Historical continuity of Democrats and Republicans

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How can we have a topic about the period from 1876-1932 without mentioning the single most important ideological movement of that era, progressivism? The existence of the Progressive movement makes me skeptical of the idea that the Republicans were always the more conservative party than the Democrats, even if they were less open on issues like immigration and trade. Even though there were progressives in both major parties, it's no coincidence that a great many of them were Western and Midwestern Republicans like Bob La Follette, William Borah, George Norris, and Hiram Johnson. And in case anyone should doubt it, the progressives were certainly the liberals of their day and their opponents the conservatives; just see how many ended up supporting FDR and take a look at the Bull Moose party platform from 1912, which translates well to modern liberalism in many ways. 

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I'm skeptical of the idea that the Republicans were always the more conservative party than the Democrats, even if they were less open on issues like immigration and trade. How can we have a topic about the period from 1876-1932 without mentioning the single most important ideological movement of that era, progressivism? Just read the Bull Moose party platform from 1912, which translates well to modern liberalism in many ways. Even though there were progressives in both major parties, it's no coincidence that a great many of them were Western and Midwestern Republicans like Bob La Follette, William Borah, George Norris, and Hiram Johnson.

Oh, I would be very hesitant to suggest a one-to-one relationship between progressivism and liberalism in the late nineteenth century. In many cases, they were directly opposed to each other. The "Bull Moose" platform aligns with twenty-first century liberal orthodoxy to a degree, but was also in many ways an aberration, and considerably more radical than anything Teddy or Taft pursued in office.

Beyond that, describing the fifty-odd years from 1876-1932 as a homogenous period is problematic for a variety of reasons, and progressivism as a meaningful identity only existed for perhaps half that time.

If your idea of a late 19th century liberal is Grover Cleveland, then yeah. His belief in laissez-faire economics couldn't be more opposed to progressivism, I agree. But by the 1910s I think this distinction no longer really existed, considering that Wilson was described as both a liberal and a progressive in equally strong terms. Like has been mentioned earlier in this thread, the same happened to the British Liberals of the time, who adopted progressive ideas under Lloyd George.

I think part of the problem is that I started with 1876. You're right that 1876-1932 isn't a homogeneous period, as progressivism didn't really exist for those first 20 years. I should've started with 1896, as by that point one might be able to say that progressivism and liberalism had already become intertwined in the form of William Jennings Bryan's populist campaign.

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I sort of view it as the Republicans always being the representative of the "in-group" (starting with Northern WASPs and expanding to other whites as time went on) and Democrats being a coalition of "out groups" (Southerners + white ethnics in the 19th century, shifting more to non-whites in the 20th century).

Well, there is one very obvious exception to this "rule." There's something of merit here, but it's lost in trying to be overly simplistic.

Yes it needs to be qualified along the lines that I used a few days ago. Not in a position to do that right now on my phone.

That’s funny, I didn’t see you mention African-Americans in any of your previous posts in this thread.

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I sort of view it as the Republicans always being the representative of the "in-group" (starting with Northern WASPs and expanding to other whites as time went on) and Democrats being a coalition of "out groups" (Southerners + white ethnics in the 19th century, shifting more to non-whites in the 20th century).

Well, there is one very obvious exception to this "rule." There's something of merit here, but it's lost in trying to be overly simplistic.

Yes it needs to be qualified along the lines that I used a few days ago. Not in a position to do that right now on my phone.

That’s funny, I didn’t see you mention African-Americans in any of your previous posts in this thread.

I assume Yankee is responding to the second part of my post ("lost in trying to be overly simplistic"). There's more that's problematic about Orser67's analysis than neglecting to mention African-Americans.

Actually, I believe Yankee may have been referring to his posts in this thread, in which he did in fact talk extensively on black voting patterns. I now recognize that my previous post was uncalled for, so I apologize. In any case, I still do believe that it's wrong to view the Republicans as always having been the more conservative party, as Yankee and some others seem to.

I also happen to feel that Yankee and others engage in some motivated reasoning. Since they're Republicans, they want to be able to draw a connection from themselves to the "good old Republicans" that everyone respects like Lincoln and Teddy. That way they can say, "see, those Republicans were conservatives too", even when the contemporary Republican party is nothing like the old one. Of course, I probably engage in the same sort of motivated reasoning from the other end by portraying those Republicans as overly liberal.

But I still do think that Yankee and co. tend to ignore the elephant in the room, the Progressive movement, when talking about the history of the Republican party. Yes, the national party in the Gilded Age was in bed with big business, but what about all the Western Republican progressives, and what about TR? And it's not like the Democrats were any more pro-worker or less pro-business (unless you view free trade in that way), and I think it's fair to say that the Progressive movement was more active inside the Republican party than the Democratic one.

Overall though, in the Gilded Age neither party really had a coherent ideology. There were progressives and conservatives in both parties, many of whom were closer politically to their fellow progressives across the aisle than their more conservative party members. Maybe, then, it's not helpful to consider either party more conservative or liberal. Perhaps a progressive-conservative distinction is more useful, similar to how some historians view the traditional Court-Country divide as still more relevant in 1690s England than the emerging Whig-Tory party system.

Edit: I realize that I ignored your earlier point about progressive conservatism, but what else am I supposed to call the opponents of progressives but conservatives? Well, now that I think about it non-progressive might be more fitting. Actually, I rather like that, implying as it does that the main political division of the Progressive Era was over its ideological namesake rather than between liberals and conservatives.

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Ok, fine. The Gilded Age Republicans were conservatives, the Democrats liberals, both in the classical sense and meaning very different things from today. But if that's really the case, I'm curious, did Republicans back then describe themselves as conservatives, and Democrats as liberals, like they do today? Did other contemporary observers describe them in those ways? Considering the names of the British parties at this time, I don't think I'm being modern centric here.

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Grover Cleveland is the tail end of the eating around the big polished table of the Jacksonian Revolution. Cleveland thinks he is a Jacksonian by virtue of doing the same thing as Jackson, he thinks he is helping the poor. Just like Old Hickory, he supported hard money. Just like King Andrew, he opposed bigger government seeing it philosophically as a tool for the elites to enrich himself. Just like King Andrew, he opposed business monopolies. Just like King Andrew Jackson he opposed protectionism. Of course he supported immigration and he supported universal white male suffrage (though it is not like anyone opposed this by 1884 except for maybe some Plantation owners and New England blue blood aristocrats).

