Obscure Groups Most Loyal to One Party Since 1856

[Joe Haydn]

Whig
- True Protestants
- Dissenting fanatics
- Bankers, financiers, stockjobbers

Tory
- Irish Papists
- Loyal churchmen
- Backwoods country gentlemen

Edit: I misread the year in the thread title as 1685.

[Joe Haydn]

Democratic
- Working class urban Irish Catholics in Boston
- Hispanics in South Texas (for now…)

Republican
- Appalachian Unionists (especially Southeastern Kentucky and East Tennesse)
- The small town/rural/(and later) exurban upper crust outside of the South

Democratic
- Middle class urban voters in Manhattan with a liberal arts background

I’m not quite sure what precise definitions you’re using here (blame the fast-and-loose way Americans use the term “middle class” ), but, either way, I very much doubt that this group has been anything close to reliably Democratic over this time period.

Assuming that by “liberal arts background” you mean that they have an undergraduate degree in the liberal arts, then for a very long time, university education was the preserve of the privileged, and thus the preserve of Republicans. In 1948, well over 70% of college graduates voted Republican, and this was even after the “liberal intellectual” phenomenon had certainly started to emerge. In addition, for much of this time period, having this sort of background in Manhattan would also likely mark you out as a WASP, which it goes without saying would strongly imply Republican politics.

I purposely said “background” to try to capture liberal arts “types” and not restrict it to college graduates for long-ago time periods.  Even among graduates, I think the math can work out.  What percent of college grads, even when being one was rare, were liberal arts majors?  They’re certainly more liberal than college grads at large in every era, IMO.  Additionally, ones living in Manhattan are going to be much more liberal than the national average.  I could definitely see 70% of college grads leaning GOP nationally while this specific major in Manhattan leans left.

But you wanted groups going back to 1856, and liberal New York liberal arts "types" in 1856 were certainly not Democrats. The leading liberal paper in 19th century America was the New-York Tribune, a solidly Republican outfit. Needless to say, it was written by New York liberals (with the help of Karl Marx) and abhorred by Democrats, leading a mob of Irish to try to burn down the paper's headquarters in the Draft Riots.

The ideological affiliations of the Democratic and Republican parties in New York were also reflected in other states. In the Lincoln-Douglas Senate race of 1858, Stephen Douglas won the endorsement of the Conservative, a Springfield newspaper which approvingly reprinted articles calling for the enslavement of both black and white workers. Here is an example of that sentiment from another Democratic newspaper of the time:

Free society! We sicken of the name! What is it but a conglomeration of greasy mechanics, filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moon-struck theorists? All the Northern and especially the New England states are devoid of society fitted for well bred gentlemen. The prevailing class one meets is that of mechanics struggling to be genteel, and small farmers who do their own drudgery; and yet are hardly fit for association with a southern gentleman's body servant. This is your free society which the northern hordes are endeavoring to extend to Kansas.

Rather ingeniously, Lincoln supporters responded to this clipping by bringing a banner to one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates which read "“Small Fisted Farmers, Mud-sills of Society, Greasy Mechanics for A. Lincoln.”

Skipping ahead to the early 20th century, we find that Nicholas Murray Butler, longtime President of Columbia and author of The Faith of a Liberal (1924), was a committed Republican and even served as the party's Vice Presidential nominee in 1912. Given the Republican Party's historic liberalism, it seems unlikely to me that the New York liberal intelligentsia, or whatever you want to call it, supported the Democrats in large numbers prior to the New Deal era.

[Joe Haydn]

Democratic
- Working class urban Irish Catholics in Boston
- Hispanics in South Texas (for now…)

Republican
- Appalachian Unionists (especially Southeastern Kentucky and East Tennesse)
- The small town/rural/(and later) exurban upper crust outside of the South

Democratic
- Middle class urban voters in Manhattan with a liberal arts background

I’m not quite sure what precise definitions you’re using here (blame the fast-and-loose way Americans use the term “middle class” ), but, either way, I very much doubt that this group has been anything close to reliably Democratic over this time period.

Assuming that by “liberal arts background” you mean that they have an undergraduate degree in the liberal arts, then for a very long time, university education was the preserve of the privileged, and thus the preserve of Republicans. In 1948, well over 70% of college graduates voted Republican, and this was even after the “liberal intellectual” phenomenon had certainly started to emerge. In addition, for much of this time period, having this sort of background in Manhattan would also likely mark you out as a WASP, which it goes without saying would strongly imply Republican politics.

