A Brief History of the Democratic Party
Part I of a III part series
Written By Conner Bryan
The Democratic party is the oldest living political party in America, and vies with Britain’s Tory party for oldest in the world. In 1828 America saw its first Democratic President, under the leadership of Andrew Jackson, and in the 200+ years of its campaign, has produced 15 out of 45 presidents.
Among whom include the likes of not only Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Barack Obama, but also James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson. Buchanan was a lifelong bachelor, indifferent to whether the Civil War broke out, remarking once that the legality of slavery was “happily, a matter of but little practical importance.” Johnson, despite being the only white southern senator to remain loyal to the Union during the Civil War, was eventually impeached after granting amnesty to Confederate soldiers and allowing them to elect rebel governments, governments wherein black people were still subject to cruelty.
Needless to say, the Democratic party’s history is complicated, often zigging where it should have zagged, and only recently has become synonymous with the “progressive” liberal ideology accepting of the welfare state and open to immigration.
This series on the history of the Democratic Party will be split into four parts: the Party’s founding, the Civil War and the “great switch,” the New Deal Democrats, and the Neoliberal Democrats of the 1990s onward. In it, I will be discussing Democrats’ tainted history promoting slavery, stripping suffrage, reclaiming itself as the progressive party of the future, and how it simultaneously serves as the working class party and the party for coastal elites.
Since we’re going to be discussing the political party at length, I thought it worthwhile to provide some background to how political parties began. They are recent. While the Ancient Greeks get the title for founding modern democracy, they did not have any organized party based politics.
Historically, the Roman Senate was divided along lines of general interest: on the one side were Patricians — a.k.a the wealthy and noble — and on the other were Plebians, or the middle class, often comprising a few lucky wealthier merchants.
Instead, political parties grew from a Roman Catholic conspiracy to kill King Charles II. In 1678 a rumor spread across England about a plot to install Charles’ brother, James, the Duke of York — a Roman Catholic — to the thrown. Despite the plot’s fictitiousness, Charles II dissolved parliament out of paranoia and their supposed lack of respect.
This divided the country into two camps: Petitioners stood in opposition to the King and demanded that Parliament be restored and Abhorrers believed any attempt to control the King’s actions was itself an act of treason. Before long, the Petitioners turned into “Whigs,” after the Scottish Presbyterians who opposed the government, and “Tories,” named after a group of Irish Roman Catholics who suffered under Protestant rule.
The government, here, however, refers to monarchical rule. Thus, the division between the first ever political parties can be seen as one for or against the People, i.e., for or against Democracy.
The American political parties were loosely modeled off this division. The first American political party was the Federalist Party, organized by Alexander Hamilton in 1787 which valued national, centralized, and commercial friendly priorities over the valuation of States’ Rights.
It wasn’t until Jay’s Treaty in 1795 that a true opposition party began to emerge. Jay’s Treaty was a negotiation between American and British interests in an attempt to resolve the tensions which naturally ensue from fostered rebellion.
The American Federalist John Jay promoted harmony with Great Britain, laid out the plans to avert international war, and encouraged closer economic relations.
Inretaliation to Federalist campaigns came the brainchild of Thomas Jefferson, namely, the Democratic-Republican Party (DRP). Self described simply as the “Republicans,” but often referred to by Federalists as “Democratic”-Republicans, associating the party with the same radical democrats who lead the French Revolution.
The DRP opposed embedding benign relations with Great Britain’s Crowned Monarch (consequently allying themselves with the French) on the grounds that it would undercut the Republican experiment that is America, and, more importantly, strengthen Hamilton’s Federalist Party. The debates surrounding the Hamilton-Jeffersonian divide crystallized the “First Party System.”
Theoretically, this meant women and black people who were no longer enslaved had the right to vote.
The “Democratic” leg of the DRP is where modern concerns regarding the legacy of the Democratic Party stem from. Take for example the policy of suffrage based in the premise that “all adult white men with a certain amount of property” be eligible to vote. This was a legitimate policy implemented by President Jefferson in 1807.
