Puritans as democrats

[Joe Haydn]

I've taken the title of this post from Barzun, who has a chapter of the same name in his masterwork From Dawn to Decadence. Please note the small "d" in democrat, as it's quite important that you don't think I'm referring to the Democratic Party.

There seems to be a major line of thought in American history that I find myself disagreeing with. It goes that the Puritans in New England began American conservatism, which first found its outlet in the Federalist Party and would continue, in modified forms, through to the contemporary Republican Party. The story goes that the Jeffersonians, later the Democrats, were liberal egalitarians who fought for the rights of the common man. But there is one major problem.

This narrative assumes that religiosity is inherently conservative and hierarchical, which isn't necessarily true. In fact, religious movements, especially those focusing on the inner spirituality of the individual, have often run together with some of the most radical movements in history. From Savonarola in Florence to the Puritans of the 17th century, to the Social Gospel and Liberation Theology of later times, the religious and populist have often overlapped. Even the French Revolution, for all its anti-clericalism, was in part a reaction to the loose morals, godlessness, and depravity of the elite. Robespierre himself was a noted moralist and theist.

But to return to the subject at hand, the Puritans are an especially relevant example of religion and liberalism going hand in hand. It is no coincidence that in the colonial period, New England was far more democratic and representative than the southern states. The Puritan emphasis on individualism led to a relatively egalitarian New England, while the more secular southern colonies, established by profit-seeking Cavaliers in the tobacco industry, were home to far more unequal and elitist governance.

Further on in American history, pietistic Protestantism played a major role in abolitionism, which is a liberal cause if there ever was one. And in 1896 William Jennings Bryan used this same religious fervor to run one one of the most populist campaigns ever, challenging the business class with Christianity and the rhetoric of a crusader. It is thus a great irony, that in modern times the Republican Party has come to represent both big business and evangelical Christians, when at heart Puritans are democrats.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Good points, good thread.

I would add that the Federalist Party's conservative, militaristic, mercantilistic, quasi-monarchical political project died with Washington (Virginian) and Hamilton (New Yorker via the British Caribbean). We are all heirs to Jefferson, in one form or another.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I agree with both posters above me to an extent. I'd partially vindicate the traditional historiography here, though, by observing that Hamilton does make a lot of sense as a progenitor of the "muh business, muh investments" style in American rightism, as indeed John Adams does of the "muh national security" style. I don't think it's coincidental that these are the two right-wing styles that upper-middle-class Northeastern/Midwestern WASP Yankee types are still amenable to being swayed by even as they tend nowadays to be left-leaning on issues of moral or religious concern.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Federalist were the Chris Shays GOP party and the WC Dems were the Woodrow Wilson Democratic Party. It wasn't until 1932, that both parties switched to the Blue and Red Divide that we know now, as the Cold War Secular and Tradtl parties.

[TDAS04]

Thank you for mentioning that religion and liberalism are not mutually exclusive.

It's been widely discussed on this forum how the parties did not switch places, to an extent that hardly anyone here claims they did anymore.  It's been pointed out that even in its earliest days, the GOP contained strong religious, moralistic tendencies, and that even abolitionism had religious motivations.  That does not automatically mean conservative motivations, however.  It may have been more conservative to view slavery not as a humanitarian concern, but as a vice that makes non-slaves lazy and immoral.  However, there were early abolitionist who were both liberal and religious, and who were inclined towards egalitarianism.  Such abolitionists were influential in the early Republican Party.  Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner were there, after all.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

There is more to it than just religion though and you have to present a mosaic that incorporates economic, social and cultural factors to understand support for political movements at a given time. Labeling anything of this period as "liberal" or "conservative" is extremely dangerous without contextual ideological identifiers. To this point you mention hierarchy. Think this through, the reason that the Whigs and GOP survived while the Federalists evaporated was because they expanded their base beyond merchant elites. It wouldn't make sense for every Republican or even every Whig to be as hierarchical as say Hamilton was because politically that was suicide or even they themselves would have found it abhorrent. Remember that the GOP was created by renegade Free Soiler Democrats and the Whigs largely hopped on later over the ensuing months and years. With such a strong Jacksonian element, embracing the whole Hamiltonian package would be unthinkable and archaic.