I purposely said “background” to try to capture liberal arts “types” and not restrict it to college graduates for long-ago time periods.  Even among graduates, I think the math can work out.  What percent of college grads, even when being one was rare, were liberal arts majors?  They’re certainly more liberal than college grads at large in every era, IMO.  Additionally, ones living in Manhattan are going to be much more liberal than the national average.  I could definitely see 70% of college grads leaning GOP nationally while this specific major in Manhattan leans left.

But you wanted groups going back to 1856, and liberal New York liberal arts "types" in 1856 were certainly not Democrats. The leading liberal paper in 19th century America was the New-York Tribune, a solidly Republican outfit. Needless to say, it was written by New York liberals (with the help of Karl Marx) and abhorred by Democrats, leading a mob of Irish to try to burn down the paper's headquarters in the Draft Riots.

The ideological affiliations of the Democratic and Republican parties in New York were also reflected in other states. In the Lincoln-Douglas Senate race of 1858, Stephen Douglas won the endorsement of the Conservative, a Springfield newspaper which approvingly reprinted articles calling for the enslavement of both black and white workers. Here is an example of that sentiment from another Democratic newspaper of the time:

Free society! We sicken of the name! What is it but a conglomeration of greasy mechanics, filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moon-struck theorists? All the Northern and especially the New England states are devoid of society fitted for well bred gentlemen. The prevailing class one meets is that of mechanics struggling to be genteel, and small farmers who do their own drudgery; and yet are hardly fit for association with a southern gentleman's body servant. This is your free society which the northern hordes are endeavoring to extend to Kansas.

Rather ingeniously, Lincoln supporters responded to this clipping by bringing a banner to one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates which read "“Small Fisted Farmers, Mud-sills of Society, Greasy Mechanics for A. Lincoln.”

Skipping ahead to the early 20th century, we find that Nicholas Murray Butler, longtime President of Columbia and author of The Faith of a Liberal (1924), was a committed Republican and even served as the party's Vice Presidential nominee in 1912. Given the Republican Party's historic liberalism, it seems unlikely to me that the New York liberal intelligentsia, or whatever you want to call it, supported the Democrats in large numbers prior to the New Deal era.

Adding on to this post, one of the most towering figures in 19th century New York intellectual life was Robert G. Ingersoll, widely recognized as the leader of the Freethought movement and an ardent abolitionist, feminist, and secular humanist. Given his deep-seated progressivism, it is only natural that Ingersoll was an extremely partisan Republican - here is part of a delightful speech, full of righteous indignation, that he gave while campaigning for Hayes in 1876:

I am opposed to the Democratic party, and I will tell you why.  Every State that seceded from the United States was a Democratic State.  Every ordinance of secession that was drawn was drawn by a Democrat.  Every man that endeavored to tear the old flag from the heaven that it enriches was a Democrat.  Every man that tried to destroy this nation was a Democrat.
Every man that shot Union soldiers was a Democrat.  Every man that denied Union prisoners even the worm-eaten crust of famine, and when some poor, emaciated Union patriot, driven to insanity by famine, saw in an insane dream the face of his mother, and she beckoned him and he followed, hoping to press her lips once again against his fevered face, and when he stepped one step beyond the dead line the wretch that put the bullet through his loving, throbbing heart was and is a Democrat.
Every man that loved slavery better than liberty was a Democrat.  The man that assassinated Abraham Lincoln was a Democrat.
... Every man that wanted the privilege of whipping another man to make him work for him for nothing and pay him with lashes on his naked back, was a Democrat.  Every man that raised bloodhounds to pursue human beings was a Democrat.  Every man that clutched from shrieking, shuddering, crouching mothers, babes from their breasts, and sold them into slavery, was a Democrat.
... Soldiers, every scar you have on your heroic bodies was given you by a Democrat.  Every scar, every arm that is lacking, every limb that is gone, is a souvenir of a Democrat.  I want you to recollect it.

Ingersoll was also a member of the National Liberal League and the first president of its successor organization, the American Secular Union. These groups worked with the Republican party to advance secularist policy proposals like the Blaine Amendment, which was sadly never adopted.

[Joe Haydn]

Sounds like something you would hear from Candace Owens. We don't take her historiography seriously and for good reason, as thinking people would identify it as a partisan exercise as opposed to an accurate portrayal of historical dynamics.

