The History of the Democratic Party:
The most enduring American political institution of the nineteenth century was the Democratic Party. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) was inaugurated as president on 4 March 1801 under the banner of the Democratic- Republicans. The origins of that organization reached back into the 1790s, and the efforts of Jefferson and James Madison (1751-1836) to defeat the economic policies of Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804). The resulting political warfare with the Federalists produced the First American Party System. In its early days, the Democratic-Republican Party stood for state rights, limited government, and a small military establishment. It was strongest in the South, and had the least support in New England. Southern slave owners and farmers, workers and independent artisans, and small farmers in the North formed the base of Jefferson's support.
For the next twenty-five years, the Democratic- Republicans dominated national politics. After eight years of Jefferson, Madison held the presidency from 1809 to 1817, followed by James Monroe (1758-1831) from 1817 to 1825. The Federalists gradually disappeared by 1816, and the Democratic-Republicans survived the factionalism and difficulties of the War of 1812. Jefferson's purchase of Louisiana in 1803 assured the nation's territorial expansion. After the end of the war, as the South and West grew, the United States entered a period of political peace that became known as the Era of Good Feelings.
The Emergence of Jacksonian Democracy
Although white male voters identified themselves as Democratic-Republicans, there was not yet a political party in the modern sense of the term. Presidential candidates were chosen in congressional caucuses where partisan affiliation was not a major consideration. Changes began to take place during the 1820s, as the tranquillity of the Monroe administration faded before new issues and emerging leaders. The most dangerous controversy involved the question of slavery that came to the fore in 1819 and 1820. Northerners in Congress endeavored to ban human bondage from new states in the West when Missouri sought admission to the Union. Although the Missouri Compromise of 1820 temporarily settled the problem, sectionalism became an important force in party organization. The state rights' doctrine of the Democratic-Republicans gave its candidates a natural appeal to those who wanted to preserve the rights of southern states to keep slaves.
More important still were the presidential ambitions of Andrew Jackson (1767-1845). In 1824 the popular western hero of the Battle of New Orleans lost to John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) in an election that was settled by the House of Representatives. Jackson denounced what he claimed was a "corrupt bargain" that made Adams president and Henry Clay (1777-1852) the next secretary of state. Jackson's supporters vowed to exact their revenge in the 1828 presidential contest.
One of the Jacksonian leaders, Martin Van Buren (1782-1862) of New York, began organizing a political base for his candidate in 1826 and 1827. Repudiating the caucus system and drawing on campaigning techniques developed by the Anti-Masonic Party, Van Buren used rallies, speeches, newspapers, and songs to rouse popular enthusiasm for Jackson. Local and state nominating conventions became a way of pledging men to vote for Jackson. The Democratic- Republicans, sometimes abbreviated to Democrats, put forward Jackson as the champion of the common man in contrast to the aristocratic Adams.
Van Buren's strategy paid off in 1828 when Jackson defeated Adams's bid for reelection by a decisive margin. Voter turnout was high, and Van Buren's approach to politics laid the foundation for the Democratic Party in the Jacksonian era. The opposition called themselves National Republicans. In office, Jackson extended the Jeffersonian legacy of small government, low taxes, and opposition to concentrated economic power. The president's main target became the Second Bank of the United States, which he destroyed as a national institution by vetoing its charter renewal and then withdrawing all federal deposits from the bank. Jackson wielded executive power to keep the national government in check, but he also made it clear that he would act vigorously to stymie efforts by South Carolina to nullify federal tariff legislation and threaten the Union from 1831 to 1832.
Jackson won reelection in 1832 over Henry Clay as the candidate of the National Republicans, who soon began calling themselves Whigs to prove their dislike of Jackson's monarchical style. During the campaign, the Democrats dropped all vestiges of the caucus system and held a nominating convention to select their presidential and vice presidential candidates. The opposition followed the same procedure. By the mid-1830s the Second American Party System was taking shape. The Democrats were the stronger of the two parties, with a solid base among southern slave planters, farmers across the country, and immigrants in the East's growing cities. The ethnocultural foundation of the party lay among Catholics, Presbyterians, and religious denominations that dissented from the more established Protestant churches. Irish immigrants would be an important element among Democrats after the 1840s.
After two controversial terms, Jackson gave way to his vice president, Martin Van Buren, in 1836. The Whigs put four candidates into the field against the Democrats; William Henry Harrison (1773-1841) was the best known. Van Buren won the presidency, but soon faced serious political difficulties as a party leader. The outbreak of the panic of 1837 and the hard times that followed demoralized the Democrats as the 1840 election neared. The Whigs borrowed some of the Democratic campaign techniques and improved on them in a campaign that featured a strongly emotional appeal for William Henry Harrison as the hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811. Harrison and his running mate, John Tyler (1790-1862), routed the unpopular Van Buren.
The Slavery Issue
The Whig triumph was brief. Harrison died one month after his inauguration and Tyler proved to be a disappointment to the Whigs. As the administration dissolved into bickering, the Democrats looked to the 1844 elections to regain national power. The issue of admitting Texas as a slave state produced divisions between northern and southern Whigs that worked to the advantage of the Democrats. Most Democrats favored the admission of Texas and territorial expansion. The party selected James K. Polk (1795-1849) of Tennessee, a "dark horse" candidate, as its nominee, and he defeated Henry Clay and the Whigs. At the national convention, the Democrats reaffirmed the rule, adopted in 1832, that a candidate had to win two-thirds of the delegates to be nominated. The rule meant that a candidate could not be chosen without the consent of the South.