I have pointed out numerous times that Jefferson and the DRs were quite strong in New England especially once the Federalists began to decline in power. The reason being, the DRs appealed to small farmers while the Federalists were a party of rich merchants, planters (yes read Truman's post on it) and otherwise merchant oriented elite. Voting was restricted to property owners and thus those of less means were small farmers and those of means lived in cities so cities were heavily Federalist while rural areas favored the DRs.

In the 1810's you had the Embargo of 1807 lingering on, the War of 1812, the Hartford convention and then rise of textiles. This damaged the Federalists who were tied to Britain via trade in multiple ways. Losing face with "near treason" is what people emphasize, but remember the shifting economic sands and redirecting of investment from trade to textiles meant that the base of wealthy people changed and the old elites and new elites often don't always mesh well in this regards. Many Federalists did jump ship, but the nationalist wing of the DRs with its embrace of the Bank of US/Tariffs, was a much better fit for New England than the old Federalists even were by the 1820's.

There were some Federalists who became Democrats, and there were a number of Whigs who did likewise in the lead up to the Civil War, including not just Southern Planters, but also Maryland's Catholic population who had been alienated by the Know-Nothings in that state. The Civil War broke the wealth and hierarchical alignment and while religion remained a motivating factor it was one of cultural identity and tribalism as opposed to always a matter of direct religious motivation for certain political actions (like in some cases abolition was).

Republicans lost their moral compass after abolition and became a tool for robber barons. While there were a number of exceptions, the GOP was largely defined by a set of cultural tropes and unified around support for protectionism. This means that as long as business interests were fine with catering to this protestant identity politics and of course the tariffs they pretty much could do whatever they wanted. In that sense not much has changed, just switch out the identity group, the unifying issues and it is the same basic dynamic.

In terms of hierarchy, Catholics were far more hierarchical in a specifically religious context but in terms of the relative social/political/economic power and empowerment in the 19th century, hierarchical religious structure doesn't make them part of the political and social hierarchy and that is what they were excluded from by the dominant WASP Yankee politics of the Republican Party and thus why they were so strongly Democratic. Ironically, it was that very hierarchical structure that the protestants used to justify the preservation of their own power structure because "Muh Romanism/Papacy".   

The fact that Catholics were hierarchical while Protestants were egalitarian doesn't translate into the politics of the 19th century because the latter were the ones in the dominant position and saw themselves as being threatened by the former. That is why I always emphasized when using the criteria of "religion" to denote 19th century conservatism, that it was caveated by "dominate religious power".  In the UK that would be the Anglican Church, while in the US and especially New England, it would be these various pious protestant groups many of them low church.

I don't really understand the desire for this reassessment or its value/benefit. When you look at the New England backed the political organizations, you see levels of cultural imperialism, you see nativism running rampant and identity politics surrounding the preservation of culture/religious/economic power against a new and rising demographic that threatens them. This is very similar to what the current pro-GOP demographics are manifesting in places like say Arizona or CA in the 1990's.

It all seems to come back to, "well its not the South". Its funny you mentioned WJB, because his support was primarily Southern and Western and yes he did alienate Catholics, but he didn't make much headway with traditional GOP voting protestants either.

In the end politics is about power, how to get it, how to steal it, how to maintain it. It is for this reason that a poor protestant in Massachusetts might vote Republican because of identity politics while a planter in VA or MS might support the Democrats. The Protestants would see themselves as part of a power group, while the planter is a diehard of the lost cause and thus by definition a political outsider on some level. Is this any different today? You have poor whites voting Republican and rich tech execs voting Democratic, because the former sees itself as threatened and the latter sees its industrial interests being subordinated to oil and gas interests in the GOP.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Federalist were the Chris Shays GOP party and the WC Dems were the Woodrow Wilson Democratic Party. It wasn't until 1932, that both parties switched to the Blue and Red Divide that we know now, as the Cold War Secular and Tradtl parties.

The problem with party flip theory is because you can always find an election prior to the date that disapproves it. It also views the outside forces that dictate these changes over time, as being static themselves when they are not.