Yet once again we have Henry engaging in the same of old exercise of taking period partisans in their partisan rhetorical excess, for being historically accurate and fair historical representations, and also cleverly packing religious bigotry in the most inoffensive packaging possible. "Its not discriminations, its just 'liberalism' and 'secularism".

We know why Republicans pushed the Blaine amendment, its because they wanted to use the public schools (teaching the King James Bible at the time as this was before the rulings in the mid 20th century that forbade such) to Protestantize immigrant Catholics. Its because nativist Americans wanted their thirst for anti-Immigrant policy satiated by their preferred political vehicle. Its because those Immigrants just happened to favor the party that didn't want them sent back home more often than that.

Likewise with this "interesting" speech. Most everyone of this "every x was a Democrat" examples can be refuted. Vance, Toombs, Stephens, John Tyler. Certainly not every slave holder was a Democrat, the Democratic Party did not even exist until the 1820s and as "we" have pointed out time and again, the Whigs were the favored party of the slave areas as demonstrated by the maps, with that only shifting as the Southern Whigs declined over the 1850s.

It is worthy of study and understanding as a period example of a political speech, but it let's not treat it as some kind of accurate historical assessment of the recent past (for them). The purpose of political speeches is not to recount history accurately, it is to win elections by throwing the hot potato, or in this case the bloody shirt, at the other side.

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. From everything I've read it seems clear to me that while many anti-Catholics were primarily motivated by nativism, there were also many who were genuine believers in liberalism and secularism and whose anti-Catholicism was based on their adherence to those beliefs. Misguided, perhaps, but in the case of something like the Blaine Amendment it makes sense why secular anti-Catholics could form alliances with evangelical Republicans despite differing motives and why a modern progressive like myself might sympathize with them in their efforts. As I said, I think it is gravely inaccurate to presume that American anti-Catholicism in the 19th century was exclusively a conservative or nativist phenomenon and not also a liberal or progressive one. I am not defending anti-Catholicism by saying this; if anything, I am defaming liberalism by associating it with that strain of bigotry, but since it is true I feel that I must. Besides objections to Catholics which are obviously either liberal or conservative in nature, there is as well a substantial amount of grey area; for instance, is an evangelical Protestant who opposes popery and slavery because they are both immoral and ungodly a liberal or a conservative? Well, one side might argue that opposition to those institutions based on a combination of religious morality and political convictions is a longstanding and indeed crucial component of Anglo-American left radicalism, while another side might contend that any political belief based on religious fundamentalism is inherently conservative. I think you know which side I am on, and I think I know which is backed by the historical record and frankly more logical, but again, you can believe what you want and we can agree to disagree.

Also, you're ignoring the broader point I was making, which is that the Republican party was not only supported by a few liberal intellectuals or liberal newspapers, but by the most notable liberal intellectuals and the biggest liberal paper in the entire country.

[Joe Haydn]

I pretty clearly said in my post that I consider anti-Catholicism based on nativism to be conservative, so most of your response is simply irrelevant. There were some exceptions, like when the Massachusetts Know-Nothings passed progressive social and even economic policies, but I won't get into that now. The point of my post was to defend groups like the National Liberal League and the American Secular Union from Yankee's charge that they used pretenses of "liberalism" and "secularism" as covers for religious bigotry. That just isn't true, and even if they did sometimes teeter over into bigotry that doesn't negate their entire worldview. Let's be clear, it's not the American Protective Association we're talking about here. Ingersoll and his friends were part of an Anglo-American radical tradition which was often deeply anti-Catholic, but they weren't nativists. Christopher Hitchens, himself a member of that tradition, wrote astutely about it in relation to Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke:

The Revolution Society was not as insurgent or incendiary as its name might suggest. It was a rather respectable sodality, dedicated to celebrating the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, a relatively bloodless coup that installed William and Mary of the House of Orange on the English throne, and established Protestantism as the state religion. One of the society's leaders was the Reverend Richard Price, a great friend to the American Revolution and a staunch Unitarian clergyman. His resolution, carried by the same meeting that had forwarded a "Congratulatory Address" to the National Assembly in Paris, read in part, "This Society, sensible of the important advantages arising to this Country by its deliverance from Popery and Arbitrary Power ..."

