Democratic Party

By: Paul Finkelman

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Democratic Party

The Democratic Party traces its origins to the political disputes between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton in the early 1790s. In its early years the party was known as the “Republican Party.” After about 1801 the followers of Jefferson were known as Democratic-Republicans, and after the War of 1812 the same politicians were called National Republicans. Despite these early party labels, there is a continuous line from Jefferson in the 1790s to Jackson in the 1830s and then to the modern Democratic Party. Between 1801 and 1841 every president was, in this sense, the candidate of the Democratic party, although some were known at the time as “Republicans” or “National Republicans.” The last president elected under this label was John Quincy Adams in 1824, who was technically a Democrat elected under the banner of the National Republicans, but ideologically was closer to the Whig party which formed in opposition to the Democrats in the 1830s. Indeed, when Adams ran for reelection in 1828 he was the candidate of the National Republicans but the bulk of Jefferson's old party supported Andrew Jackson, running as a “Democrat.” After 1828 the National Republicans disappeared, with the followers of the late Jefferson forming the Democratic Party, under the leadership of Andrew Jackson and his chief strategist, Martin Van Buren. From 1800 until 1860 the party dominated American politics, winning all but two presidential elections (1840 and 1848) and invariably dominating Congress. For most of this period Democrats also dominated the Supreme Court. Although every state had some Democratic presence, the party was particularly powerful in the South. It claimed to be the party of the “common man,” but its leadership often consisted of wealthy slaveholding southern planters, such as Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, John C. Calhoun, and Jefferson Davis. Most Democrats, whether from the North or the South, were hostile to black freedom and black civil rights. As a national institution, the Democratic Party was overwhelmingly proslavery. Secession and the Civil War broke the party's dominance of American politics, and from 1861 until Douglass's death in 1895 Democrats were generally in the minority. Only twice did a Democrat win the presidency, although the death of Abraham Lincoln put a former Democrat, Andrew Johnson, in the nation's highest office. After the Civil War, Democrats continued their hostility toward the rights of blacks, as they fought against constitutional amendments and laws designed to protect black freedom.

From Jefferson to Jackson

The Democratic Party traces its origins to the supporters of Thomas Jefferson in the 1790s. By 1796 the Jeffersonians had organized into a political party whose members called themselves Republicans or Democratic Republicans. With the election of Jefferson in 1801 they emerged as the dominant political force in the new nation. By 1816 the opposition Federalist Party had all but disappeared, and in 1820 President James Monroe ran for reelection with no opposition as a member of what had come to be called the National Republican Party.

The Jeffersonians had a complicated relationship to slavery and race. Their leader and hero, Thomas Jefferson, owned between 175 and 225 slaves from the Revolution until his death in 1826. Due to Jefferson's relationship to slavery (as well as Madison's and Monroe's, who followed him to the presidency), it would have been hard for early Democrats to oppose slavery. Indeed, with the exception of John Quincy Adams, who was a National Republican but went into the Whig Party after 1829, every Democratic president from 1801 to 1837 was a slaveholding southerner. The southern dominance of the party insured that it would be proslavery and often anti-black. In those states where free blacks could vote, the Democrats often ran blatantly racist campaigns, while working to disfranchise blacks. In the 1821 election, Jeffersonian Democrats led by Martin Van Buren attempted to disfranchise blacks in New York. While unsuccessful in eliminating the black vote, the Democrats managed to remove property requirements for white voters, but not for black voters. Not surprising, in those states where blacks could vote, they were almost universally supporters of the Federalist and Whig Parties until the 1840s and 1850s, when they backed the Liberty, Free Soil, and then the Republican parties.

While utterly unsympathetic to freeing blacks or to ending slavery, Jefferson and other early Democrats did understand that slavery was dangerous to the nation. Thus, Jefferson and his followers favored an end to the African slave trade, which would not harm slavery but would reduce the growth of the nation's black population. In foreign policy Jefferson sought to undermine the independence of Haiti, fearful of a black republic on America's doorstep. Under Monroe the United States pursued an aggressive policy against the Spanish and the Seminole Indians in an attempt to recover runaway slaves.

Except for a brief resurgence during the debates over the Missouri Compromise, the Federalist Party ceased to be much of a force in national politics after about 1813. Jefferson's party, now called the National Republicans, had no serious opposition, although factions within the party jockeyed for power. The absence of any opposition party proved to be destabilizing to the political system, and in 1824 four viable candidates, all theoretically from the same party, competed for the presidency. Andrew Jackson had a plurality of the popular vote and the electoral vote but lacked a majority of the electors. That threw the election into the House of Representatives, where John Quincy Adams, who ran second to Jackson, was chosen as president. In 1828 Adams ran for reelection as a National Republican, but that organization no longer represented the Democratic-Republican tradition of the Jeffersonians. That year Adams lost decisively to Jackson, who ran as a Democrat and, in doing so, claimed the Jeffersonian tradition. The losing supporters of Adams soon formed the Whig Party.