I like to point to the example of the UES have a conservative Republican Representative from 1947-1959 and then a liberal Republican for about ten years before it went Democratic.

The NE establishment was not liberal by origin, it had views that reflected its base and economic interest and sough to preserve the power and interests of that base. As that base shifted, it caused the politicians who represented it to evolve.

People move, employment changes, religious strength and affiliations shift, and culture changes over time as well and all of these things have an impact on the politics. There was no single flip of the parties, only a slow evolution and a push-pull effect created by demographic shifts.

[darklordoftech]

I’m curious as to whether or not any of the political parties that do or ever have existed (whether it be today’s Democrats and GOP, those of 1860, or the Federalists and Dem-Republicans of 1796) are descended from the Puritans or if the Puritans have nothing to do with the politics of later eras. I wonder what Southern Senator’s take on the Puritans is.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I’m curious as to whether or not any of the political parties that do or ever have existed (whether it be today’s Democrats and GOP, those of 1860, or the Federalists and Dem-Republicans of 1796) are descended from the Puritans or if the Puritans have nothing to do with the politics of later eras. I wonder what Southern Senator’s take on the Puritans is.

The first thing you have to answer is what do you mean by "puritans". Is that restricted the types of people who arrived in 1621 or is that inclusive of pious New England protestants down through to the late 19th and early 20th century.

The former definition would certainly be less so than the latter.

The easiest and most accurate answer is that both parties take elements from both sides of a given previous dynamic. On a small scale there are a number of people who voted for Clinton in 1990's that voted for Bush and there are a number of people who voted for Obama that voted for Trump. There are a number of people who voted for Bush 41 and then for Clinton. For Bush 43 and then Obama, for Romney and then for Clinton. Now span this same dynamic across 200 years.

I realize I love to compare these things to natural science but it is kind of like DNA and the genome. Every human has traces of a biological Adam and a biological Eve according genomic sequencing.

The human descendants of the Puritans are largely secular whites who vote Democratic yes. In terms of Puritan influence as they were down to today, yes you see it that in attempts to regulate behavior in both parties whether it be the Evangelicals going after video games or the Democrats going after soft drinks. Reformism has a political movement itself is a very puritanical concept at its core ("Reformation") and in a more direct way the desire to improve society certainly has appeals to a progressive mind of today even if the motivations may differ.

However, the support for such "reform" was limited to certain areas and when it comes to the Republicans, economic reform was certainly a tougher sale then for the Democrats, especially after WJB but WJB was not a radical departure from historical democratic traditions as I will explain below. Republican Reformism emphasized areas that didn't challenge the dominance of their political supporters, meanwhile the aggressive pushes for economic reform came from outside of the Yankee belt for the most part (some overlap in WI/MN).

I think what it comes down to is what you prioritize most in politics. If is the plight of the common man, if it is opposing big business, I think there is a degree of consistency that often gets ignored because of the fact that there were terrible people in this coalition for a long time. It doesn't make the overall cause less valid or invalidate the support for it that occurred in a given period.

It goes back to what I said before. If you are bought into a given economic and social order, you are going to be part of the resulting political establishment. After the Civil War, the US was dominated by heavy industries who were inextricably linked and tied in with the dominant political party of the time. Their economic policy (protection) was centered around preserving their power and while there were certainly Democrats who were complicit in this arrangement by far the Republicans from Credit Mobilier to Tea Pot Dome were the primary benefactors of this arrangement.

A large number of working class voters (not all of course) through either intimidation or direct calculation of interest aligned themselves with the interest of business over labor (you see this today in mining where workers and owners vote the same way, so it is not hard to fathom).

The opposition to this power paradigm in a binary political world is going to include the parts of the country left behind economically (Industrialism heavily favored the NE, Midwest and CA), politically (not every Democrat was a rebel...) and culturally (it isn't' called the Lost Cause for nothing). Democratic rhetoric often accused NE/Wall Street tycoons of treating the South and West like a colony to be exploited. I remember the famous line from LBJ: The Early Years, where LBJ (played by Randy Quaid) starts a speech by railing against Easterners for "stealing West Texas Juice to power their damn sky scrappers".

