jacksonianism as a political movement fits broadly into the tapestry of the evolution of American liberalism, preserving in bastardized form the essential egalitarian impulses of Jeffersonianism with respect to white men, a general suspicion of banks and organized money, which would inform the later candidacies of Bryan and FDR (who I think we would both agree are liberals).


I don't have much more to say about Frederick Douglass (broadly speaking it's a bad idea to accept any historical figure's word as gospel; Douglass had his biases like everybody else and is speaking from a very specific point of view), but I do want to address this bit.

Also, which populist economic issues are you referring to which the Democrats returned to? They had always opposed the tariff and on the currency question they continued to advocate hard money, which was hardly a populist position in the 1870s when the Greenbackers were arguing for fiat currency.

I was referring to the Great Railway Strike of 1877, in which the governor of Indiana at the time—James "Blue Jeans" Williams, a Democrat elected with Greenback support—sided with the strikers by refusing to call in the militia. Williams' election on a Democatic-Greenback fusion ticket was not uncommon, as the Democrats were the Greenback's preferred partner in such ventures outside the South. (Harris M. Plaisted was the Democratic-Greenback governor of Maine from 1881 to 1883, and Benjamin Butler was elected governor of Massachusetts as a result of a similar bargain in 1882.) But in general I agree that the Democrats were not genuinely left-wing during this period, hence my preference for the Greenbacks and the later Populists.

4) But as Alcibiadies noted, capitalism was intrinsically tied up with liberalism at this point, so its advancement was not really a conservative objective. And I'm not sure everyone believed Whig policies were pursued only to help the rich; who are we to say they didn't genuinely believe in Listian economics and the necessity of developing US national industry, regardless of who the most benefits went to? In any case, bankrupting the slaveholders to enrich the capitalist class was a real step forward in the march of history, though it would've been nice if the Radical Republicans had succeeded in redistributing the wealth of the South to poor people as they intended.

That was true in England, but as I said previously there are significant differences between the U.S. and the U.K. during this period that make a direct comparison problematic, significantly the absence of universal manhood suffrage and the existence of a feudal class order prior to the nineteenth century. In the U.K. the elites were a hereditary nobility and many poor men could not vote, so of course the Liberals appealed to the bourgeoisie. In the U.S., you had a landed gentry in the South (who mostly voted Whig outside of Virginia) and a monied interest in the North who prior to 1850 marched in lock step —the "lords of the loom" and the "lords of the lash." After 1850 Northern industrialists came to see slavery as a threat to their self-interest, but that wasn't the case before: hence why slaveholders loved the Whig party and Hamilton kept trying to elect Pinckneys over the more troublesome Adams.

Ultimately, though, this is an interpretive question. If you take Marx's view that the development of capitalism is prerequisite for the rise of the international proletariat, than you can absolutely argue the Federalist/Whig economic platform was overall conducive to left-wing ends. That's not how people saw it at the time, but it's a valid historiographical framework, at least in my opinion.

5) Indeed, but I'm reminded of something Yankee once said in another thread (or perhaps earlier in this one). It was about how sometimes in history there have been ideological alignments which pitted conservatives and leftists/labor together against liberals. His claim was that the Republican Party at its founding included both conservative businessmen and socialists drawn together against Democratic liberals, but I'm increasingly getting the sense that the opposite was true, if you replace "businessmen" with "slave owners" and "socialists" with "labor". Even if socialist thinkers like Marx who understood the importance of the slavery battle supported the Republicans, most workingmen in the 1850s continued to vote Democratic based on the old economic issues and racist demagogic appeals. They were joined in the party by slave owners, of course, desperate to preserve their favored economic and political position from abolitionism. On the other side, in the Republican Party, we see Northern liberals and the bourgeois middle class, determined to liberate the oppressed slaves of the South. Examining the most extreme ends of both sides in the slavery debate, this reversal of Yankee's position bears out at an individual level too. While George Fitzhugh decried Northern capitalism and modernity and argued for his form of "Tory socialism", William Lloyd Garrison championed Lockean natural rights and the cause of individual liberty in his war against the slave power.