Jackson claimed to be the heir to the legacy of Thomas Jefferson, and in many ways his party and his politics fit this claim. Both men had enormous faith in the “common man” and saw small farmers and urban workers as the base of their political support. Both relied on the South for their main political strength, although both had significant northern support. Jefferson ran with a New Yorker, Aaron Burr, in the election of 1800, and Jackson did the same in 1832, running with Martin Van Buren. Like Jefferson, Jackson generally opposed internal improvements, an expanded federal government, and a policy that enhanced the nation's commercial and manufacturing interests. As the secretary of state, Jefferson had opposed the chartering of the First Bank of the United States; as the president, Jackson vetoed a bill to recharter the Second Bank of the United States. When he purchased Louisiana from France, Jefferson envisioned resettling all eastern Indians on some of this new land west of the Mississippi. As a general and president, Jackson oversaw the removal of most Indians in the Southeast to what later became Oklahoma.

Most important, like Jefferson, Jackson was a proslavery planter who owned hundreds of human beings. Jackson built a party that was southern based, intensely supportive of slavery, and opposed to the rights of free blacks, even while supporting democracy and the “common man.” During the age of Jackson, Democrats in Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and North Carolina stripped free black men of the right to vote. Democrats in the Midwest restricted the rights of free blacks. In Congress the Democratic Party vigorously supported a “gag rule” that prevented the House of Representatives from even receiving antislavery petitions. Jackson's attorney general, Roger B. Taney, issued an opinion that the United States should not grant passports to free blacks nor grant them any rights as citizens of the United States. Jackson would later appoint Taney to the Supreme Court, where as chief justice he would consistently oppose rights and legal protections for blacks.

Prewar Platform

Starting with Jackson's victory in 1828, the Democrats dominated American politics until the Civil War. At the state and local levels Democrats in the North and the South were hostile to free blacks. At the national level Democrats generally stood for a limited federal government, low taxes and tariffs, and allowing the states to develop policies as they wished. A key component of the Democratic Party's platform, at least until the 1840s, when the issue mostly disappeared, was opposition to a national bank. Democrats in Congress voted to limit the funding of the U.S. Navy's Africa Squadron, which was sent to patrol the Atlantic to stop the international slave trade. At the same time, Democrats opposed cooperating with England to suppress the African slave trade. Democrats also generally supported states' rights. For example, the Democratic majority on the Supreme Court allowed states to regulate certain aspects of national commerce, including the movement of free blacks into the South or immigrants entering northern ports. Despite their opposition to an active federal government, Democrats favored territorial expansion and in the 1830s and 1840s were strong proponents of manifest destiny.

From Jefferson through Martin Van Buren, Democrats aggressively sought the removal of all Indians from the eastern states. The Indian Removal Act, passed by Congress in 1830 under Jackson's sponsorship and strictly enforced by Van Buren, opened up new lands in the South for cotton cultivation, thus strengthening slavery while removing a large nonwhite population from the region. Democrats pushed for the annexation of Texas, which was accomplished by John Tyler, who had been a Democrat before running for vice president as a Whig. Once in power, however, Tyler mostly adopted Democratic politics. Democrats, led by President James K. Polk, a slaveholding Tennessean like Andrew Jackson, pushed for and advocated war with Mexico to gain new territories. Democrats also advocated strong federal policies to support slavery and to help masters recover fugitive slaves.

Southern Control of the Dominant Party

With a strong base in the South and support from many urban workers and some immigrants—especially those from Ireland—the Democratic Party dominated American politics before the Civil War and lost only two elections before 1860. Both losses were to Whig Party candidates, in 1840 and 1848. The Whigs' first victory was partially undone by the unexpected death of William Henry Harrison only a month after he took office. His vice president, John Tyler, had been a Democrat before running with Harrison and had little interest in the Whig agenda. The second Whig president, Zachary Taylor, also died in office, only to be succeeded by Millard Fillmore, another Whig with minimal commitment to the party. In his home state of New York, Fillmore had opposed the antislavery wing of the Whig Party, which was led by Senator William H. Seward. By the start of the Civil War, Fillmore had become a Democrat. Throughout the three antebellum decades Democrats in the Senate were led by southern fire-eaters like John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, Robert Toombs of Georgia, and Jefferson Davis of Mississippi.