In a way, doesn't that make Cleveland a conservative, if by that point the Jacksonian policies were no longer helping the common people? I remember one time when I praised the Whigs for being ahead of their time on the currency issue, you told me "context matters." The Whigs supported soft money to benefit speculators and bankers, you said, while the Bryan Democrats believed it would help out poor indebted farmers. Does not context matter in this case also? By the 1890s, if hard money and laissez-faire primarily benefited businesses rather than commoners, doesn't that make the man behind those policies conservative in some sense, even if those policies were once Andrew Jackson's? Also, you claim that Cleveland supported Jackson's old policies for the same reason Old Hickory had, namely that he believed in liberal anti-elitist principles. I won't pretend to know Grover Cleveland's motives, but it strikes me as unlikely that a leader of a faction called the Bourbons was motivated by a desire to help the poor or fight elites.

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^You've made some good points in this thread Yankee, and have somewhat convinced me of your "continuously conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats" theory. However, I think that once you start calling plantation owners "liberals", the term basically loses all meaning. Owning other human beings as property is antithetical to all of liberalism's principles and everything it stands for. But since you don't seem to view the racial issues of the 19th century in a liberal/conservative lens, I'll get away from the obviously illiberal racial stuff to focus on other things. Namely, that plantation owners were fabulously wealthy individuals who believed in all sorts of hierarchies, not just for blacks but also for poor whites. If wealthy and privileged individuals who strongly believed in hierarchy and keeping the poor and oppressed classes down aren't conservatives, then I don't know who is.

Oh, but I guess that's not "what defined conservative values at the time on the national scale." It doesn't matter if you're a rich and powerful landowner who despised the working poor; to be a conservative you have to be a Northern Republican nativist or a New England banker, because Yankee says so! Why? Because Republicans are always more conservative, Democrats always more liberal, that's just the way it is. It doesn't matter what the members of the party actually believe, as a Democrat is by definition a liberal, and a Republican a conservative. Besides, trying to apply modern ideological definitions onto 19th century political parties isn't historically accurate, even if there are certain principles, like the defense of hierarchy and order, that are definitionally conservative. No matter if Democrats were often at least as strong believers in hierarchy as Republicans; the only 19th century issues that can truly be viewed through a liberal/conservative prism are ones that Democrats and Republicans disagreed on, like immigration and free trade. Because the Democrats were liberals on all the issues and the Republicans conservatives, obviously.

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Since discussion has stalled for a few days, I'd like to reiterate some points I've made previously in the thread that I don't feel have been fully answered. I don't agree with calling either one of the Democratic or the Republican parties more liberal or conservative than the other, during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Yankee admitted that in the 19th century neither party's members referred to themselves in those terms, even while in Britain there was a clear distinction between liberals and conservatives. I don't think it was until Wilson at the very earliest, FDR at the latest, that Democrats had firmly established themselves as self-described "liberals", and Republicans as "conservatives" (and even then, there would continue to be plenty of conservative Southern Democrats and liberal Rockefeller Republicans for some time to come).

To get back to the point, the political parties of turn of the century America were such big tents - with coalitions based more around cultural identity than common policy positions - that neither one really had much of a consistent ideology. Trade is the one exception, as Republicans were united around protectionism and Democrats around free trade. But on the whole, both parties were focused solely on gaining power for its own sake, and were just as willing to nominate conservatives (McKinley, Parker) as progressives (Bryan, Roosevelt) if they thought it'd help them win. This is why I think it makes more sense to view the politics based on a progressive-conservative dichotomy, similar to how some historians view the traditional Court-Country divide as still more relevant in 1690s England than the emerging Whig-Tory party system. Many of the most progressive and liberal politicians of the period like Bob La Follette, George Norris, William Borah, and Hiram Johnson were Republicans. I therefore don't see how a party that produced such men can be considered conservative, while Ben Tilman's Democrats were supposedly a liberal party.

Also, there's one specific issue I'd like to offer as a counter to the idea that Democrats were always the more liberal party. On the issue of women's suffrage, an undeniably liberal cause if there ever was one, the Republicans were to the left of the Democrats. The traditionally Republican western states were the most forward-looking on the issue, with many of them granting suffrage as early as the 19th century. In the 1916 election, Hughes ran on a more pro-suffrage platform than Wilson. When the 19th Amendment was ratified, the Republican North was far more favorable to the cause than the Solid Democratic South, with many Deep Southern states not ratifying the Amendment until decades afterward. I could go on, but I think you get the point. (Edit: I also wanted to add that it's a myth that Prohibition was mostly a Republican policy. The split of Democrats and Republicans voting for and against the Prohibition resolution in Congress was about equal. There were plenty of Prohibitionist Democrats at the national level like Bryan. Furthermore, I don't view Prohibition as a left-right issue. Many progressives supported it as well as conservatives, believing it to be a just and necessary reform.)

Lastly, I'd like to express an interesting observation I've made, unrelated to the current discussion about historical partisan ideologies but relevant to the thread topic. The 1876 and 1976 election maps, for being a century apart, are astonishingly similar. In both elections, the West was uniformly Republican, while the South was almost completely solid for the Democrat. The Northeast was highly contested, with the Democrat generally doing better in the Mid-Atlantic, the Republican in New England. The Midwest is the main difference between the two maps, as it was slightly more Republican in 1876. However, one could attribute this to the fact that in the 19th century the Midwest was less of its own distinct region, and more an extension of the Western states (hence the west part of the name).

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I'm left wondering whether there was any point to the last five pages, because it seems we're back to square one: assuming that being a "progressive" is the same as being left-wing, cherry-picking a few Republican politicians and claiming they speak for the entire party at the turn of the century (despite all evidence to the contrary), arguing that nineteenth century Democrats couldn't be liberals because they were racist, and dismissing the obvious flaws in your argument with "it wasn't an ideological issue." Social issues are difficult to fit into an ideological framework given how dramatically our views on race and gender have changed in the last 200 years (this cannot be overstated), and trying to arguing that [candidate X] must have been a conservative because they believed [racist nonsense] and no liberal would every believe that today, is an obviously flawed model for understanding the past. Your point about prohibition really underscores the problem here.

Many progressives supported it as well as conservatives, believing it to be a just and necessary reform.

Many progressives were conservatives. The progressive movement was a set of policy objectives that different kinds of people endorsed for different reasons. This shouldn't be hard to understand, as you presumably support gun control while condemning the racist ideology that led white conservatives to press for an assault weapons ban in the 70s and 80s. Some people became progressives because, like Bryan, they understood that the Second Industrial Revolution had changed the playing field and the lower classes would now need to leverage the power of the newly-democratized state to counter the influence of big business. Some people became progressives because they understood that, in lieu of substantial reforms, capitalism would collapse in on itself and be replaced by a radical new order. Some people who became progressives saw themselves as leading an egalitarian revolution against the status quo, and some people who became progressives saw themselves as restoring a bygone era of civic virtue. Lumping all these people together and saying, "yup, they're the left" ignores all of these nuances in favor of a simplified dichotomy that fits with our modern ideas of what the world is like, instead of trying to understand past individuals for who they were.