Polk pushed for war with Mexico and westward expansion. He was a vigorous chief executive in the mold of Andrew Jackson. The Mexican War (1846-1848) brought territorial gains, but it heightened differences over the future of slavery in the West among Democrats. The proposed Wilmot Proviso, which would have barred slavery from any areas acquired from Mexico, proved a major source of discord. Polk retired after a single term, and the Democratic Party grappled with the slavery question in picking its nominee in 1848. Lewis Cass (1782-1866) of Michigan advocated popular sovereignty, a method by which residents of a territory would decide when and if their potential state would be slave or free. Cass won the nomination, but lost the election to the Whig candidate, Zachary Taylor (1784-1850). The Free- Soil Party and its candidate, Martin Van Buren, took votes away from Democrats in the North.
The brief Taylor presidency and the Millard Fillmore (1800-1874) administration that followed when Taylor died in 1850 produced the Compromise of 1850, which sought to settle the issue of slavery in the territories. With sectional issues on hold temporarily, the Democrats turned in 1852 to a compromise candidate, Franklin Pierce (1804-1869) of New Hampshire. Pierce outpolled the Whig candidate, Winfield Scott (1786-1866), decisively and the Whig Party disappeared soon after the election.
Pierce was a weak and irresolute president, and Democratic political fortunes suffered. In 1854 Stephen A. Douglas (1813-1861), a Democratic senator from Illinois, pushed through the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which gave popular sovereignty on slavery in the West. Outraged northerners, fearing the expansion of slavery, defected to the American or Know-Nothing Party to some degree, but moved in even larger numbers to a new political party, the Republicans. Many northern Democrats experienced this change in electoral allegiance. Increasingly, the Democrats were seen as a pro-slavery party in the South and a pro- southern party in the North. Democratic doctrine denounced Republicans as pro-black, and claimed that political and social equality for African Americans was a goal of the new party.
The election of James Buchanan (1791-1868) in 1856 over the first Republican presidential candidate, John C. Frémont (1813-1890), represented a last victory for the old Democratic Party. It was clear that if the Republicans continued to grow at their current rate they would be the dominant party in the North by 1860. Buchanan came to the White House with distinguished credentials as a cabinet officer and lawmaker, but he was a very disappointing president. He endorsed the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision (1857), which said slavery was legal in all U.S. territories, and Buchanan appeased the pro-slavery, pro- southern wing of his party in the struggle over the fate of Kansas as a future free or slave state. Meanwhile, the Republicans made steady gains in the North as the slavery issue became more polarized. It seemed unlikely that the Democrats could win the 1860 presidential election against the united Republicans and their ascendancy in the North. The South was unwilling to accept any northern Democrat opposed to the expansion of slavery. Northern Democrats, such as Douglas, knew that such a position would doom their chances against the Republicans. The two factions were irreconcilable.
The Civil War Decline
The events of the 1860 election proved disastrous for the Democrats. They put two tickets into the race against Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) and the Republicans. Stephen A. Douglas represented the northern wing of the party, which was loyal to the Union. John C. Breckinridge (1821-1875) led the southern Democrats, who believed in slavery and planned to secede if Lincoln won. Although the anti-Lincoln candidates gained more popular votes, the Republican candidate had a secure majority in the electoral vote.
Democrats found it difficult to find a viable political posture during the Civil War. To the extent that they endorsed Lincoln and his war aims, they called into question the reason for their own existence. When they criticized the conduct of the conflict or talked about the need for a negotiated end to the fighting, they allowed the Republicans to label them as treasonous. The Copperheads in the North, who favored a negotiated settlement with the South, became indelibly associated with the Democrats. Despite these problems, the residual strength of the party in the North was impressive. In the 1864 campaign, the Democrats nominated George B. McClellan (1826-1885) who had led the Union armies in 1862. Even with patriotic appeals and the mistakes of the Democrats, Lincoln won reelection with only 55 percent of the popular vote.
The end of the war in 1865 and the death of Lincoln put a former Democrat, Andrew Johnson (1808-1875), in the White House. When the southern states were once again part of the Union, the Democrats seemed likely to benefit politically. White southerners were unwilling to accept the Republicans as a legitimate part of the political scene in the region, especially when the Republicans relied on the votes of former slaves as a major part of their coalition. The Democrats had every reason to favor the prompt readmission of the South and a lenient policy on the issues of Reconstruction. More and more the Democratic Party was identified with an antiblack racial posture that looked to the maintenance of white supremacy.
The imbedded electoral power of the Democrats was clear in the presidential election of 1868. The Republicans nominated the military hero of the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885), and the Democrats named the former governor of New York, Horatio Seymour (1810-1886). Seymour's running mate was Francis Preston Blair Jr. (1821-1875) of Missouri, a staunch opponent of Radical Reconstruction. Even with the popularity of Grant and the advantages that the Republicans enjoyed in terms of organization, Seymour still garnered more than 47 percent of the popular ballots. The Democrats stressed the race issue in the campaign, and identified themselves even more strongly with white supremacy as a basic ideological position. While they were unable to overcome Grant's lead in the North, the Democrats were beginning to reestablish their base in the South as Reconstruction waned.