I don't immediately disagree with this, though again I would caution against over-reliance on Fitzhugh. (And since this is a thread about political parties, it's worthwhile to note that Garrison hated the Whigs and the Democrats equally and refused to vote on principle.)

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

The rise of King Cotton is what produces the radicalized Southern fire eater over the course of the ensuing decades, from the likes of John C. Calhoun to Jefferson Davis, by which point you get people trying spin slavery as a positive "civilizing force", which was not present to my knowledge in the 1780s.

And the planters themselves were positively aware that this shift in opinion had occurred —as we've both discussed previously, pro-slavery literature of the 1850s is full of denunciations of Jefferson. There is an essay published in Debow's Review (a pro-slavery publication) during the campaign of 1860 I love to quote that captures this revisionist history quite well:

Now, to return to the year 1790; at that time the number of slaves was comparatively small, and the disposition to emancipate them quite general. People saw that slavery was an evil to the country; they had no longer a King George to compel its existence, and there can be no doubt but that in a few years, there would have been a general emancipation; the negroes would have decreased in numbers, owing to their idleness and profligacy, and afterward the great immigration of Irish and German labor would have crushed them by competition in the marts of industry, and the black race would probably have been swallowed up in the capacious maw of civilization, as many savage races have been before them. But just at this juncture, just in the nick of time, and only ten years after King George had relinquished his rule in America, in steps King Cotton, forbidding by his power what the other had forbidden by his veto, viz.: the abolition of slavery; and so the negroes were saved.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

As for the Federalists, I tend to take a somewhat more generous view of someone like John Jay (who as governor signed the 1799 law to abolish slavery in New York) or even Washington than I do of Clay, given they actually took steps (however small) to dismantle the institution. I will point out, however, that Jefferson pursued much the same plan in Virginia as Jay successfully lobbied for in New York, and arguably did more to weaken slavery in the long term than any other founding father by keeping slavery out of the Northwest and trying unsuccessfully to outlaw it in all federal territory with his 1784 land bill. (He was still a filthy racist of course.) Anti-slavery sentiment was simply more popular with the founding generation than with the generation that came of age after the War of 1812, but with few exceptions not much was accomplished on the slavery front after the 1780s. So I would not characterize the Federalists as an anti-slavery party, merely a party that had some nominally anti-slavery members.

How much would you say that has to do with the Enlightenment? In the book Burr by Gore Vidal, set in the 1830s, a repeated trope is this idea that Burr is a thoroughly 18th century man with ideas and attitudes that are no longer fashionable in the 19th.

I don't know about Gore Vidal or his characterization of Burr, but in broad terms I would agree that the Enlightenment concept of natural rights lent itself to certain anti-slavery conclusions. If you hold that all people are created essentially equal and with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property, it is very difficult to justify holding your fellow men in bondage, whatever racial prejudices you may harbor notwithstanding. (I'm reminded of a letter Jefferson wrote to the French abolitionist Henri Gregoire in 1808, where he equivocates over whether blacks are the intellectual equals of whites, but then adds, "whatever be their degree of talent it is no measure of their rights" —meaning, in essence, that even if blacks are inferior, it does not justify slavery, a sentiment later generations of Southerners would passionately denounce as you are so fond of quoting.) As those ideals passed out of fashion in the early nineteenth century, it is in some ways not surprising that white Americans found it easier to ignore the obvious inhumanity of slavery.

Now, I could point out to you that the North held on to Established Churches for longer than the South did

It doesn't make any sense to me how there could be an "established" state Congregational church in the North, when the whole point of Congregationalism is that local congregations control their own affairs. Case in point: when the Independents came to power in Britain, they abolished the Church of England and granted freedom of religion to Protestant dissenters.