It is from this exact same political mindset of NE has money, West Texas is getting screwed that powered the New Deal. It wasn't some change from the previous dynamic, it was an evolution operating to satisfy the same desire that had existed going back to Jefferson, "Wall Street has the money and they stole it from me and foreclosed on my farm in Georgia/Oklahoma/Nebraska/North Carolina". Even though the people are different, working different jobs in a completely different context, it is this same sense of being abused by the business elite that Bernie Sanders operates to satisfy. West Texas might be a wash in oil money and voting super Republican, the exact geography doesn't matter. What matters is where is the largest concentration of people today with similar desires of a given group back then (who may be totally different in different circumstances but nonetheless found themselves on the same relative position).

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

In the 1890's, you had indebted farmers turning to Populist Democrats to alleviate their debt burden through easy money.

You have the exact same dynamic today, but instead of farm debt it is college debt and instead of them being rural, it is largely urban.

In the 1890's, you had Republicans balancing the interests of business with that of a "threatened demographic" (my short hand for a previously dominant ethnic/religious/racial group whose power is being challenged by a rising demographic, which could be immigrants, internal migration or just education and generational change).

You have that exact same dynamic today.

Party flip theory focuses too much on who, where and when, and ignores what is desire and why it is desired.

Why did rural areas desire left populism then? Because there were large numbers of small indebted farmers. Why do the rural areas today demand right populism? Because they are dominated by land owners who don't want "those people" moving in next door. Poor people in rural areas tend to not vote, in many places because they cannot.

This is why rural upcountry whites in the South now vote like Dixiecrats, even though that is the area that resisted the Dixiecrats and largely stuck with Truman and even LBJ to some extent. Back then there were enough people who remembered the hard times, the New Deal and the like. Those people are dead now and most of the poor people have moved out through generational flight (this is especially the case in places like ND, IA etc). In their place you have GOP dominated big agra, oil and gas for industries. These industries tend to attract migrant workers and these migrant workers trigger the race consciousness in areas where it didn't exist at least not to that extent.

The biggest mistake today is to presume that the heirs of Jacksonian farmer politics are in central Tennessee. Nope, they are the debt laden urban college students. Or that the heirs of Protestant Yankee nativism are actually found in the Yankee belt today (technically they are there in small pockets in places like Maine, Michigan and Oregon, the most rural and least educated pockets of this band of states). But no, it is primarily centered in the Phoenix, Dallas and Atlanta suburbs. Ten years ago it was NOVA and Denver suburbs (Ever heard of Tom Tancredo?) and before that Socal (too many immigration restrictionists to name here back then).

[darklordoftech]

I find the parallels between Bryan and Sanders fascinating, from their appeal to a debtor demographic to their fights with the “establishment”. In Bryan’s time there were “Bourbon Democrats” and in Sanders’ time there are “neoliberals”. There’s also the Gilded Age parallels such as income inequality and debates over immigration and prohibition.

[Joe Haydn]

Damn it damn it damn it!!!!! I had just written out a really long response to your post Yankee, and guess what happened right when I clicked post: the site crashed and I lost everything!! For the love of God, the post box needs to store what you were typing in it earlier, as I don't always remember to hit the save draft button.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Insofar as we are speaking of democrats, it is a thesis not without merit. Certainly New England in the seventeenth century was "democratical" in her political forms relative to the other English colonies in North America, owing to the sort of people who settled there and their reasons for coming to the New World. There is a danger, however, in equating democracy (it is helpful to refer to the original Greek, δημοκρατία, demokratia, i.e. rule by the demos) with anti-hierachialism or liberalism, as well as in generalizing about the entire period from the founding of Plymouth in 1620 to the election of Lincoln in 1860, and those are the points where the OP's argument is heavier than the evidence may reasonably be expected to bear.