Any hopes for a Democratic rebound during the next presidential election in 1872 proved illusory. The prospects for the Democrats seemed more promising as the year began because of a developing split between pro-Grant Republicans and those reformers in the party who called themselves Liberal Republicans. If the Democrats and the Liberal Republicans could unite, their coalition could defeat Grant's reelection bid. In the end, however, the Liberal Republicans selected the New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley (1811-1872) as their nominee. The Democrats had little choice but to accept Greeley, lest they split the anti-Grant vote. Neither the Liberal Republicans nor the Democrats were enthusiastic about Greeley, and the campaign turned into a rout for Grant. The Democratic Party had reached one of its low points of the nineteenth century.
The onset of the panic of 1873 and the economic distress that followed produced a dramatic improvement in the electoral fortunes of the Democrats during the 1870s. In 1874 the Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives for the first time in eighteen years and seemed poised to be a competitive force in the 1876 presidential election. The election of Samuel J. Tilden (1814-1886) as governor of New York meant that the Democrats could hope to carry that state for the presidency. The scandals of the Grant administration, the return of the South to full political power, and popular unhappiness with the programs of the Republicans led to a more even balance between the two major parties. For the next quarter of a century, American politics would see an electoral stalemate between the Republicans and the Democrats. This equilibrium between the two parties has been characterized as the Third American Party System.
Stalemate in the Gilded Age
In the 1876 election the Democrats chose Tilden as their running mate against the Republican nominee, Rutherford B. Hayes (1822-1893). The campaign produced a very close race, and on election night it seemed as if Tilden had been elected. He had 184 electoral votes, just one short of the number needed for the presidency. Hayes trailed with 165 electoral votes. Twenty electoral votes--from South Carolina, Florida, Louisiana, and Oregon--remained in dispute, and were claimed by both parties. The election of 1876 had to be settled by an electoral commission and a political bargain; the result was the election of Hayes and the defeat of Tilden. Nonetheless, the 1876 election demonstrated that the Democrats could compete on even terms with the Republicans. With the solidly Democratic South behind them, the Democracy (as it was known then) had about 137 electoral votes (from the states of the former Confederacy, plus Kentucky and Missouri) toward a majority. If it could add New York and a midwestern state, such as Indiana, the party would have a winning coalition.
The Democrats came close to victory again in 1880 when they selected Winfield Scott Hancock (1824-1886), a Civil War general, to oppose the Republican nominee, James A. Garfield (1831-1881). Hancock would defuse the issues relating to Democratic attitudes toward the war, and was acceptable to the South because he had advocated a lenient Reconstruction policy. The popular vote was very close, with only 39,213 votes separating Hancock and Garfield. In the electoral college, Garfield won with 214 votes to 155 for Hancock. The South had become the bedrock of the Democratic Party.
Twenty-four years out of power ended in 1884, when the Democrats regained the White House behind the presidential candidacy of Grover Cleveland (1837-1908) of New York. The mayor of Buffalo in 1881, Cleveland was elected governor of New York in 1882. His ability to carry that state's electoral votes made him a national contender for the nomination. As a fresh face untainted with the battles of the past, Cleveland appealed to Democrats and to Republicans alienated with the candidacy of James G. Blaine (1830-1893) as their party's nominee. The campaign that ensued was one of the most bitter in American history. Cleveland's romantic entanglement with a woman named Maria Halpin and the illegitimate child for whom he took responsibility added an element of scandal to the race. Cleveland withstood the incident and went on to defeat Blaine narrowly in the popular vote and in the electoral tally. Happy Democrats celebrated their return to Washington.
In the late nineteenth century, the Democrats had assembled a powerful, if fractious, voting coalition. White Democrats in the South ensured that the region would provide a bloc of electoral votes for the party every four years. In the North, the Democrats appealed to Roman Catholics, who disliked the evangelical Protestantism of many Republicans. Americans who thought of themselves as consumers admired the Democratic belief in a low tariff on imported goods and modest taxation. The party also endorsed laissez-faire economic policies and emphasized states' rights and localism. The Republicans were the party of national authority and positive government; the Democrats upheld older traditions of a limited, nonintrusive state.
The Cleveland Era and Beyond
Cleveland's first term produced modest legislative accomplishments. The president alienated many party members by his civil service appointments at a time when patronage was a key element in the political system. Cleveland was more popular than his party, and his reelection in 1888 seemed likely. In 1887 the president made a lower tariff the sole theme of his annual message, and the issue became the dominant question in the 1888 presidential race. To oppose Cleveland the Republicans selected Benjamin Harrison (1833-1901) of Indiana, a Civil War general and the grandson of President William Henry Harrison. The younger Harrison ran on a platform that emphasized tariff protection, fair elections in the South, and an activist government.