I'd agree that progressives weren't necessarily left-wingers at heart, as many of them were initially conservatives who adopted progressive policy positions in order to co-opt popular reforms. However, relatively speaking, I think they were the liberals of their day, or at least more liberal than their opponents. On the whole, the progressive reforms made a more egalitarian society, regardless of the motives of the reformers. Like you said, many conservative party elites opposed progressives for that reason, as they sought to preserve their social position.

But if progressives weren't the left-wing of that period of American politics, then who was? I know there were leftist third parties like the Populists and Socialists, but since we're talking about the differences between the two major parties, let's ignore them for now. Were the Democrats the left then, since they were supposedly the liberals? Well, I'd argue that some indeed were, like William Jennings Bryan, but others just as easily weren't. The small government classical liberals were getting old fast, and Cleveland and his ilk were conservatives by the time Bryan came along. I don't know why you're so insistent on portraying Cleveland as such a true believer in liberalism - except that it fits with your narrative of the Democrats as liberals - when it was clear that his outdated, conservative ideas were no longer helping the common people. Similarly, Alton Parker was like Cleveland a traditional Democrat, and was duly regarded as the conservative to Roosevelt's progressive. I'd also argue that the Southern wing of the party was never really liberal, as their arguments for states' rights didn't come from a deeply held belief in liberal federalism, but from a desire to justify slavery and white supremacy. With all that in mind, it is my view that the left of American politics consisted of progressive members of both parties, while the right was made up of social elites resistant to progressive reforms, including both Republican New England financiers and Democratic Southern landholders.

If we accept that the progressives were the liberals of their day, then let's look at which parties they came from. I wasn't trying to cherry-pick Republican progressives, it's just that a vast majority of well-known progressives seem to come from that party. The only notable Democratic progressives I know of are Bryan and Wilson. There are probably more, but they're not familiar enough to me. So if most progressives were Republicans, then doesn't that in some sense put the party to the left of the Democrats, when the establishments of both parties were conservative?

There's a reason Roosevelt's 1912 campaign went down in flames at the Republican National Convention (yes, I am aware that Taft was far more progressive on the issues than he is often given credit for —that doesn't change the fact that he ran as the conservative candidate in 1912, and the party divided accordingly): the party bosses and the majority of elected Republicans were very hostile to the progressive agenda and viewed Roosevelt, La Follette, Borah, and the rest as dangerous men. Neither party has ever been ideologically homogenous, but that doesn't mean we can't draw conclusions about what the average Republican or the average Democrat believed in 1900, nor does it mean that everyone who supported a given policy did so for identical reasons. The presence of conservative Southern Democrats in Congress during the 30s and 40s does not change the fact that the Democratic party of FDR was fundamentally a liberal and progressive political party nationally, just as the presence of progressive Western Republicans in Congress during the 1880s and 1890s does not change the fact that the Republican party of Harrison and McKinley was a fundamentally conservative political party nationally.

The party bosses of the Democrats disliked progressives, too. The corrupt Tammany Hall machine strongly opposed the Bryan wing of the party, for instance. That said, he still did manage to win the nomination three times, so...you've probably got the stronger argument there. But I'd like to address the second part of your paragraph. Who decides what conservative means anyway? I still fail to see how Southern aristocrats were any less conservative than Northern industrialists and bankers. Was it because they supported a liberal party with liberal policies like free trade? Without further elaboration, that's just circular reasoning. What makes that party and those policies liberal? What is so much more liberal about the Southern Democratic elitist who supports free trade because it enhances his riches, than the Northern Republican elitist who support protectionism because it protects his wealth?

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I am going to try and hammer this one out, but this is really pushing it time wise for me.


Woman's Suffrage

Motivations- The thing to remember is that as was said earlier, people support things for different reasons. If you look at anti-slavery and abolitionism, a number of people supported that because they wanted to "civilize" the "heathens" and they viewed slavery as a hindrance to being able to spread the gospel to them, especially after several black codes were past out of fear of a slave revolt on a massive scale (like Haiti or Nat Turner's Rebellion). It is worth noting that the concept of the Jefferson Davis, "Slavery as a civilizing force" was developed in all its infamy and ridiculum in large part as a rhetorical reaction to the moralistic cultural imperialism of pious Northern protestant abolitionists referenced above.  The latter Jeff Davis bs line is far more remembered, then the any kind of deep dive into the motivations of abolitionists, but we can certainly look past the cultural imperialism today, since the end goal of abolitionism was justifiable for other means. That point is the important take away.

When it comes to women versus male dynamic in this time, there is a distinct traditional conservative versus classically liberal divide. This is further emphasized by the point that "married women" tended to be conservative leaning as late as the 2000s and thus when you account for the higher marriage/lower divorce rates you begin to paint a picture that leads one to some interesting observations. For instance, drunkenness was primarily a problem caused by men, along with prostitution and guess who the people running the prostitutes out often were? Married women. Who were the ones smashing up the saloons? Married women. A generalized but effective analogy I often look to and gives an interesting take on western settlement is that men often went first and brought with them saloons and brothels, and then married women came and forced the closure of the saloons and brothels and the opening up of schools and churches.

Therefore, women were a force for societal stability and the family, against the libertine urges of male virility and appetites. This kind of controlling behavior social conservatism was present as recent as the 2000s and had strong support from the same group largely, married women who were highly religious. Women strongly backed Harding and Eisenhower for President as well.  

Even if women were temperamentally or politically conservative at the time, that doesn't change the fact that expanding the franchise is a fundamentally liberal principle that throughout history has always been pushed for by liberals and opposed by conservatives. It also doesn't change the fact that the suffragettes were viewed as dangerous radicals by the establishment and the ruling class.

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^You've made some good points in this thread Yankee, and have somewhat convinced me of your "continuously conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats" theory. However, I think that once you start calling plantation owners "liberals", the term basically loses all meaning.

TIL Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Patrick Henry, Andrew Jackson, and investor in the slave trade who helped draft the (obviously pro-slavery) colonial Constitution of the Carolinas John Locke weren't liberals (or rather, Liberals, to be crystal clear).

They may have been perceived as or thought themselves to be liberals, but their actions didn't match their rhetoric. The owning of other humans as property is clearly inconsistent with core liberal principles like individual liberty and personal freedom, unless one takes an extreme propertarian stance to justify their actions (like Locke and others did).

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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.

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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.

To quote this review of a history of the Puritan political tradition for anyone who didn't see it in the other thread,

For several centuries the term "Puritan" was synonymous with democracy, enlightenment, rebellion against tyranny, freedom, and much else that was laudable. In the last century an entire reversal has occurred, making the term to mean repressive, hypocritical, censorious, prudish, and worse ... From 1620 to 1900 the great majority of commentators, including such non-Calvinists as Emerson, Thoreau, and Unitarians and liberals generally, expressed their profuse admiration of the Puritans.