Okay, but there was. The Congregationalist Church remained the state church of Connecticut until 1818, when it was finally disestablished by a coalition of Republicans and moderate Federalists who ran under the banner of the "Toleration party"; New Hampshire had disestablished its state Congregationalist Church only the previous year, while neighboring Massachusetts kept its established church for another decade and a half, only formally disestablishing the Church in 1833. I should think this should not be too surprising to anyone familiar with the history of Puritanism in New England.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Now, I could point out to you that the North held on to Established Churches for longer than the South did

It doesn't make any sense to me how there could be an "established" state Congregational church in the North, when the whole point of Congregationalism is that local congregations control their own affairs. Case in point: when the Independents came to power in Britain, they abolished the Church of England and granted freedom of religion to Protestant dissenters.

Okay, but there was. The Congregationalist Church remained the state church of Connecticut until 1818, when it was finally disestablished by a coalition of Republicans and moderate Federalists who ran under the banner of the "Toleration party"; New Hampshire had disestablished its state Congregationalist Church only the previous year, while neighboring Massachusetts kept its established church for another decade and a half, only formally disestablishing the Church in 1833. I should think this should not be too surprising to anyone familiar with the history of Puritanism in New England.

I just don't understand it on a conceptual level. How can a denomination that definitionally gives congregations local control have a state church?

I wonder what you imagine a state church to be, and how it is incompatible with Congregationalism? In New England, the established Congregational Church had the support of the state, meaning it was able to collect tithes and enforce church attendance. As I say, this continued well into the nineteenth century, long after the rest of the country disestablished their state churches in the late eighteenth century.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

The ideological origins of anti-slavery really deserve their own thread, but in broad terms, yes: clearly the anti-slavery argument was deeply influenced by the Enlightenment and the American Revolution. Even before 1776, the doctrine of natural rights proposed by Locke and other philosophers of the Enlightenment was working to convince a growing number of educated men in the colonies that slavery was incompatible with natural law and ought to be put on the path to extinction. (Of course, we have to be careful not to be too congratulatory of the Enlightenment: many of its proponents had no problem with slavery, including Locke himself, as you note, and the spirit of scientific inquiry that produced many of the achievements of this period also led to the invention of scientific racism.) The inherent contradiction of declaring, on the one hand, that "all men are born free and equal," while on the other continuing to hold half a million men in bondage, was not lost on Americans of the late eighteenth century; in fact, this was the basis for the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts, which was achieved, not by any act of the legislature, but by a series of judicial decisions made in the summer and fall of 1781, culminating with the declaration by the Supreme Judicial Court of the commonwealth:

"Whatever sentiments have formerly prevailed in this particular or slid in upon us by the example of others, a different idea has taken place with the people of America, more favorable to the natural rights of mankind, and to that natural, innate desire of Liberty, with which Heaven (without regard to color, complexion, or shape of noses-features) has inspired all the human race. And upon this ground our Constitution of Government, by which the people of this Commonwealth have solemnly bound themselves, sets out with declaring that all men are born free and equal – and that every subject is entitled to liberty, and to have it guarded by the laws, as well as life and property – and in short is totally repugnant to the idea of being born slaves. This being the case, I think the idea of slavery is inconsistent with our own conduct and Constitution; and there can be no such thing as perpetual servitude of a rational creature, unless his liberty is forfeited by some criminal conduct or given up by personal consent or contract." (Source)

This theme was adopted by the nineteenth century abolitionists, some of whom went so far as to argue (as Lysander Spooner did in his 1860 work, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery) that slavery ought to have been outlawed by the Declaration of Independence, as the "original constitutional law" of the United States, its principles being clearly opposed to the continuation of slavery —which principles being, as Jefferson himself testified, essentially plagiarized from Locke. Charles Elliot, a Methodist minister and abolitionist, cited Enlightenment scholars such as William Blackstone in his two-volume denunciation of the institution.