At a time when incumbent presidents did not campaign for reelection, Cleveland played a passive role. In his campaign advisers and in his approach to the election, he muted the low-tariff themes of his annual message and did not emphasize the issue in the fall. Cleveland won a majority of the popular vote, in part because of the overwhelming Democratic strength in the South. But Harrison triumphed in the electoral tally. The Republicans also won control of both houses of Congress.
The Democratic eclipse was brief. The Republicans enacted an activist program of tariff protection and antitrust legislation and sought to pass a bill to ensure fair elections in the South. The Democrats rallied against the new Force Act that would have protected African American voting rights, and they also asserted that the higher tariffs had raised prices on consumer goods. In the Midwest, Republican laws to restrict sectarian schools and require the teaching of English alienated Catholic and Lutheran voters. The Democrats were the beneficiaries of these political mistakes. In the 1890 election, the Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives.
Two years later Cleveland defeated Harrison for the White House by the largest popular vote margin in twenty years. The Democrats kept control of the House and regained a majority in the Senate. It looked as if the Democrats had reestablished the preeminence that they had enjoyed earlier in the century. Some observers forecast hard times ahead for the Republicans.
But the Democrats were an uneasy coalition. In the South and West, where the farm economy was suffering from low prices and a burden of debt, many Democrats, mindful of the challenge of the farm- based People's Party, wanted policies to inflate the currency through the coinage of silver into money on an equal basis with gold. Democrats in the Northeast regarded the gold standard as essential. These differences were papered over in 1892, but could resurface in a crisis.
Then the economic skies darkened. The panic of 1893 set off a four-year depression that defied the efforts of Cleveland and his administration to offset its effects. The president offered the familiar answer of limited government and patience with the business cycle. His only substantive answer was to call for the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which the Republicans had passed in 1890 to provide a small subsidy to silver miners. Cleveland charged that the bill had undermined business confidence. He called Congress into special session in August 1893 to repeal the measure.
The resulting battle split the Democrats, as southern and western lawmakers sought to stave off the gold standard. Cleveland wielded patronage and other weapons ruthlessly to achieve his goal. He got his way, but the party was fractured. The president's harsh policies during the Pullman Strike of 1894 and his general antilabor approach alienated many within the party. By the election of 1894, the Democrats were demoralized and disunited.
The Republicans won a sweeping victory in that election. The Democrats lost more than 110 House seats, in the largest transfer of power in congressional history. In many parts of the country the Democrats became an enfeebled minority. Only in the South, where whites used electoral machinery to fend off the Populists, did the Democrats retain a stronghold. The Republicans had become the majority party and would remain so well into the twentieth century. Cleveland had become a hated, repudiated leader in the Democratic ranks.
In the election of 1896, the Democrats turned away from the policies of Cleveland and abandoned the gold standard. They nominated a political newcomer, William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) of Nebraska, who made an impassioned speech on behalf of free silver at the Democratic National Convention. The "cross of gold" speech transformed Bryan into a national figure and won him the nomination. He also received the nomination of the People's Party. Bryan conducted a vigorous campaign. He crisscrossed the nation, pressing the case for silver. But after an initial wave of enthusiasm, his candidacy faltered before the well-financed and well-organized appeal of the Republicans and their standard-bearer, William McKinley (1843-1901). Bryan was defeated soundly in the fall balloting as McKinley got 271 electoral votes to 176 for Bryan. The stalemated politics of the Gilded Age had ended, and the Republicans had emerged as the dominant force.
Bryan made another try at the White House four years later. The victories of the Spanish-American War of 1898 had made imperialism a key issue, and Bryan attempted to make the contest a referendum on overseas expansion. That did not work, and he returned to free silver along with an emphasis on the evils of business consolidation. The result was the same, with McKinley gaining an even more decisive triumph in the popular vote and the electoral total. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Democratic Party was in a subordinate status with little prospect of regaining national power in the immediate future. Republicans joked that the Democratic Party was like alcohol. It killed everything that was alive and preserved everything that was dead.
The Democrats did, however, have latent strengths that would enable the party to prosper in the twentieth century. Their base in the South meant that Democrats would be a power in Congress, where seniority gave power to lawmakers with safe seats. While the Democrats were still the party of small government, localism, and state rights, there had begun to be signs under William Jennings Bryan of a readiness to use the power of government to address concentrations of economic wealth and to deal with social injustice. Similarly, in industrial states in the Northeast and Middle West, Democrats began to use state regulatory power to engage issues of child labor, working conditions, and corporate misdeeds in what became in time the party's urban liberal wing. Any Democrat embarking on such a course would have to be careful of alienating the South, ever sensitive to the idea that a powerful government might attack segregation. Nonetheless, the possibility of becoming a party devoted to the interests of the small entrepreneur, the worker, and the consumer was one that many Democrats would be tempted to explore during the first decade of the new century to come.
When they talked of the Democratic Party in 1900, men spoke of the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian tradition and all that it represented. Americans distrustful of the government, wealth, and consolidated power had found a powerful instrument in the Democratic Party. At its best it represented virtues of rural life, proximity to the people, and the native wisdom of common Americans. In its less attractive elements, the Democrats' creed stood for racial injustice, the supremacy of white Americans, and negativism as to the role of government. Having survived the challenges of the Federalists, Whigs, and Republicans to remain one of the two major parties in the United States, the Democrats had become an indispensable part of the functioning of partisan politics and the operation of government. In that sense, the Democratic Party had become an integral part of American culture.