So yes, while Nathaniel Hawthorne (I haven't read The Scarlet Letter btw, would you recommend it?) and most people in general would agree that the Salem Witch Trials were a bad thing, most 19th century liberals still held a positive view of the Puritans because they were willing to look past their obvious flaws and see them for what they were in the context of their time: fellow liberals. The ever faithful Southern reactionary George Fitzhugh, though he approves of the Witch Trials, was able to see the greater damage the Puritans had done to the conservative order. In his chapter on the Reformation from Cannibals All!, he bashes the Puritans for their liberalism, writing

The Puritans, in the early days of New England, acted it out; and if they hung a few troublesome old women, the good that they achieved was more than compensated for by any errors they may have committed. Liberty of the press, liberty of speech, freedom of religion, or rather freedom from religion, and the unlimited right of private judgment, have borne no good fruits, and many bad ones.

I also think we need to better define what we mean when we talk about Puritans. I'm mostly using the term to refer to English and colonial American Calvinists of the 17th and 18th centuries, rather than pietistic American Protestants of the 19th century. I may have used it that way a few times in this thread, but I think it's debatable whether it even makes sense to refer to "Puritans" as a group that existed beyond the 18th century; perhaps the better term would be "the descendants of the Puritans"?

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.

Now this is where things get interesting (in other words, screw America, because it's English history time!). Obviously the literal idea of the left/right divide comes from where people were sitting in the French National Assembly, as we all know. I'd argue that the modern liberal/conservative dichotomy actually begins with the English Revolution of 1640, rather than the French Revolution 150 years later. I admit that I'm being revisionist here, as the conventional view says that modern ideologies basically formed in reaction to the French Revolution. But if you look at some of the things the Puritans were actually saying, you'll realize that they came to a lot of the same conclusions regarding democracy as the French Jacobins did in 1789.

You've probably heard of the Putney Debates, but I doubt everyone has in this thread. For those unaware, they were debates within the New Model Army over the nature of England's proposed new republican constitution. One of the main discussion points was universal male suffrage - in 1647. When did universal male suffrage become a reality in Great Britain? 1918. It almost seems too unbelievable to be true, that this was seriously being argued in the mid-17th century at the height of European absolutism, but we have the records to prove it and you can see for yourself. I don't doubt there were Republican theorists who had made similar arguments at around the same or earlier, but unlike the New Model Army they were not in a position of power to implement those ideas. The fact those ideas weren't in the end implemented in 1647 is irrelevant; it is astonishing enough that they were even considered in the first place.

Now we find ourselves at the Glorious Revolution, where I will once again play the part of the historical revisionist. You've admirably summarized the standard Whig history narrative, but that is a narrative which I dissent from. It's worth remembering that the catalyst for the Revolution was the imprisonment of seven leading Anglican bishops - these people were the sworn enemies of the Puritans. The case of the Seven Bishops outraged Tory opinion, always on the side of High Church Anglicanism, and brought them into common cause with Whig anti-Catholicism. When William of Orange invaded in 1688, it was a bipartisan group of Whigs and Tories that invited him and showed him support. It wasn't until the Hanoverian Succession that the Tories became a truly Jacobite party; in William and Anne's reign they were strong supporters of the Protestant monarchy.

The Glorious Revolution, then, was a revolution of the nobles and clergy, angered by James's attacks on the established church. What it precisely was not was a revolution of the Puritans. Indeed, that opportunity had come and gone in 1683 with the failure of the Rye House Plot. The truly radical elements of society, the old Cromwellians and Commonwealthmen, saw the Glorious Revolution for what it was: a betrayal and a sell-out of the Good Old Cause. No republic was forthcoming and the monarchy was clearly here to stay, forcing them to turn to a seemingly alien cause: Jacobitism. Many of those implicated in the Jacobite assassination plot of 1696 were Whiggish Jacobites, angered by William's tyrannical measures such as the creation of a large standing army. Among the (falsely) accused was William Penn, that constantly subversive advocate of religious tolerance.

Viewing the Puritans as prudes and censorious was very common even in the 17th century in England. They banned Christmas for instance as well as the heavy handed actions under Cromwell. It was illegal for a number of years in Massachusetts and you were even penalized for skipping work as late as the 19th century in Boston for it.

It is also worth remembering that many people fled Massachusetts because of religious intolerance leading to the formation of Rhode Island for instance. Then there is the fact that MA had executed some Quakers at one point.

Yes they were dissenters from the Church of the England and yes they pioneered some anti-monarchical thought which contributed importantly to the growth of liberalism, but in the context of America they were perceived as being intolerant and authoritarian even in neighboring parts of New England, not to mention Quaker heavy Pennsylvania.

For all the talk of innate egalitarianism, it has to be strongly caveated that this was equal in the eyes of God, not equal under the law. Thus it only applied if you shared the same "ONE TRUE" faith, otherwise it was off to the gallows. In action, they formed their own oppressive and discriminatory establishment a large part of America's early political life hinged around opposition to this establishment and American Liberalism cut its teeth by dismantling the established region championed by this same group of "egalitarians". Obviously, something got lost in the pond on the boat ride over.

I agree with you on the religious intolerance of the American Puritans. Massachusetts Bay was indeed a religiously intolerant society, as shown by the cases of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson. But politically, New England was by far the most democratic region of the Thirteen Colonies. They held regular elections, allowed a relatively wide degree of suffrage, and elected state representatives from all walks of life. This perception still held in the 19th century, as evidenced by George Fitzhugh's scathing attack on New England liberalism.

In Puritan England the opposite was true, as there was little political freedom but widespread religious liberty. In the Protectorate period, Cromwell ruled as a military dictator and dissolved Parliament numerous times when it disagreed. The promising ideas of the Putney Debates were still clearly a long way off. But religiously, the English Puritans were far more tolerant than their American brethren. The 1650s saw a great proliferation of new Protestant sects, many of them millenarian and apocalyptic in nature. These groups were largely allowed to worship freely, as Cromwell was a religious Independent opposed to the idea of an established state church. Cromwell also allowed the Jews to return to England for the first time since they were expelled in the 13th century. Of course this toleration did not extend to the Catholics, but this was no change from Stuart policy.

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This is a great thread and very educational to read. NC Yankee and others have made a strong case for the ideological continuity of the Republican and Democratic Parties from its founding to the present. However, I would note that the most radical elements from Europe-the German '48ers and even Karl Marx himself (who I would argue were far more egalitarian and democratic than almost any native American political figure)-strongly favoured the Republican Party as the instrument with which to destroy slave power. The influence of Forty-Eighters such as Franz Siegel and Carl Schurz on the early Republican Party is well known. Friedrich Hecker has a famous revolutionary song named after him and he ended up a Brigadier General in the Union Army. I'm pretty certain the Forty-Eighters would have favoured the Jeffersonian Republicans in the Early Republic, given their outgrowth from French Revolutionary/Jacobin influence. It is noted earlier in the thread that the bulk of the Liberal voters in Britain favoured the North despite the Southern sympathies of some Liberal politicians (IIRC even Gladstone gave a speech favouring the South though John Bright was pro-Union). There are some parallels here to the division of the old Whig Party into the Cotton and Conscience Whig elements.

