Historical continuity of Democrats and Republicans

[H. Ross Peron]

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.