For the next twenty-five years, the Democratic- Republicans dominated national politics. After eight years of Jefferson, Madison held the presidency from 1809 to 1817, followed by James Monroe (1758-1831) from 1817 to 1825. The Federalists gradually disappeared by 1816, and the Democratic-Republicans survived the factionalism and difficulties of the War of 1812. Jefferson's purchase of Louisiana in 1803 assured the nation's territorial expansion. After the end of the war, as the South and West grew, the United States entered a period of political peace that became known as the Era of Good Feelings.
The Emergence of Jacksonian Democracy
Although white male voters identified themselves as Democratic-Republicans, there was not yet a political party in the modern sense of the term. Presidential candidates were chosen in congressional caucuses where partisan affiliation was not a major consideration. Changes began to take place during the 1820s, as the tranquillity of the Monroe administration faded before new issues and emerging leaders. The most dangerous controversy involved the question of slavery that came to the fore in 1819 and 1820. Northerners in Congress endeavored to ban human bondage from new states in the West when Missouri sought admission to the Union. Although the Missouri Compromise of 1820 temporarily settled the problem, sectionalism became an important force in party organization. The state rights' doctrine of the Democratic-Republicans gave its candidates a natural appeal to those who wanted to preserve the rights of southern states to keep slaves.
More important still were the presidential ambitions of Andrew Jackson (1767-1845). In 1824 the popular western hero of the Battle of New Orleans lost to John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) in an election that was settled by the House of Representatives. Jackson denounced what he claimed was a "corrupt bargain" that made Adams president and Henry Clay (1777-1852) the next secretary of state. Jackson's supporters vowed to exact their revenge in the 1828 presidential contest.
One of the Jacksonian leaders, Martin Van Buren (1782-1862) of New York, began organizing a political base for his candidate in 1826 and 1827. Repudiating the caucus system and drawing on campaigning techniques developed by the Anti-Masonic Party, Van Buren used rallies, speeches, newspapers, and songs to rouse popular enthusiasm for Jackson. Local and state nominating conventions became a way of pledging men to vote for Jackson. The Democratic- Republicans, sometimes abbreviated to Democrats, put forward Jackson as the champion of the common man in contrast to the aristocratic Adams.
Van Buren's strategy paid off in 1828 when Jackson defeated Adams's bid for reelection by a decisive margin. Voter turnout was high, and Van Buren's approach to politics laid the foundation for the Democratic Party in the Jacksonian era. The opposition called themselves National Republicans. In office, Jackson extended the Jeffersonian legacy of small government, low taxes, and opposition to concentrated economic power. The president's main target became the Second Bank of the United States, which he destroyed as a national institution by vetoing its charter renewal and then withdrawing all federal deposits from the bank. Jackson wielded executive power to keep the national government in check, but he also made it clear that he would act vigorously to stymie efforts by South Carolina to nullify federal tariff legislation and threaten the Union from 1831 to 1832.
Jackson won reelection in 1832 over Henry Clay as the candidate of the National Republicans, who soon began calling themselves Whigs to prove their dislike of Jackson's monarchical style. During the campaign, the Democrats dropped all vestiges of the caucus system and held a nominating convention to select their presidential and vice presidential candidates. The opposition followed the same procedure. By the mid-1830s the Second American Party System was taking shape. The Democrats were the stronger of the two parties, with a solid base among southern slave planters, farmers across the country, and immigrants in the East's growing cities. The ethnocultural foundation of the party lay among Catholics, Presbyterians, and religious denominations that dissented from the more established Protestant churches. Irish immigrants would be an important element among Democrats after the 1840s.
After two controversial terms, Jackson gave way to his vice president, Martin Van Buren, in 1836. The Whigs put four candidates into the field against the Democrats; William Henry Harrison (1773-1841) was the best known. Van Buren won the presidency, but soon faced serious political difficulties as a party leader. The outbreak of the panic of 1837 and the hard times that followed demoralized the Democrats as the 1840 election neared. The Whigs borrowed some of the Democratic campaign techniques and improved on them in a campaign that featured a strongly emotional appeal for William Henry Harrison as the hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811. Harrison and his running mate, John Tyler (1790-1862), routed the unpopular Van Buren.
The Slavery Issue
The Whig triumph was brief. Harrison died one month after his inauguration and Tyler proved to be a disappointment to the Whigs. As the administration dissolved into bickering, the Democrats looked to the 1844 elections to regain national power. The issue of admitting Texas as a slave state produced divisions between northern and southern Whigs that worked to the advantage of the Democrats. Most Democrats favored the admission of Texas and territorial expansion. The party selected James K. Polk (1795-1849) of Tennessee, a "dark horse" candidate, as its nominee, and he defeated Henry Clay and the Whigs. At the national convention, the Democrats reaffirmed the rule, adopted in 1832, that a candidate had to win two-thirds of the delegates to be nominated. The rule meant that a candidate could not be chosen without the consent of the South.