Thus I think we can see the very early Republican Party of 1854 to the early 1880s as a big-tent party composed of Northern industrial interests, Yankee Protestant social reformers (which could be conservative or liberal), and the radical democrats represented by the Forty-Eighters. Of course, the old pro-business and Yankee Whig element eventually gained pre-eminence but I don't think that should detract from the radical elements of the early Republican Party. I think one can argue that the Republican Party of 1885 was more directly comparable to (at least the Northern wing) of the Whig Party in 1845 then the Republican Party of 1865 would have been due to the eventual marginalization of the more radical wing. One can see this in the political trajectory of someone like Benjamin Butler who claimed Jeffersonian principles but believed it had to be achieved through Hamiltonian means. It's at best a coincidence but its amusing to note that the "Wide Awakes" of 1860 has a parallel today in the term "woke" used to describe awareness of oppression and privilege in contemporary times.

Great post. I would also add that the top minds of the Confederacy, if they can be called that, were self-described reactionaries who talked about “rolling back the Reformation in its political phases” and “raising the Tory standard in the South.” In the Civil War liberalism was clearly on the side of the North and abolition, while support for the South and slavery was a conservative position. Notice the anti-Reformation rhetoric as well. Yankee Protestants were essentially liberals, in a Lockean sense, and the Southerners hated them for it. Fitzhugh savaged the New England Puritans for allowing “liberty of speech” and “freedom of religion,” and explicitly denied equality and the liberal ideas the country was founded on. To an old-school Tory absolutist like him, they were the same old anarchical heretics that had executed King Charles, led the American Revolution, and defiled the good name of the South by allowing abolitionist “jacobins” like Garrison to speak their minds.

Another important point is that opposition to slavery and advocacy for racial justice has always been and was always perceived as a liberal rather than conservative priority, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. In the UK the abolition movement was led by William Wilberforce and his Quakers, and in Parliament it was taken up by Charles James Fox and the radical Whigs. It was opposed, of course, by the Tories. Even in America someone like Jefferson recognized that slavery was incompatible with his liberal values, and therefore struggled with what we would today call cognitive dissonance as a slaveowner himself. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, on the other hand, was an unapologetic defender of the Southern ruling class and thus thought slavery to be perfectly justified in and of itself. In the Reconstruction period the most vociferous defenders of racial justice were called “radicals”, which had an almost exclusively left-wing connotation at the time. Not to mention the fundamentally redistributive class-based economic policies they pushed for in the South. If you need any proof, look at the Yankee Leviathan passage here.

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I wasn't saying that the South hated New England moralism, but that they hated New England liberalism, as I have provided evidence for. So you are implying that the two are connected then, no? I would agree that they are. Moralism is not inherently conservative and it never has been, despite what the religious right would have you think. In many cases liberal views have stemmed from strong religious beliefs, like among abolitionists or Social Gospelers who believed that the inequality in the world was deeply wrong on a moral level.

I would also argue that Yankees were not the dominant faction in the United States. The Slave Power and what succeeded it was. The planters controlled the United States economy and political system to such a degree that they were able to silence critics of slavery via the gag rule and dictate US foreign policy during the westward expansion period. That the planters chose to ally themselves with the Irish and other Catholic immigrants was, as you said, a marriage of convenience. The immigrants were enemies of the Yankees, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Their mutual racism just made it easier as they both despised the efforts of the liberalizing Yankees to improve the lot of the worst off in society, the slaves.

Basically, what I am trying to argue here is that the Southern planters defined the Democratic party just as much as the Northern immigrants did. You can't argue that the latter defined the party and the former just "tacked along" when they in fact wielded effective control over it. Furthermore, if you are defining the Democrats by the urban immigrants, then why not define the Republicans by their Black supporters? Why not say the Northern Yankees just "tacked along"? Is it because the Yankees in the North were the base of the party and far outnumbered Black Republicans? That is a reasonable point, but I would still argue as I have that many of those Yankees were in fact liberals. They were not the dominant group in American society - the Slave Power was. They fought against that power, just as their English Puritan ancestors had fought against the power of the King.

By the way, I found this cool speech from 1910 comparing the English and American Civil Wars. It should be obvious, but guess which side is which:

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_parallel_between_the_English_and_American_civil_wars

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Ok, but even if the North was in the dominant position relative to the South, that doesn't make their position any less liberal. It's not how much money you have that determines your ideology, but what ideas you are fighting for. In the case of the Civil War the North was fighting for liberal ones and the South for conservative ones, as defined by the political theorists on both sides. Look at the English Civil War for instance. Read this passage from the speech I linked comparing the American and English Civil Wars:

In very many respects the position of the Parliament resembled that of the Federal government. Both began the war with great advantages. The Parliament, like the North, held the seat of the national government, and controlled whatever central machinery existed. But the possession of London meant much more than the possession of Washington; it was Washington, New York and Boston in one the headquarters of the administration, the money market, and the intellectual centre united and it had comparatively a larger population than those three cities put together. Oxford, the seat of the royal government, situated almost on the frontier of the territory which the King held, furnishes a sort of analogy to Richmond; year after year the forces of the Parliament marched against it and failed to take it and its fall marked the end of the war.

These are superficial resemblances. It is more important to remember that the Parliament, like the Federal government, possessed far greater financial resources than its adversary. It held the richest part of the country, most of the capitalists lived in its quarters, the taxes it levied were more productive, and it could raise loans with greater facility. In the American Civil War the possession of mines and foundries and factories was one of the elements in the superiority of the North; in our Civil War the simpler economic organisation of the time made the control of the manufacturing districts less vital.

In other words the Roundheads controlled the richer parts of England - the South and East - where Puritanism was strong among the prosperous mercantile bourgeoisie in the coastal cities. By contrast the Royalists received the bulk of their support from the North and West - the poorer sections of the country with stronger remnants of ancestral Catholicism. The Parliamentarians were clearly in a dominant position relative to the Royalists, but you wouldn't say they were the more conservative side, would you?

Also, if you say that "Southern Planters were on the verge of being completely left behind and irrelevant in a country completely defined by different values", doesn't that basically make them reactionaries by definition since they were trying to preserve their feudalistic society in a rapidly changing world?