But in general, yes, the political forms of the Plymouth colony and her sister colonies in New England were as essentially democratical as anything you would find in the Western world of the seventeenth century —that is, they were organized so that power emanated from "the people" and proceeded from them to invest the highest levels of government. Massachusetts is as good an example as any of this constitutional arrangement. Until the final decade of the 1600s, the town meeting was the basic organizational unit of the colonial polity. Each town sent representatives to the Assembly, who elected the Council (a sort-of cross between a cabinet and upper house whose members normally served for life) and the governor. This was achieved by the proprietors moving their headquarters from England to America in the early years of the colony's history and making all freemen shareholders. In the nineteenth century, rules limiting the franchise to landowners came to be seen as the major obstacle to democratization; but in these early days, when practically every free male either owned a farm or could hope to do so, this had the effect of making the highest levels of administration responsible to the population at large. After 1692, Massachusetts had a royal governor, but even then he would normally defer to the elected council. This is why the suspension of the provincial assembly in 1774 was such a big deal: by this time, Massachusetts had a 150-year history of self-government that made them disinclined to accept an outside authority. (The only other attempt to bring New England under direct royal administration failed miserably under the ill-fated governorship of Sir Edmund Andros and was revoked following the Glorious Revolution.)

But 'liberalism' —even the very early liberalism of Locke and the Enlightenment —did not exist when the Puritans were tilling the field of New England, and was present in their constitutions only in retrospect. Furthermore, while New England was democratical —or anyways, as much as any society was in the seventeenth century —it was also definitely hierarchical, albeit in a very different way than Virginia or the Carolinas. While every freeman was given a vote, in practice ministers were the leaders of their communities, and reverence for their position gave them vast power and influence over the rest of society. This is the point at which it is important to remember that while the Reformed churches took a radical position when they claimed that any layman could read and interpret the gospel, they did not want a million parishioners to form as many rival and conflicting theologies. Such was the potency of the Truth, they believed, that once freed from the oppression of the Roman Church, all the faithful would naturally find their ways to the same conclusions as John Calvin and the other great Reformed theologians. Anyone who did not reach those conclusions was obviously an agent of the Devil; thus the execution of Anne Hutchinson, the exile of Roger Williams, and the efforts to purge the scourge of witchcraft at Salem and elsewhere.

So New England was democratical in the sense that it was ruled by and with the consent of the class of enfranchised freemen, but this was not a liberal democracy (such did not exist to even be aspired to), and while it lacked a ruling class of the sort that existed in the Southern colonies, a powerful social hierarchy did exist. This becomes more obvious to us after independence, when society was evolving much more quickly than its forms, and what had been eminently democratic in the seventeenth century became undemocratic and conservative in the nineteenth century. The old rule limiting the vote to freeholders, as mentioned previously, reflected very differently in a society where landless immigrants and unskilled laborers made up an increasingly large share of the population. While Virginia disestablished the Anglican church early in the Revolutionary period (please note that I am not arguing nineteenth-century Virginia was a democratic society), the Congregationalist church of New England continued to collect tithes well into the nineteenth century, and religious dissenters (most famously Baptists) were hardly regarded any better than they had been in the days of Roger Williams —to say nothing of all those Catholics coming over from Europe. As late as 1843, Rhode Island limited the franchise to landowners, and an attempt to call a constitutional convention for the purpose of extending the franchise to all male citizens was quickly repressed. Throughout this period, New England remained the historic home of nativist and anti-Catholic sentiment; in the realigning elections of 1854, it was not the Republicans, but the Know-Nothings, who emerged as the primary opposition to the pro-slavery Democracy in Massachusetts.

That said, it is unwise (if easy) to characterize a society as "all one thing," and as Yankee notes New England did indeed have a strong radical tradition in the likes of Daniel Shays, Matthew Lyon, Thomas Wilson Dorr, William Lloyd Garrison, and Henry David Thoreau —the last of whom has been described as an anarchist and was certainly more radical than anything that the South or West produced, more so even —arguably —than Bryan. Garrison, likewise, prescribed to a moral philosophy radical even by modern standards, which led him to identify not only as an abolitionist, but as a non-resistant (pacifist) and to eschew organized churches in favor of a non-denominational Christianity. John Parker Hale and Hannibal Hamlin, two favorite sons of New England who were instrumental in organizing the Republican party, came from the Jacksonian political tradition, while Benjamin Butler —a pro-slavery Massachusetts Democrat before 1860 —became an ardent advocate for civil rights and the Greenback movement after the war.