Polk pushed for war with Mexico and westward expansion. He was a vigorous chief executive in the mold of Andrew Jackson. The Mexican War (1846-1848) brought territorial gains, but it heightened differences over the future of slavery in the West among Democrats. The proposed Wilmot Proviso, which would have barred slavery from any areas acquired from Mexico, proved a major source of discord. Polk retired after a single term, and the Democratic Party grappled with the slavery question in picking its nominee in 1848. Lewis Cass (1782-1866) of Michigan advocated popular sovereignty, a method by which residents of a territory would decide when and if their potential state would be slave or free. Cass won the nomination, but lost the election to the Whig candidate, Zachary Taylor (1784-1850). The Free- Soil Party and its candidate, Martin Van Buren, took votes away from Democrats in the North.
The brief Taylor presidency and the Millard Fillmore (1800-1874) administration that followed when Taylor died in 1850 produced the Compromise of 1850, which sought to settle the issue of slavery in the territories. With sectional issues on hold temporarily, the Democrats turned in 1852 to a compromise candidate, Franklin Pierce (1804-1869) of New Hampshire. Pierce outpolled the Whig candidate, Winfield Scott (1786-1866), decisively and the Whig Party disappeared soon after the election.
Pierce was a weak and irresolute president, and Democratic political fortunes suffered. In 1854 Stephen A. Douglas (1813-1861), a Democratic senator from Illinois, pushed through the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which gave popular sovereignty on slavery in the West. Outraged northerners, fearing the expansion of slavery, defected to the American or Know-Nothing Party to some degree, but moved in even larger numbers to a new political party, the Republicans. Many northern Democrats experienced this change in electoral allegiance. Increasingly, the Democrats were seen as a pro-slavery party in the South and a pro- southern party in the North. Democratic doctrine denounced Republicans as pro-black, and claimed that political and social equality for African Americans was a goal of the new party.
The election of James Buchanan (1791-1868) in 1856 over the first Republican presidential candidate, John C. Frémont (1813-1890), represented a last victory for the old Democratic Party. It was clear that if the Republicans continued to grow at their current rate they would be the dominant party in the North by 1860. Buchanan came to the White House with distinguished credentials as a cabinet officer and lawmaker, but he was a very disappointing president. He endorsed the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision (1857), which said slavery was legal in all U.S. territories, and Buchanan appeased the pro-slavery, pro- southern wing of his party in the struggle over the fate of Kansas as a future free or slave state. Meanwhile, the Republicans made steady gains in the North as the slavery issue became more polarized. It seemed unlikely that the Democrats could win the 1860 presidential election against the united Republicans and their ascendancy in the North. The South was unwilling to accept any northern Democrat opposed to the expansion of slavery. Northern Democrats, such as Douglas, knew that such a position would doom their chances against the Republicans. The two factions were irreconcilable.
The Civil War Decline
The events of the 1860 election proved disastrous for the Democrats. They put two tickets into the race against Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) and the Republicans. Stephen A. Douglas represented the northern wing of the party, which was loyal to the Union. John C. Breckinridge (1821-1875) led the southern Democrats, who believed in slavery and planned to secede if Lincoln won. Although the anti-Lincoln candidates gained more popular votes, the Republican candidate had a secure majority in the electoral vote.
Democrats found it difficult to find a viable political posture during the Civil War. To the extent that they endorsed Lincoln and his war aims, they called into question the reason for their own existence. When they criticized the conduct of the conflict or talked about the need for a negotiated end to the fighting, they allowed the Republicans to label them as treasonous. The Copperheads in the North, who favored a negotiated settlement with the South, became indelibly associated with the Democrats. Despite these problems, the residual strength of the party in the North was impressive. In the 1864 campaign, the Democrats nominated George B. McClellan (1826-1885) who had led the Union armies in 1862. Even with patriotic appeals and the mistakes of the Democrats, Lincoln won reelection with only 55 percent of the popular vote.
The end of the war in 1865 and the death of Lincoln put a former Democrat, Andrew Johnson (1808-1875), in the White House. When the southern states were once again part of the Union, the Democrats seemed likely to benefit politically. White southerners were unwilling to accept the Republicans as a legitimate part of the political scene in the region, especially when the Republicans relied on the votes of former slaves as a major part of their coalition. The Democrats had every reason to favor the prompt readmission of the South and a lenient policy on the issues of Reconstruction. More and more the Democratic Party was identified with an antiblack racial posture that looked to the maintenance of white supremacy.
The imbedded electoral power of the Democrats was clear in the presidential election of 1868. The Republicans nominated the military hero of the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885), and the Democrats named the former governor of New York, Horatio Seymour (1810-1886). Seymour's running mate was Francis Preston Blair Jr. (1821-1875) of Missouri, a staunch opponent of Radical Reconstruction. Even with the popularity of Grant and the advantages that the Republicans enjoyed in terms of organization, Seymour still garnered more than 47 percent of the popular ballots. The Democrats stressed the race issue in the campaign, and identified themselves even more strongly with white supremacy as a basic ideological position. While they were unable to overcome Grant's lead in the North, the Democrats were beginning to reestablish their base in the South as Reconstruction waned.