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Additionally, this economic nationalism as you call it is not just a conservative thing. Friedrich List, the German nationalist economist of the early 19th century, was a political liberal who was greatly inspired by the economic thought of Alexander Hamilton. My father is actually reading a book right now called Radical Hamilton: Economic Lessons from a Misunderstood Founder, which just came out this year. Going back further, you'll find that the Whigs, not the Tories, supported protectionism. In the 17th and 18th centuries the Whigs backed protectionist policies primarily for anti-French/national security  reasons and developed an economic theory to go along with it, while the Tories advocated free trade. It's just not true that classical liberalism and laissez-faire have always gone together, or vice versa.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_industry_argument

http://www.paecon.net/PAEtexts/Chang1.htm (I disavow the paragraph about Lincoln and the Civil War)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whigs_(British_political_party)#Protectionism

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This is a YouTube video which just came out today that makes a lot of really good points related to our discussion. Have a look at this article as well, comprised of direct quotes from the 19th century:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/abolitionism-socialism-slavery/

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I'm just going to leave this here:

OP if forced to choose major-party candidates?

Explanation: Democrat, anti-racist, anti-papist.

Actually I think I'd be a Hughes-Harding-Coolidge-Smith voter (Debs in 1920 and LaFollette in 1924 if third-parties allowed). Since anti-Catholicism in the 1920s came mostly from the Klan rather than Northeasterners, I would've firmly opposed it.

Actually I had no doubts your voting preferences would be exactly like that, but you know I like to trigger you.

By the way, what kind of voter would have feared Al Smith's Catholicism only because of possible ties to Mussolini and Primo de Rivera? It sounds absurd.

A liberal intellectual voter, as I said, who paid close attention to international affairs. It may sound absurd, but at that point the Catholic Church was still a profoundly illiberal institution in bed with reactionaries and dictators across the world. It wasn't just bigoted Southerners or the Klan who feared that a Catholic in power would bring in theocracy or take orders from the Pope, but secular Northern liberals too. In that spirit the National Liberal League had supported the Blaine Amendment some 50 years earlier. Here's a passage from The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism on just that:

The membership of this movement, largely well-to-do and well educated, came from the old Puritan regions in New England and from the areas of the Puritan diaspora in the upper Middle West, and they had important friends in Congress and even the White House. (President Ulysses S. Grant had made separation part of the Republican agenda.) The Liberals, or "total separationists," as I will call them to distinguish them from the earlier anti-Catholics, were in some respects heterogeneous. Some were atheists, some were Jews, others called themselves agnostics, and still others experimented with various forms of non-Christian "spiritualism" in vogue at the time. None of them saw any reason the United States should have any connection with Christianity, and they girded themselves to battle for "the absolute separation of church and state."

Liberals, then, rejected Christianity--but not Protestant religiosity.

[...]

At first glance, it is startling to see an unapolgetically anti-Christian movement flourish in a nation whose traditions and public institutions were steeped in Protestant Christianity. Yet a closer look would show that the Liberals were really located at the far end of a Protestant continuum [...] Even the Liberals, who disliked all forms of Christianity, could easily agree with the often-voiced Protestant view that Catholics did not think for themselves but took orders from a foreign power. In the campaign to pass the Blaine Amendment, Liberals formed a close working relationship with many pious Protestants. They were able to achieve this kind of working ecumenism because there was a broad Protestant consensus, at least in the North.

Also, somewhat tangentially I remember reading that in 1896 Mark Hanna courted Catholic voters as a winnable bloc for McKinley against the pietist Bryan because he saw the Catholic Church as a global force for conservatism. Furthermore that greatest of classical liberals, William Ewart Gladstone, strongly opposed Catholicism because of its innate conservatism.

I'd also like to address NC Yankee's point regarding the "Liberal Republicans." I get the sense that they called themselves "liberals" in order to distinguish themselves from the Radical Republicans then in charge ("radical" had an almost exclusively left-wing connotation at the time, by the way). In other words, they weren't trying to differentiate themselves from some sort of Republican "conservatism", but rather the radicalism that was then dominant in the party. You could say that their version of "liberal" meant moderate or compromising, a willingness to work with the other side. And yes, the other side was conservative.

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In my view, the political spectrum for the 1872 election was something like this:

Left-wing<--(Radical) Republicans--Liberal Republicans|Democrats--Straight-out Democrats-->Right-wing

President Grant and the Radical Republicans ran the most radical and uncompromising campaign on Reconstruction, with the potential to completely uproot Southern society and redistribute land and wealth, while the Liberal Republicans - though still on the left side of the spectrum -  were more willing to compromise with the Democrats on the issue. Likewise most Democrats were willing to put their differences aside and field a joint candidate with the Liberal Republicans, but for the hardline conservatives in the Straight-Out faction Greeley was way too radical.

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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.

Who’s Henry?

I think he's referring to me

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I was searching for references to "popery and slavery" for a different post when I came across a couple interesting findings, namely these two university papers:

https://ir.library.louisville.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3440&context=etd

https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/55595/PDF/1/play/

If you Ctrl-F and search for the terms "liberal" and "radical", you'll find that 90% of the time or more they are used in reference to Protestantism, the North, and the Republicans; while "conservative" and "reactionary" are used with the same frequency to describe Catholicism, the South, and the Democrats. Just some food for thought.

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Expanding on my last post, I would strongly encourage everyone reading this to spend some time scrolling through the links I posted above. To be honest it felt incredibly vindicating to read page after page describing the deep conservatism of 19th century American Catholics and how it conflicted with the Protestant liberal values of the country. There are so many passages I could post here to help back up the points I've made throughout this thread, but for now I'll share only a few from each source.

From Louisville:

Not only did Church officials perceive the Republicans to be anti-Catholic and associate them with the nativist riots that occurred during the prewar period, but prelates and priests also argued that the party of Lincoln represented the ill-effects of Protestantism in American society. Clergy considered the Republican antislavery platform and the party’s association with abolitionism to be examples of Protestant fanaticism. Although by 1860 nearly all Protestant sects contained an antislavery faction, almost all members of the Church—in both the United States and Europe—denounced abolitionism as a radical movement that opposed Catholic teachings. Catholic leaders considered abolitionism to be a product of Protestant liberalism which threatened to upend the social and legal status quo in the country. As abolitionists demanded an immediate end to slavery, despite American laws that protected the institution, Catholic leaders sought to preserve order by upholding the sanctity of the Constitution. Thus, prelates and priests believed that the Republican Party—the party of northern Protestants—endangered the stability of the country by advancing its antislavery platform. In particular, ultramontane clergy—like Francis Patrick Kenrick and Spalding—adhered to the belief that slavery remained a legitimate human relation that fit within a structured social hierarchy. Clergy referenced Catholic theology, doctrine, and dogma to offer an alternative course of action than the one pursued by abolitionists and antislavery Republicans. According to members of the American hierarchy, Catholicism defended national laws, protected the social order, and prevented political factionalism because it provided a central authority—the Church—to settle internal disputes. On the other hand, prelates and priests contended that Protestantism allowed for lawlessness, fomented social disorder, and led to political disunion because, without the acceptance of a central moral authority, Protestantism allowed each man (or woman) to become a law unto himself (or herself). Thus, not only did clergy oppose the Republican Party because of its perceived anti-Catholic stance, but prelates and priests also disparaged the party of Lincoln because it represented the interests of northern Protestants, a group that Catholics considered uninformed religious fanatics that fomented disunion.