While the Democrats dominated American politics, southerners dominated the Democratic Party. A majority of southern senators were Democrats, and they were always a majority of the Democrats in the Senate. Thus, a northern Democrat who hoped to gain a spot on an important Senate committee was forced to support the party's proslavery agenda. The most successful Democratic presidents—Jackson (1829–1837) and James Knox Polk (1845–1849)—were also slaveholding southerners. The northern Democratic presidents—Martin Van Buren (1837–1841), Franklin Pierce (1853–1857), and James Buchanan (1857–1861)—were classic “doughfaces,” northern men with southern principles.

With Democrats controlling the presidency for twenty-four of the thirty years leading up to the Civil War, the Supreme Court became almost an arm of the party. There was a southern majority, and an overwhelming Democratic majority, on the Court from the early 1830s until the Civil War. In the three decades before the Civil War only one justice, John McLean of Ohio (1830–1861), was a strong opponent of slavery. Joseph Story (1811–1845), a National Republican appointed by James Madison, and Benjamin Robbins Curtis (1851–1857), the only Whig on the Court in this period, were at best moderate opponents of the institution. Story's opposition was particularly timid and muted by the end of his career. The rest of the Court consisted of proslavery southern Democrats and their northern Democratic doughface allies.

This Court consistently supported the fugitive slave laws and in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) constitutionalized the position of the southern wing of the Democratic Party by declaring that Congress had no power to regulate slavery in the territories and that free blacks, even if they were citizens of northern states, could never be considered citizens of the United States. The Dred Scott decision, which declared that blacks had no rights under the U.S. Constitution, was written by the Jackson-appointed Chief Justice Taney and supported by six other justices appointed by Democratic presidents. John McLean, another Jackson appointee, dissented in the case, but by this time McLean had abandoned his support for the Democratic Party largely because of its proslavery stance. The only other dissent in the case came from the lone Whig on the Court, Benjamin R. Curtis.

Slavery Causes Party Division

In the North some Democrats were antislavery, but most expressed no opinion on the issue, took the position that it was a “southern problem,” or were openly proslavery. On race, however, almost all Democrats were united in opposing black rights. In the 1850s Democrats in Indiana, Illinois, Oregon, and Iowa banned black immigration, although only in Indiana were such laws effective. Throughout the North, Democrats played the race card in campaigns, accusing their Whig and, later, Republican opponents of favoring racial equality or interracial marriage. By the 1850s this tactic was no longer effective, however, as Republicans correctly accused northern Democrats of being in the palm of the proslavery national party, which forced the Democratic Party to support laws that protected slavery and allowed for its expansion into the West.

Many northern whites may have opposed black rights, but few were sympathetic to slavery. During the Mexican-American War, northern Whigs accused their Democratic opponents of supporting the war to bring new slave states into the Union. In response to this charge, Congressman David Wilmot, a Pennsylvania Democrat, tried to ban slavery in any territory acquired in the war by appending a rider, known as the Wilmot Proviso, to an appropriations bill for the war. Although the proviso passed the House with ease because the huge northern majority voted for it without regard to party affiliation, it died in the Senate, where southerners held a temporary majority.

By the 1850s the proslavery stance of the Democratic Party had undermined its viability in much of the North. Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois attempted to finesse the issue with the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Douglas argued that western settlers should decide the issue of slavery in the territories through what he called “popular sovereignty.” Under this policy Congress opened up most of the western territories to settlement without regard to slavery, thereby repealing a major element of the Compromise of 1820. Douglas's solution to the dilemma of northern Democrats backfired in two ways. In Kansas it led to a mini–civil war: southerners resorted to violence and vote fraud to prevent a northern majority from banning slavery in the territory, and northerners struck back with their own lethal force. For two years the territory was known as “Bleeding Kansas.” More significant, the partial repeal of the Missouri Compromise led to a huge backlash by Whigs, antislavery Democrats, and unaffiliated northerners opposed to slavery. The result was a formation of what was first called the Anti-Nebraska Party but soon became known as the Republican Party. By 1860 this new political organization had defeated Democrats throughout the North, taking over state legislatures and governorships.

In 1856 the Democrats managed to win the presidency by running a Pennsylvania doughface, James Buchanan, with a former Kentucky congressman, John C. Breckinridge, as his running mate. The ticket carried the South and a handful of northern states, but eleven northern states sided with the new Republican Party, which was pledged to stop the spread of slavery in the West. In 1860 the Democratic Party divided into northern and southern wings over the issue of slavery in the territories. Douglas ran in the North, and Breckinridge ran in the South. Even if the Democrats had remained unified, however, it is doubtful they could have beaten the new Republican Party. Led by the moderate Abraham Lincoln, the new party carried all the northern states and the election in 1860. The Democratic proslavery stranglehold on American politics was finally broken.