However, I think it is a mistake to give too much credit to the Enlightenment, or to discount the role of the Second Great Awakening in producing and sustaining the abolitionist movement. If Enlightenment liberalism were enough to abolish slavery, it would have happened in 1790; Evangelical Protestantism absolutely played a crucial role in furthering abolitionism, and its place within the larger tapestry of reform movements in the middle nineteenth century cannot be ignored.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

The title of this old blog post by historian Eric Rauchway sends up all sorts of red flags, but the content actually reinforces the point Yankee and I (among others) have been making here: that while the policy prescriptions of the major parties changed dramatically between 1876 and 1936, their core ideologies did not.

"In the West were voters disillusioned with the Republican Party’s Second American System, which turned out awfully favorable to banks, railroads, and manufacturing interests, and less favorable to small-time farmers such as those who had gone West and gone bust."

"Now, one can get cleverer and point out that although the rhetoric and to a degree the policies of the parties do switch places, their core supporters don’t—which is to say, the Republicans remain, throughout, the party of bigger businesses; it’s just that in the earlier era bigger businesses want bigger government and in the later era they don’t."

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

The title of this old blog post by historian Eric Rauchway sends up all sorts of red flags, but the content actually reinforces the point Yankee and I (among others) have been making here: that while the policy prescriptions of the major parties changed dramatically between 1876 and 1936, their core ideologies did not.

"In the West were voters disillusioned with the Republican Party’s Second American System, which turned out awfully favorable to banks, railroads, and manufacturing interests, and less favorable to small-time farmers such as those who had gone West and gone bust."

"Now, one can get cleverer and point out that although the rhetoric and to a degree the policies of the parties do switch places, their core supporters don’t—which is to say, the Republicans remain, throughout, the party of bigger businesses; it’s just that in the earlier era bigger businesses want bigger government and in the later era they don’t."

I have linked to Rauchway before including earlier in this thread: https://www.livescience.com/34241-democratic-republican-parties-switch-platforms.html

Ha! I am starting to forget everything that has been said in this thread after 12 pages.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

It seems Henry is just determined to believe that the wealthy business interests who used their considerable political capital to increase their riches at the expense of the working classes were actually liberals, and actually it was the poor immigrants, farmers, and workers who were the real reactionaries. No matter how much evidence is marshaled against these arguments, he always comes back with the same three quotes and his bizarre transposition of seventeenth century England onto nineteenth century America, and an equally-unfounded paranoia towards a marginalized religious minority.

If your idea of liberalism includes wealthy industrialists, bankers, and speculators and excludes poor and working class people, then liberalism is not remotely a left-wing ideology. There is a reason the Jacksonians absorbed the Working Men's Party in the early 1830s. There is a reason those abolitionist radicals Henry loves to quote spoke of a corrupt alliance of the "lords of the loom" and the "lords of the lash." There is a reason why the Dorr rebels in Rhode Island or the Tolerationists in Connecticut sided with the Democrats against the Whigs. Outside of the period from 1850-1874, the politics of the United States in the nineteenth century were characterized by a bitter class war. Racism, xenophobia, and religious bigotry were all invoked by the various elites to divide the working classes as they always are, and often successfully: white supremacism was used against the Readjusters and the Populist movement in the post-war South, nativism was used against the labor movement in the North. So it goes.

The North was indeed a tapestry of religions, philosophies, and ideologies in the nineteenth century —and it is a mistake of Biblical proportions to assume all of these formed one, cohesive, liberal Yankee protestant identity. You mention Transcendentalism —but probably the most famous Transcendentalist was Henry David Thoreau, who was an anarchist and a Democrat! Put simply, this evidence does not mean what you think it means, and taking people like Henry Adams and George Fitzhugh at their word (which is what you are doing when you accept their characterization of nineteenth century politics at face value) is the worst kind of analysis.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

So we've gone from "bad history" to "actually, religious bigotry isn’t that bad"