So I'll accept this argument less because I believe it is correct, and more because it is an important reminder not to fall into an oversimplified dichotomy that glosses over important nuances in the development of complex societies in favor of a diluted "good guys v. bad guys," "us vs. them" historical narrative.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Damn it damn it damn it!!!!! I had just written out a really long response to your post Yankee, and guess what happened right when I clicked post: the site crashed and I lost everything!! For the love of God, the post box needs to store what you were typing in it earlier, as I don't always remember to hit the save draft button.

I had that happen earlier in the TX registration thread and also with the Fed convention in Atlasia.

[Chunk Yogurt for President!]

What a lot of people forget is that conservative Protestantism/Evangelicalism is not something that was limited to the South.  New England today is much less religious than the South, so people assume that has always been the case.  But that isn't accurate when looking at the history.  Considering the theological views of the Puritans, I can't imagine them being at home in the Democratic Party in 2020.  And Reformed Christians today, who are close in theology to the Puritans, are much more likely to vote Republican than Democrat.

[Joe Haydn]

I'm going to try to rewrite some of yesterday's post from memory, but please note that it was written before Truman's post and thus doesn't address any of his arguments.


In response to Yankee's original post, you've definitely made some good points. But even if the Federalists advocated for more elitist policies than the Jeffersonians, the regions they performed well in tell the opposite story. The Massachusetts statehouse was made up of around an equal number of farmers, merchants, and laborers, with no one group dominating. This, I believe, reflects the Puritan ethos and its emphasis on the individual and his or her connection to God. After all, it was religious extremists, even more zealous than the Puritans, who had led the very radical Putney Debates back in England. Comparing Massachusetts to Virginia, one finds that the Virginian House of Burgesses was made up almost entirely of planters. This, I believe, reflects the fact that the Virginia elite were descended from Episcopalian royalists.

Given these different forms of government in New England and the South, it doesn't make sense to me to call New England "conservative" in this period. They were nativists, sure, but on the issue that most divided liberals and conservatives at this point —that is, liberty —New Englanders were clearly the most liberal of Americans. It is thus ironic, I suppose, that they mostly voted for the Federalists, but I guess this just proves the idea that in the early republic identity, not ideology, was the greatest influence on voting behavior.

Not all New Englanders were rich merchants and bankers, and not all southerners were poor farmers. I'm not accusing you of this, Yankee, but there seems to be a southern victim complex in regard to history. According to them, throughout all of American history greedy northerners exploited the poor South for their own benefit. But they conveniently ignore the fact that the richest Americans were southern planters, who greatly supported Jefferson (the Pinckneys are the only notable exception I've found so far). They forget about the small farmers of western Massachusetts who fought against oppressive taxes in Shays' Rebellion. And they refuse to recognize that before 1860, the United States was a slaveocracy in which the South wielded undue political influence derived from the Three-Fifths Compromise (Adams would have won in 1800 if not for the Slave Power).

To move the clock forward a bit, you also seem to be implying that the Republicans were more pro-business than the Democrats during the Third Party System, which I disagree with. The late 19th century Democrats, from what I can tell, basically forfeited any claims they may have had to being the party of the common man. The party was equally corrupt and beholden to special interests as the Republicans, and Grover Cleveland and the Bourbon Democrats were quite pro-business. At least Harrison got through an early antitrust law and a silver purchase act, while Cleveland is arguably best known for sending in federal troops to put down a strike. It wasn't until Bryan took over that the Democrats reclaimed any pretense of representing the common people. And speaking of Bryan, he did in fact make considerable gains among pietist Protestants in the Plains States (though not so much in New England). Here's a webpage (unfortunately from the Mises Institute, but still valuable) that has lots of relevant information on voting behavior in 1896.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Sadly not going to be able to do a good response in the short time that I have before work today.


In brief though while I agree fully that the south should be held accountable for the things it has done and have spent many posts debunking the Lost Cause. At the same time I think that too often the South is treated in history by Progressive posters as a myopia of planters and their slaves/sharecroppers, while failing to account for the role that people like Huey Long for instance played in progressive Democratic politics.

You would have gotten far more sympathy from a Huey Long Democrat then from a Massachusetts Protestant banker in the 1930's.

As Truman's present signature attests, I certainly never forget about Daniel Shays.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

The conversation seems to have died out, but I ran across this individual recently while falling down the rabbit hole and it reminded me of this thread. Quite a character!