Any hopes for a Democratic rebound during the next presidential election in 1872 proved illusory. The prospects for the Democrats seemed more promising as the year began because of a developing split between pro-Grant Republicans and those reformers in the party who called themselves Liberal Republicans. If the Democrats and the Liberal Republicans could unite, their coalition could defeat Grant's reelection bid. In the end, however, the Liberal Republicans selected the New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley (1811-1872) as their nominee. The Democrats had little choice but to accept Greeley, lest they split the anti-Grant vote. Neither the Liberal Republicans nor the Democrats were enthusiastic about Greeley, and the campaign turned into a rout for Grant. The Democratic Party had reached one of its low points of the nineteenth century.
The onset of the panic of 1873 and the economic distress that followed produced a dramatic improvement in the electoral fortunes of the Democrats during the 1870s. In 1874 the Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives for the first time in eighteen years and seemed poised to be a competitive force in the 1876 presidential election. The election of Samuel J. Tilden (1814-1886) as governor of New York meant that the Democrats could hope to carry that state for the presidency. The scandals of the Grant administration, the return of the South to full political power, and popular unhappiness with the programs of the Republicans led to a more even balance between the two major parties. For the next quarter of a century, American politics would see an electoral stalemate between the Republicans and the Democrats. This equilibrium between the two parties has been characterized as the Third American Party System.
Stalemate in the Gilded Age
In the 1876 election the Democrats chose Tilden as their running mate against the Republican nominee, Rutherford B. Hayes (1822-1893). The campaign produced a very close race, and on election night it seemed as if Tilden had been elected. He had 184 electoral votes, just one short of the number needed for the presidency. Hayes trailed with 165 electoral votes. Twenty electoral votes--from South Carolina, Florida, Louisiana, and Oregon--remained in dispute, and were claimed by both parties. The election of 1876 had to be settled by an electoral commission and a political bargain; the result was the election of Hayes and the defeat of Tilden. Nonetheless, the 1876 election demonstrated that the Democrats could compete on even terms with the Republicans. With the solidly Democratic South behind them, the Democracy (as it was known then) had about 137 electoral votes (from the states of the former Confederacy, plus Kentucky and Missouri) toward a majority. If it could add New York and a midwestern state, such as Indiana, the party would have a winning coalition.
The Democrats came close to victory again in 1880 when they selected Winfield Scott Hancock (1824-1886), a Civil War general, to oppose the Republican nominee, James A. Garfield (1831-1881). Hancock would defuse the issues relating to Democratic attitudes toward the war, and was acceptable to the South because he had advocated a lenient Reconstruction policy. The popular vote was very close, with only 39,213 votes separating Hancock and Garfield. In the electoral college, Garfield won with 214 votes to 155 for Hancock. The South had become the bedrock of the Democratic Party.
Twenty-four years out of power ended in 1884, when the Democrats regained the White House behind the presidential candidacy of Grover Cleveland (1837-1908) of New York. The mayor of Buffalo in 1881, Cleveland was elected governor of New York in 1882. His ability to carry that state's electoral votes made him a national contender for the nomination. As a fresh face untainted with the battles of the past, Cleveland appealed to Democrats and to Republicans alienated with the candidacy of James G. Blaine (1830-1893) as their party's nominee. The campaign that ensued was one of the most bitter in American history. Cleveland's romantic entanglement with a woman named Maria Halpin and the illegitimate child for whom he took responsibility added an element of scandal to the race. Cleveland withstood the incident and went on to defeat Blaine narrowly in the popular vote and in the electoral tally. Happy Democrats celebrated their return to Washington.
In the late nineteenth century, the Democrats had assembled a powerful, if fractious, voting coalition. White Democrats in the South ensured that the region would provide a bloc of electoral votes for the party every four years. In the North, the Democrats appealed to Roman Catholics, who disliked the evangelical Protestantism of many Republicans. Americans who thought of themselves as consumers admired the Democratic belief in a low tariff on imported goods and modest taxation. The party also endorsed laissez-faire economic policies and emphasized states' rights and localism. The Republicans were the party of national authority and positive government; the Democrats upheld older traditions of a limited, nonintrusive state.
The Cleveland Era and Beyond
Cleveland's first term produced modest legislative accomplishments. The president alienated many party members by his civil service appointments at a time when patronage was a key element in the political system. Cleveland was more popular than his party, and his reelection in 1888 seemed likely. In 1887 the president made a lower tariff the sole theme of his annual message, and the issue became the dominant question in the 1888 presidential race. To oppose Cleveland the Republicans selected Benjamin Harrison (1833-1901) of Indiana, a Civil War general and the grandson of President William Henry Harrison. The younger Harrison ran on a platform that emphasized tariff protection, fair elections in the South, and an activist government.
At a time when incumbent presidents did not campaign for reelection, Cleveland played a passive role. In his campaign advisers and in his approach to the election, he muted the low-tariff themes of his annual message and did not emphasize the issue in the fall. Cleveland won a majority of the popular vote, in part because of the overwhelming Democratic strength in the South. But Harrison triumphed in the electoral tally. The Republicans also won control of both houses of Congress.