If the proof that "nativism wasn't totally irrational" is a list of atrocities committed three hundred years before the time in question and what's more, on another continent, then I think it's safe to say we have passed out of the realm of historianship and into the realm of personal vendetta. I'm not even going to bother to list the many atrocities committed by Protestant governments against Catholics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, because—guess what?—that stuff isn't actually part of nineteenth century American politics. Understanding the violence of the Reformation can help us to understand religious attitudes of the early nineteenth century in a larger historical context, but to go so far as to say anti-Catholic sentiment was actually a rational response to the conditions of the time is simply baseless. Catholicism did not pose a credible threat to American democracy in the nineteenth century. That some Protestants believed it did is evidence that, yes, they were ignorant bigots. You can just as easily use a similar argument as Henry has made to allege that Japanese internment was justified, or Southern slave codes strengthened in response to the Haitian Revolution were justified. A good historian tries to understand the past on its own terms, and that means considering the reasons why some people have held ignorant or bigoted views. To assert that these were good reasons is a bridge too far, and in this case suggests a partiality toward the nativist Protestant position that is something more than healthy admiration.

Honestly, I am not sure why Henry continues to post in this thread. It is clear he doesn't really want to discuss American political history, because he keeps trying to make this conversation about events in another country that happened two hundred years before the period in question. If you want to understand American history, you need to look at what was happening in America at the time of study. Drawing parallels to other historical events is not in itself sufficient to be considered valid analysis.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

By contrast, the Tories claimed that value came from land, and only land. The best way to expand the economy was by acquiring more land, rather than by developing already held land. The vision of the Tories for England's future was an explicitly agrarian one, and their support came from the landed gentry and rural folk more generally. [...]

So, to summarize, we have two parties, one of which supported [...] agrarianism

That's not what agrarianism is.

AGRA'RIAN, adjective [Latin agrarius, from ager, a field.] Relating to lands. appropriately, denoting or pertaining to an equal division of lands; as, the agrarian laws of Rome, which distributed the conquered and other public lands equally among all the citizens, limiting the quantity which each might enjoy. Authors sometimes use the word as a noun; an agrarian for agrarian law.

An agrarian distribution of land or property, would make the rich, poor, but would not make the poor, rich. –Burke.

SOCIALISM, n. A social state in which there is a community of property among all the citizens; a new term for AGRARIANISM.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

By contrast, the Tories claimed that value came from land, and only land. The best way to expand the economy was by acquiring more land, rather than by developing already held land. The vision of the Tories for England's future was an explicitly agrarian one, and their support came from the landed gentry and rural folk more generally. [...]

So, to summarize, we have two parties, one of which supported [...] agrarianism

That's not what agrarianism is.

AGRA'RIAN, adjective [Latin agrarius, from ager, a field.] Relating to lands. appropriately, denoting or pertaining to an equal division of lands; as, the agrarian laws of Rome, which distributed the conquered and other public lands equally among all the citizens, limiting the quantity which each might enjoy. Authors sometimes use the word as a noun; an agrarian for agrarian law.

An agrarian distribution of land or property, would make the rich, poor, but would not make the poor, rich. –Burke.

SOCIALISM, n. A social state in which there is a community of property among all the citizens; a new term for AGRARIANISM.

Well, Steven Pincus would disagree with you then, because he specifically uses the word "agrarian" to describe the Tories' economic philosophy at the time of the Glorious Revolution.

Something else I forgot to mention is that at the same time that the Whigs were getting the Bank of England chartered, the Tories proposed a land bank as a sort of agrarian alternative.

I don't care what Steve Pincus has to say. We are talking about America in the nineteenth century, not England in the seventeenth century.

Please go start a thread on the Glorious Revolution so that the rest of us can go back to discussing American history without your constantly evangelizing the one book you've read. I'm sorry if I seem short, but this has gone on long enough and it's clear you have no interest in discussing the actual scholarship on the subject of this thread.