[All Along The Watchtower]

But they conveniently ignore the fact that the richest Americans were southern planters, who greatly supported Jefferson (the Pinckneys are the only notable exception I've found so far).

George Washington was a Federalist in spirit and practice (and Shay's Rebellion is what took him out of retirement - which he violently put down and then went on to win the Presidency unopposed two times - not a good look for democracy!), if not in open affiliation, and Alexander Hamilton's in-laws owned slaves (and Hamilton himself traded some slaves in NYC and even owned one or two IIRC, don't quote me on that last part though).

The real point is that the Federalists were more anti-democratic, even if the Jeffersonians/Republicans were white supremacists and many of them were wealthy slaveowners. True, there were more abolitionists in the Federalist Party because of New England's politics and there were more white supremacists in the Jeffersonian Republican Party because of the Southern skew, so it is not super clear-cut, but for the most part I'm pretty confident in saying that the Federalists were more conservative, certainly in a more elitist "Tory" sense!


FWIW, I reckon Aaron Burr was pretty good on a lot of issues (and he helped kill the Federalist Party - literally ) but his legacy is forever tainted because of Hamilton's death and the weird conspiracy he was involved in later.

[darklordoftech]

Keep in mind that voting for the more liberal party doesn’t mean that one is more liberal on all issues. The Democratic-Republicans may have been better for voting rights than the Federalists, but that doesn’t mean that the South was better for voting rights than New England. Today, there’s plenty of pro-life Democratic voters and pro-choice Republican voters.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

But they conveniently ignore the fact that the richest Americans were southern planters, who greatly supported Jefferson (the Pinckneys are the only notable exception I've found so far).

George Washington was a Federalist in spirit and practice (and Shay's Rebellion is what took him out of retirement - which he violently put down and then went on to win the Presidency unopposed two times - not a good look for democracy!), if not in open affiliation, and Alexander Hamilton's in-laws owned slaves (and Hamilton himself traded some slaves in NYC and even owned one or two IIRC, don't quote me on that last part though).

Not to mention Patrick Henry (Jefferson's first great rivalry and a Federalist during the Adams administration), Edward Rutledge, and John Marshall. Those are some pretty significant oversights.

If we expand the frame to include the Hamiltonian's ideological successors in the Second Party System, William Henry Harrison presents as a prominent pro-slavery Whig (his tenure as governor of the Indiana Territory was marked by conflict with President Jefferson over his proposal to introduce slavery in the Northwest). It's interesting to compare county-level results from the election of 1840 with this map showing the counties with the largest slave populations.

(1)

(2)

(1) Source: Wikimedia Commons
(2) Source: Smithsonian Magazine

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

The plebs are coming to kill us, isn't far off from the slaves are coming to kill us.

Also remember the Haitian Revolution in living memory. The State's Rights Whigs and nullifiers were also part of the Whig coalition.

The Southern Whigs were certainly planter heavy.

Compare to say someone like Andrew Johnson the epitome of a Jacksonian Democrat, who while certainly racist, represented a classist anti-planter view that led to his militant opposition to the Confederacy and desire to hang Robert E. Lee (it was Grant that saved Lee by the way). Robert Toombs and Alexander Stephens (CSA VP) were both Whigs.

Not saying that all Democrats wanted to hang the plantation elite, but it would be a mistake to view the Democrats of this period as a party of slave owners with no relation whatsoever to modern day. Populism and anti-elite/wealthy politics has been around since the beginning.

[darklordoftech]

I’m curious as to whether or not any of the political parties that do or ever have existed (whether it be today’s Democrats and GOP, those of 1860, or the Federalists and Dem-Republicans of 1796) are descended from the Puritans or if the Puritans have nothing to do with the politics of later eras. I wonder what Southern Senator’s take on the Puritans is.

The first thing you have to answer is what do you mean by "puritans". Is that restricted the types of people who arrived in 1621 or is that inclusive of pious New England protestants down through to the late 19th and early 20th century.

The former.

[Joe Haydn]

But they conveniently ignore the fact that the richest Americans were southern planters, who greatly supported Jefferson (the Pinckneys are the only notable exception I've found so far).