Civil War and Civil Rights

The election of Lincoln led to civil war, with seven states seceding before he even took office. Four more slave states left the Union after Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter, and Lincoln asked for volunteers to save the Union. Most northern Democrats accepted the argument that secession was illegal, although many, including the outgoing president, James Buchanan, did not believe that Lincoln should use force to hold the Union together. Once the war began, most northern Democrats supported the effort, but they opposed turning the war to save the Union into a war to end slavery. However, a significant minority of the party always opposed the war, arguing that the states were free to leave the Union. These “Peace Democrats” were seen as traitors in the North and were often referred to as “Copperheads,” after the poisonous snake that strikes without warning.

By late 1862 many Democrats who had supported the Union became opponents of the war because the Emancipation Proclamation, preliminarily issued in September 1862 and finalized on 1 January 1863, had changed the nature of the conflict. In 1864 the Democrats ran General George B. McClellan as a peace candidate. McClellan promised to end the Civil War, even if it meant a permanent dissolution of the Union. Many northerners considered this former general's campaign to be tantamount to treason, and he was soundly defeated in the free states, carrying only three loyal slave states with a mere twenty-one electoral votes. Throughout the war some Democrats teetered on a fine line between opposing Lincoln's policies and supporting the rebellion. In 1863 the Lincoln administration expelled Clement Vallandigham from the Union because the Ohio Democrat persistently and intemperately spoke out against the administration's war policy and allegedly encouraged draft evasion. Within the party, the “War Democrats” continued to support efforts to suppress the rebellion even as they opposed emancipation, the enlistment of black troops, and, ultimately, black citizenship.

After the war Democrats favored a speedy readmission of the former Confederate States but accepted emancipation as a fact and generally did not oppose the Thirteenth Amendment. The assassination of Lincoln in April 1865 put Andrew Johnson in the White House. Before the war Johnson had been a Democratic senator from Tennessee. He was a slaveholder, a strong supporter of states' rights, and a deeply racist man who opposed any legal rights for blacks. He supported the end of slavery but persistently vetoed civil rights legislation, such as the Freedmen's Bureau Bill and the Civil Rights Act of 1866. In this sense, his policies were those of the Democratic Party, not of the Republicans who had put him in office. Following prewar Democratic ideology, the party became a strong advocate of states' rights after the war. As such, Democrats in Congress, as well as President Johnson until he left office in 1869, opposed the civil rights legislation of the 1860s and 1870s as well as the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

In response to the disputed election of 1876, Democrats forced the incoming Republican administration to withdraw all federal troops from the South and end attempts to protect black civil rights in that region. In the 1880s and 1890s Democrats at the state level gradually deprived blacks of many of the rights they had gained during Reconstruction. When the Populist Party tried to create an alliance of blacks and poor whites, the Democratic Party in the South used every means at its disposal to prevent blacks from gaining or retaining political rights and power. At the national level Democrats in Congress vigorously opposed the efforts of the congressman from Massachusetts, Henry Cabot Lodge, to pass a federal law in 1890 to protect the voting rights of African Americans.

Throughout the late nineteenth century blacks naturally gravitated to the Republican Party, not only because it was “the party of Lincoln” and the party of emancipation but also because Democrats opposed black political participation. In the South, Reconstruction ended when white Democratic administrations took over state governments. For the rest of the century the Democratic Party in the South stood for limiting black political power while economically and socially isolating and repressing former slaves and their children. In the North some Democrats tried to woo newly enfranchised blacks, and in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic states there were some bipartisan efforts to secure civil rights legislation. In general, however, blacks remained loyal to the Republican Party, which in turn offered them some political power and patronage. Black leaders like Frederick Douglass gained political appointment from Republican administrations at the state and federal levels and lost both authority and offices when Democrats were in power.

See also Adams, John Quincy; Antislavery Movement; Black Politics; Buchanan, James; Calhoun, John C.; Civil Rights; Civil Rights Act of 1866; Civil War; Civil War, Participation and Recruitment of Black Troops in; Confederate States of America; Constitution, U.S.; Douglas, Stephen A.; Douglass, Frederick; Dred Scott Case; Election of 1860; Emancipation; Emancipation Proclamation; Fifteenth Amendment; Fourteenth Amendment; Free African Americans before the Civil War (North); Free African Americans before the Civil War (South); Freedmen; Freedmen's Bureau; Fugitive Slave Law of 1793; Fugitive Slave Law of 1850; Immigrants; Jefferson, Thomas; KansasNebraska Act; Laws and Legislation; Mexican-American War; Native Americans and African Americans; Pierce, Franklin; Political Participation; Polk, James K.; Proslavery Thought; Racism; Reconstruction; Republican Party; Seward, William Henry; Slave Trade, African; Slave Trade, Domestic; Slavery; Supreme Court; Taney, Roger B.; Thirteenth Amendment; Union Army, African Americans in; Voting Rights; Whig Party; and Wilmot Proviso.

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