It was made immediately plain to Burke that those who had enthused over revolution across the Channel were also interested in undermining and discrediting the same Church that he—an Irishman brought up under anti-Catholic penal laws—felt so obliged to defend. (This deep connection has been established by Conor Cruise O'Brien in a masterly series of studies that began with his own edition of the Reflections in 1968.) But the point is not a merely sectarian one. In 1780 London had been convulsed and shamed by the hysterical anti-Papist Gordon Riots, in which a crazed aristocratic demagogue had led a mob against supposedly subversive Catholics. (The best evocation of the fury and cruelty of that episode is to be found in Dickens's Barnaby Rudge.) This memory was very vivid in Burke's mind, and goes far to explain his visceral detestation of crowd violence. No less to the point, some emulators of Jacobinism—the United Irishmen, with many Protestants among their leaders—were at work in Ireland trying to bring off a rebellion that would compromise all parliamentary "moderates." And several of the pro-Jacobin activists and spokesmen in England, not excluding the rather humane Price himself, had had political connections with Lord George Gordon. As between the Jacobite and the Jacobin, Burke could not be neutral for an instant; he might give up the Jacobite cause out of loyalty to the British crown, but he was profoundly stirred when he saw old-fashioned anti-Catholicism renascent under potentially republican colors. So one does well to keep Barnaby Rudge in mind along with A Tale of Two Cities.

It was Conor Cruise O'Brien who pointed out, almost 40 years ago, that the most famous and foundational political debate of modern times--the confrontation between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine--was based not just upon conflicting interpretations of 1688, but on differing religious attitudes to it. Burke was a covert Catholic (very probably having this in common with William Shakespeare) and an Irishman, while Paine was a part-Quaker English Deist. The radical and constitutionalist groups in London that hailed the 1789 revolution in France, and had hailed the 1776 revolution in America, were largely and openly pro-1688 and against "Popery," and it was this that had excited Burke's original alarm. Paine was anticlerical rather than anti-Catholic, but he ridiculed Burke's belief that the Glorious Revolution was a one-time-only settlement that established a permanent monarchy. (Burke's position was the more vulnerable one, in that he thought even a Protestant monarchy, and Protestant established church, were better than none at all.)

His [Paine's] father was a Quaker and this was at a time, remember, when what the Quakers would have recalled was the Cromwellian revolution, the Protestant Revolution, the overthrow of the monarchy in Britain, the execution of King Charles in 1649, the destruction of all these achievements by the restoration of the Stuart Monarchy, the reestablishment of a church that was a department of monarchy, where the divine right of kings was still half believed in.

This is important, by the way, first because he represents this Protestant, freethinking, Quakerish, anti-clerical, anti-established-church, anti-monarchic tradition that leads to the American Revolution eventually, because I think the English Revolution is the ancestor of theirs.

At the same time, Hitchens makes clear that Paine detested the sort of vulgar, sectarian, and reactionary anti-Catholicism represented by the Gordon Riots (other radicals like Richard Price were more sympathetic, but like I said earlier, one blind spot doesn't negate his entire worldview):

Both men had good reason to remember the Gordon Riots of 1780, in which a murderous and arsonist anti-Catholic mob was mobilized by a demented reactionary aristocrat named Lord George Gordon, an ancestor of Lord Byron, who later resolved his religious troubles by converting to Judaism in Newgate prison. That horrible episode of crime in 1780 is best revisited in the pages of Dickens's Barnaby Rudge. Both Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France and Paine's Rights of Man contain stern condemnations of mobocracy at that level.

Paine, of course, agreed with Edmund Burke, who is the great - well, not - people call Burke a Tory; they're slightly wrong in saying that. Burke was a classical liberal. But Paine agreed with him that the rule of what would have been called ochlocracy, that's literally to say mob rule, the rule of the crowd, was a wicked thing. He, like Burke, was very worried by the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots in London. He didn't like what he saw, which he saw more than Burke did, of the rule of sheer street force in Paris either. In fact, he was twice very nearly to lose his life to it.

Finally, you say that "Myself and Yankee have both written at length about how antislavery does not necessarily equal liberalism", which I agree with. In fact, I'm arguing against the same sort of ideological absolutism as you are, the notion that anti-Catholicism necessarily equals conservatism. Because the truth, whether you like it or not, is that anti-Catholicism has long been a major part of Anglo-American left radicalism. Was Paul Blanshard, the socialist author and Nation editor who wrote American Freedom and Catholic Power, a conservative? Perhaps he was misguided or simply wrong, but he was following in a recognizably left-wing anti-Catholic tradition dating back 3 centuries before his book was published.