Note how they refer to the Protestants as "fanatics" - this is the exact same language that Tories used to describe radical Protestants and Whigs in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Although the clergy in Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri did not publicly endorse or campaign for a candidate in the presidential election of 1860, the majority of prelates and priests privately supported Stephen Douglas, the northern Democratic candidate from Illinois. The clergy’s antebellum experiences with nativism and anti-Catholicism forged a strong bond between members of the Church and Democrats. However, by the summer of 1860, the Democratic Party had divided into northern and southern wings, forcing Border State Catholics to decide between Douglas and John C. Breckinridge of the southern Democratic Party. Although some Catholics backed Breckinridge—particularly fellow Kentuckians from the western portion of the state—most members of the Church in the region supported Douglas. The northern Democratic candidate promoted unionism and vowed to uphold the status quo, which, to Catholic clergy, meant an adherence to the law and the preservation of social order. As Catholic historian William B. Kurtz explained, “Catholics’ faith and religious worldview, which emphasized stability over reform, also made them predisposed to favor a conservative and national party.” Douglas gained the support of Catholics because he advocated the policy of popular sovereignty to decide the fate of slavery in the West, opposed abolitionism, promised to protect the rights of immigrants, and promoted the sanctity of the Union by running a national campaign. For example, regarding the dispute over slavery in the western territories, the Douglas Democratic platform pledged to “abide by the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States [the Dred Scott decision] upon these questions of Constitutional law.” Thus, clergy from the Border States viewed Douglas as the candidate least influenced by Protestant liberalism and most committed to the interests of the Church and the nation.

From Rutgers:

By midcentury many leading American Catholics held that Catholicism melded more easily with the hierarchical and illiberal culture of the slaveholding South than with the ultra-democratic and commercial values of the Yankee North. This notion of the South as a kind of “quasi-Catholic society,” flawed and superficial as it was, would soon spread beyond American shores and exert a powerful hold over the Catholic elite of Europe. As the United States descended into Civil War, many of the Catholic monarchists, nobles, and reactionaries of the Old World came to regard the struggle between an abolitionist North and slaveholding South as a mirror image of the longstanding struggle between liberal democracy and reactionary monarchism that had roiled Catholic Europe since 1789. The Confederacy, on this view, was a traditional, aristocratic society besieged by the modern forces of democracy and industrialism embodied in the “Yankee Leviathan” of the North. Eager to witness the dissolution of the American Republic, the Catholic elite of France, Spain, Germany, Austria and Italy, including many of the leading representatives of the Holy See itself, would prove among the most stalwart allies of the Confederacy.

[...]

Moreover, the view of the Confederacy as a traditional, aristocratic society besieged by a revolutionary and ultra-democratic North was itself a key article of Confederate propaganda during the Civil War. Eager to enlist foreign allies and shape public opinion overseas, the Confederacy between 1862 and 1864 funded an extensive agitprop campaign in Europe aimed at reinforcing the perception of the American South as a conservative, traditional society at war with the radical and materialistic “Yankees” and “Puritans” of the industrial North. Particularly in France, Ireland, Spain, and Italy, a central pillar of this propaganda campaign was the argument that the aristocratic South was, in terms of culture, religion, politics, and national origins, a kind of colonial outpost of the Catholic Old World. To help disseminate this message, the Confederate government enlisted a number of American Catholic churchmen, including Rev. John Bannon of St. Louis and Bishop Patrick Lynch of Charleston, to travel to Europe as diplomatic agents. But this propaganda campaign also benefited from the more informal support of a wide array of pro-Confederate American Catholic clergymen, including Martin John Spalding, the intellectual luminary of the American hierarchy, who sought to leverage their Old World influence into stronger diplomatic ties between Richmond and Rome

The ultramontane assault against the secular world, however, rarely applied to the world of urban machine politics, where support for the Democratic Party remained a hallmark of immigrant life. If anything, the ultramontane revolution actually strengthened Irish-Catholic attachment to the increasingly reactionary Democrats, which amid the bitter sectional debates of the 1850s emerged as the de facto party of the South. By steadfastly denouncing abolitionism as an outgrowth of “the Lawless liberalism” that had convulsed Europe, the ultramontane Church legitimized the proslavery stance of Southern Democrats and further estranged Irish-Catholics from the reformist impulse of the Whig and Republican parties. In truth, the democratic-republicanism of Irish-born radicals like Thomas Addis Emmet and Thomas O’Connor had always mixed uneasily with the proslavery apologetics of Jefferson and Jackson, and in this respect the ultramontane emphasis on tradition, order, and hierarchy helped resolve longstanding cultural differences between aristocratic Southern elites and hardscrabble working-class Irish. When Charles O’Conor in 1859 praised African slavery as an “institution ordained by nature,” he voiced a sentiment that would have rattled his father, the former political radical, but hardly seemed out of place to the reactionaries who dominated both the Catholic Church and the Democratic Party at midcentury.

In 1863 Father John Bannon of Missouri, an Irish-American Catholic priest serving as a Confederate agent abroad, published a series of pamphlets in Ireland addressed to the local Catholic clergy. Intended to quell Irish-Catholic support for the Union Army, which relied heavily on the enlistment of immigrant Irish, the letters cast the American Civil War as epic spiritual struggle between the “all-domineering materialism” of the Yankee North—a society purportedly defined by vulgar industrialism, rampant individualism, and a tawdry ultra-republican political culture—and the “remnant of Christian civilization” that still prevailed in the rural South. The spiritual conflict between North and South, Bannon insisted, owed to the very origins of the European settlement in North America. Whereas New England Yankees were the spiritual heirs of anti-Catholic Protestant radicals like Oliver Cromwell, the planters of the South were descended from the aristocratic families of Catholic Europe, and retained many of the pieties and prejudices of their Old World ancestors. In an age of ever-advancing secularism, liberalism, and materialism, the Southern planter class, much like the Roman Catholic Church itself, remained a pillar of conservative Christian culture. "The Southern People,” Bannon affirmed to his Irish-Catholic audience, were “by race, religion and principles, the natural ally of the foreigner and Catholic.”