The Democratic eclipse was brief. The Republicans enacted an activist program of tariff protection and antitrust legislation and sought to pass a bill to ensure fair elections in the South. The Democrats rallied against the new Force Act that would have protected African American voting rights, and they also asserted that the higher tariffs had raised prices on consumer goods. In the Midwest, Republican laws to restrict sectarian schools and require the teaching of English alienated Catholic and Lutheran voters. The Democrats were the beneficiaries of these political mistakes. In the 1890 election, the Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives.
Two years later Cleveland defeated Harrison for the White House by the largest popular vote margin in twenty years. The Democrats kept control of the House and regained a majority in the Senate. It looked as if the Democrats had reestablished the preeminence that they had enjoyed earlier in the century. Some observers forecast hard times ahead for the Republicans.
But the Democrats were an uneasy coalition. In the South and West, where the farm economy was suffering from low prices and a burden of debt, many Democrats, mindful of the challenge of the farm- based People's Party, wanted policies to inflate the currency through the coinage of silver into money on an equal basis with gold. Democrats in the Northeast regarded the gold standard as essential. These differences were papered over in 1892, but could resurface in a crisis.
Then the economic skies darkened. The panic of 1893 set off a four-year depression that defied the efforts of Cleveland and his administration to offset its effects. The president offered the familiar answer of limited government and patience with the business cycle. His only substantive answer was to call for the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which the Republicans had passed in 1890 to provide a small subsidy to silver miners. Cleveland charged that the bill had undermined business confidence. He called Congress into special session in August 1893 to repeal the measure.
The resulting battle split the Democrats, as southern and western lawmakers sought to stave off the gold standard. Cleveland wielded patronage and other weapons ruthlessly to achieve his goal. He got his way, but the party was fractured. The president's harsh policies during the Pullman Strike of 1894 and his general antilabor approach alienated many within the party. By the election of 1894, the Democrats were demoralized and disunited.
The Republicans won a sweeping victory in that election. The Democrats lost more than 110 House seats, in the largest transfer of power in congressional history. In many parts of the country the Democrats became an enfeebled minority. Only in the South, where whites used electoral machinery to fend off the Populists, did the Democrats retain a stronghold. The Republicans had become the majority party and would remain so well into the twentieth century. Cleveland had become a hated, repudiated leader in the Democratic ranks.
In the election of 1896, the Democrats turned away from the policies of Cleveland and abandoned the gold standard. They nominated a political newcomer, William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) of Nebraska, who made an impassioned speech on behalf of free silver at the Democratic National Convention. The "cross of gold" speech transformed Bryan into a national figure and won him the nomination. He also received the nomination of the People's Party. Bryan conducted a vigorous campaign. He crisscrossed the nation, pressing the case for silver. But after an initial wave of enthusiasm, his candidacy faltered before the well-financed and well-organized appeal of the Republicans and their standard-bearer, William McKinley (1843-1901). Bryan was defeated soundly in the fall balloting as McKinley got 271 electoral votes to 176 for Bryan. The stalemated politics of the Gilded Age had ended, and the Republicans had emerged as the dominant force.
Bryan made another try at the White House four years later. The victories of the Spanish-American War of 1898 had made imperialism a key issue, and Bryan attempted to make the contest a referendum on overseas expansion. That did not work, and he returned to free silver along with an emphasis on the evils of business consolidation. The result was the same, with McKinley gaining an even more decisive triumph in the popular vote and the electoral total. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Democratic Party was in a subordinate status with little prospect of regaining national power in the immediate future. Republicans joked that the Democratic Party was like alcohol. It killed everything that was alive and preserved everything that was dead.
The Democrats did, however, have latent strengths that would enable the party to prosper in the twentieth century. Their base in the South meant that Democrats would be a power in Congress, where seniority gave power to lawmakers with safe seats. While the Democrats were still the party of small government, localism, and state rights, there had begun to be signs under William Jennings Bryan of a readiness to use the power of government to address concentrations of economic wealth and to deal with social injustice. Similarly, in industrial states in the Northeast and Middle West, Democrats began to use state regulatory power to engage issues of child labor, working conditions, and corporate misdeeds in what became in time the party's urban liberal wing. Any Democrat embarking on such a course would have to be careful of alienating the South, ever sensitive to the idea that a powerful government might attack segregation. Nonetheless, the possibility of becoming a party devoted to the interests of the small entrepreneur, the worker, and the consumer was one that many Democrats would be tempted to explore during the first decade of the new century to come.
When they talked of the Democratic Party in 1900, men spoke of the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian tradition and all that it represented. Americans distrustful of the government, wealth, and consolidated power had found a powerful instrument in the Democratic Party. At its best it represented virtues of rural life, proximity to the people, and the native wisdom of common Americans. In its less attractive elements, the Democrats' creed stood for racial injustice, the supremacy of white Americans, and negativism as to the role of government. Having survived the challenges of the Federalists, Whigs, and Republicans to remain one of the two major parties in the United States, the Democrats had become an indispensable part of the functioning of partisan politics and the operation of government. In that sense, the Democratic Party had become an integral part of American culture.
"Democratic Party." Encyclopedia of the United States in the Nineteenth Century. Ed. Paul Finkelman. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2001. U.S. History in Context. Web. 10 June 2015.