George Washington was a Federalist in spirit and practice (and Shay's Rebellion is what took him out of retirement - which he violently put down and then went on to win the Presidency unopposed two times - not a good look for democracy!), if not in open affiliation, and Alexander Hamilton's in-laws owned slaves (and Hamilton himself traded some slaves in NYC and even owned one or two IIRC, don't quote me on that last part though).

The real point is that the Federalists were more anti-democratic, even if the Jeffersonians/Republicans were white supremacists and many of them were wealthy slaveowners. True, there were more abolitionists in the Federalist Party because of New England's politics and there were more white supremacists in the Jeffersonian Republican Party because of the Southern skew, so it is not super clear-cut, but for the most part I'm pretty confident in saying that the Federalists were more conservative, certainly in a more elitist "Tory" sense!


FWIW, I reckon Aaron Burr was pretty good on a lot of issues (and he helped kill the Federalist Party - literally ) but his legacy is forever tainted because of Hamilton's death and the weird conspiracy he was involved in later.

I actually like Aaron Burr a lot, and think he was better than both Hamilton and Jefferson. In a way he combined the better aspects of the two without a lot of the negative stuff. Overall though, I still prefer the Federalists, especially at the presidential level (other than Pinckney). I think John Adams was quite good, and the New Yorkers the party ran later were preferable to the Virginian Jameses.

But they conveniently ignore the fact that the richest Americans were southern planters, who greatly supported Jefferson (the Pinckneys are the only notable exception I've found so far).

George Washington was a Federalist in spirit and practice (and Shay's Rebellion is what took him out of retirement - which he violently put down and then went on to win the Presidency unopposed two times - not a good look for democracy!), if not in open affiliation, and Alexander Hamilton's in-laws owned slaves (and Hamilton himself traded some slaves in NYC and even owned one or two IIRC, don't quote me on that last part though).

Not to mention Patrick Henry (Jefferson's first great rivalry and a Federalist during the Adams administration), Edward Rutledge, and John Marshall. Those are some pretty significant oversights.

If we expand the frame to include the Hamiltonian's ideological successors in the Second Party System, William Henry Harrison presents as a prominent pro-slavery Whig (his tenure as governor of the Indiana Territory was marked by conflict with President Jefferson over his proposal to introduce slavery in the Northwest). It's interesting to compare county-level results from the election of 1840 with this map showing the counties with the largest slave populations.

(1)

(2)

(1) Source: Wikimedia Commons
(2) Source: Smithsonian Magazine

I knew that Marshall was a Virginian and obviously a Federalist, but somehow I hadn't made the obvious connection that he was a slaveowner. Also, I'm not surprised about Harrison, as I already knew that the Whigs had a strong pro-slavery Southern faction. But the Federalists were much more centered around the Northeast, I believe, or at least always seemed that way to me. By the way, even though I prefer the Whigs over the Democrats I'm not a Whig hack, and in elections where the Democratic candidate was better (like in this case), I would've supported him.

[Joe Haydn]

The plebs are coming to kill us, isn't far off from the slaves are coming to kill us.

Also remember the Haitian Revolution in living memory. The State's Rights Whigs and nullifiers were also part of the Whig coalition.

The Southern Whigs were certainly planter heavy.

Compare to say someone like Andrew Johnson the epitome of a Jacksonian Democrat, who while certainly racist, represented a classist anti-planter view that led to his militant opposition to the Confederacy and desire to hang Robert E. Lee (it was Grant that saved Lee by the way). Robert Toombs and Alexander Stephens (CSA VP) were both Whigs.

Not saying that all Democrats wanted to hang the plantation elite, but it would be a mistake to view the Democrats of this period as a party of slave owners with no relation whatsoever to modern day. Populism and anti-elite/wealthy politics has been around since the beginning.

Ok, but let me make a counterpoint. The state most representative of the planter elite class, even more so than the nullifiers’ home state of South Carolina, was Virginia — and it was solidly Democratic (in fact, so was South Carolina for the most part). Kentucky and Tennessee, on the other hand — arguably the two states most representative of the backcountry yeomen farmers — were quite Whiggish.