But perhaps nothing more strongly influenced the rise of ultramontanism in the American Church than the outspoken support of Protestant nativists, middle-class reformers, and urban evangelicals for the political convulsions that had roiled Catholic Europe. Covering the uprisings in Italy as a correspondent for the New York Tribune, one the leading organs of the Whig Party, Margaret Fuller, the Massachusetts-born reformer and litterateur, wrote glowingly of the Italian “cause for freedom” while condemning the backwardness and conservatism of the Catholic clergy. (She was particularly critical of the Jesuit Order, which she accused of being “always against the free progress of humanity.”) After nationalist forces conquered the Papal States and drove Pius into exile, a wide array of American Protestant luminaries, including Horace Greeley, voiced vigorous support for the Roman Republic, much to the horror of the nation’s Catholics. “They have plundered the churches—they have extorted money from the people—they have almost legalized assassination where ever their authority,” Hughes said of nationalist uprising in Italy. “And this is the phalanx recognized by Mr. Greeley as the Roman Republic.” Such objections, however, did little dampen American Protestant support for liberal nationalism. In the aftermath of the Roman revolution a number of leading European radicals, including Louis Kossuth of Hungary and Alessandro Gavazzi of Italy, made extended tours through North America, denouncing “popery” as a threat to human freedom while soliciting financial contributions for nationalist insurgents in Europe. Typically sponsored by leading American evangelicals, these lecture tours only reinforced the obvious parallels between anti-Catholic nativists in the U.S. and secular liberals in Europe. By the mid-1850s, the apparent links between European liberals and American Know-Nothings had all but extinguished the radical democratic strain of Irish Catholicism.

Hmm...Ms. Fuller's reaction to the Italian revolution of 1848 seems suspiciously reminiscent of how Jefferson and his Republicans talked about the French Revolution. But no, it can't be, because the Whigs were elitist anti-revolutionary nativist conservatives, right?

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One more quote, this time to show that it wasn't just Southerners and Catholics who perceived the Civil War as the same old fight between tradition and monarchy against liberty and republic, but Northerners and Protestants too. From The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism:

"Slavery," wrote Henry Adams in 1907, "drove the whole Puritan community back on its Puritanism." He was reflecting on his early teenage years in the 1850s, the time when he first tried to picture the forces arrayed against each other in America. "The Slave power took the place of Stuart kings and Roman popes" in his imagination, while on the other side the antislavery politicians became the new Puritan liberators, bravely battling tyranny and obscurantism. Growing up in Boston as a scion of a revolutionary family but somewhat adrift in the nineteenth century, Adams found that this image of an earlier struggle renewed his sense of community. His politics "were no longer so modern as the eighteenth century, but took a strong tone of the seventeenth." He was "no longer an isolated atom in a hostile universe, but a sort of herring-fry in a shoal of moving fish." Eventually he discovered that Massachusetts politics were more complicated and less pristine than those of his imagined Puritan past; patronage swaps and other Faustian bargains had to be struck with proslavery Democrats, bargains that were justified as tactical truces in the struggle against slavery and meanwhile served the career ambitions of Whig and Free Soil politicians. But that was to come later. For a thirteen-year-old, the sides were clearly drawn: it was the Roundheads versus the Cavaliers, and the Roundheads were on the side of God and the Republic.
Adams's adolescent typology was widely shared in the decade prior to the Civil War and felt with particular intensity during the war itself. For Northern antislavery spokesmen, the Puritans and "Pilgrims" - terms they often used interchangeably - had laid the groundwork for self-government in America by inculcating habits of hard work, self-discipline, and moral idealism. It was "the blood of those Puritans who planted themselves on these shores," wrote the abolitionist Theodore Parker, "which gave their descendants ad Power of Idea and a Power of Action, such as no people before our time ever had." In contrast, "the Southern States were mainly colonies of adventurers, rather than establishments of men who for conscience' sake fled to the wilderness." Unschooled in religion and morality, at least in comparison to the inhabitants of the "sterner and more austere colonies of the North," the people of the South were all too prone to accept the institution of slavery.

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1) So would most Englanders have described Puritan commonwealthmen as fanatics at any point post-Restoration, including many fellow dissenters and Presbyterians (who were major opponents of "sectaries" or Independents). My point was simply that it started out as a Tory insult and American Catholics seem to have used it in the same way to imply that their religious and political opponents were dangerous enemies of the social order. You are incorrect in stating that I have only cited Southern Catholics. If you spent any time reading the Rutgers paper, you would know that it pulls from as least as many Northern as Southern Catholics. It cites Archbishop John Hughes of New York more than any other single Catholic, whose sentiments were in fact quite reactionary. It also cites newspapers such as The Freeman’s Journal and Catholic Register of New York, which denounced the "infidel and Red Republican struggles" of 1848. And yes, it has plenty on Orestes Brownson (his surname appears more than 100 times), but it makes clear that he was a religious outsider who bemoaned the conservatism of his American co-religionists. Liberal Catholics like Brownson lost the battle for the hearts and minds of their brethren against Archbishop Hughes, in large part because liberalism was associated with their Protestant enemies. In other words, "By the mid-1850s, the apparent links between European liberals and American Know-Nothings had all but extinguished the radical democratic strain of Irish Catholicism."

2) But you can't be ideologically liberal without supporting liberalism as a sociopolitical system, which is what the ideology is based upon. The "reactionaries who dominated both the Catholic Church and the Democratic Party at midcentury" did not support that system, or at least were certainly less supportive of it than their political opponents. They were horrified by the liberal revolutions that had afflicted Europe in 1848, while Whig publications like the New York Tribune celebrated them. You say "It is perfectly possible to be both pro-slavery or indifferent to the institution and also left-wing on the class and economic issues", and while technically true that was very often not the case. There were strong links between the abolitionist movement and socialists and leftists in Europe, just as there were strong links between pro-slavery advocates and European reactionaries. Abolitionists were often accused of socialism by their opponents, and many former abolitionists moved on to agitating for radical economic causes after abolition. You also mention a "socially conservative program" supported by Yankees that was described at the time as "liberal", and I would have to agree with the contemporaneous latter description if you're referring to what I think you are. The temperance movement was linked with progressive more often than conservative causes, as many of its supporters saw themselves as crusading moral reformers as opposed to upholders of the status quo. You yourself are certainly aware of this, as the egalitarian platform of the Prohibition Party in Get Off the Track! shows.

3) If you asked Frederick Douglass, the state of the Republican and Democratic parties was much the same in 1888 as it had been 20 years earlier: "One represents the culture, the industry and progressive spirit of the North, and the other affiliates with the South and finds its main support in all that is left of an extinct system of barbarism." Elsewhere (still in 1888), he writes: "One of these parties is historically anchored to the past, and is apparently incapable of adjusting itself to the demands of the present and future. The other is the party of progress." The clash of civilizations remained alive and well.