Before then, it was legal, and indeed it happened, that a state like New Jersey could allow “free inhabitants of the State, who were over the age of majority, had more than fifty pounds of wealth and had lived in New Jersey for more than six months,” to vote in elections.
Theoretically, this meant women and black people who were no longer enslaved had the right to vote. This right was taken from them by Democrats.Occasions such as these are what have recently propelled state legislatures to renounce Jefferson as their forefather altogether. It also challenges the authenticity of Democrats’ egalitarianism.
The DRP lasted until 1828. Jefferson’s term ended in 1809. With the help of Jefferson’s charm and despite a growingly skeptical branch of DRP members, James Madison was able to win the 1808 election, 122 electoral votes to the Federalist candidate’s 44.
He held office for two terms, ushering in the so-called “Era of Good Feelings” for the also two term DRP president, James Monroe. Monroe’s administration (1817–1825) is typically referred to as the “Era of Good Feelings,” in part, because he enjoyed the privilege of just one party being in power: the DRP.
It didn’t last long.
With the introduction of new states to the Union, a population that had increased by roughly 35%, relaxed voting laws, and the ratification of the popular vote for general elections, there were as many issues as there were divided factions within the DRP.
Candidates would seize on this opportunity and in the election of 1824, the party’s caucus nominated William H. Crawford, Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and Henry Clay, simultaneously.
One party being able to rule stood in opposition to an often overlooked senator and eventual President: Martin Van Buren, founder of the Democratic Party as we know it. Responding to the DRP’s factionalism, which centered on the leading candidates and not policies, Van Buren wrote to newspaper editor Thomas Ritchie about a plan to organize people around “party principle,” not “personal preference.”
He argued that, “we must always have party distinctions [and] political combinations between the inhabitants of the different states are unavoidable.” This was in reference to to the multiple candidates being nominated across the States within a single party. Principled parties, according to Van Buren, would last longer, avoid the domination of special interests, and most importantly, were more American.
Let’s talk about the ethos of America after the popular vote and with much of modern America’s east coast registered in the Union. Jumping ahead to 1831 and 1832, French writer Alexis de Tocqueville toured a United States fresh off the “Second Party System.” The Second Party System (1828–1854) sparked the dawn of America’s participatory politics. Election day rallies, protests, partisan newspapers, and certain loyalty to parties regardless of the candidate increasingly became the norm.
It was in this climate that Tocqueville would see in America “the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices, and its passions.” To him, what he saw was the future, whereas Europe, with its aristocracy and disparity, was the past. Historians are quick to point out that the president at the time of Tocqueville’s writings was a Democrat.
President Andrew Jackson was an innovator at best, and a corruptible hypocrite at worst. The principles of his Democratic Party platform were simple: keep the government frugal and abolish fiscal favoritism, maintain the separation of church and State, and do your best to represent the meritorious, ordinary working people of America.
Clay’s critique brings up the crux of the problem embedded in Democrats’ history. On the surface, their principles strike images of egalitarianism, meritocracy, and mobility for all. In practice, however, the spoils often end in the hands of those in power.
Standing in opposition against intrusive governments and the aristocracy meant developing original grassroot techniques for organizing. Among these was the pyramidal structure of local, state, and national committees, caucuses, and conventions in order to adopt people and platforms. Yet, also included was Jackson’s controversial “spoils system” of patronage.
The spoils system was essentially an administrator’s official method of firing employees thought to be disloyal. According to some reports in the 19th century, Jackson’s first year of office saw nearly 700 governmental positions vacated or replaced.
In other instances, it is reported that Jackson hired officials who served under Washington’s administration 40 years earlier, and who were deemed too old to be serving public office at all. Most notably, opponents like Henry Clay called out Jackson for his blatant corruptness, often being caught saying of the Democrats, “they see nothing wrong in the rule that to the victors belong the spoils.”
Clay’s critique brings up the crux of the problem embedded in Democrats’ history. On the surface, their principles strike images of egalitarianism, meritocracy, and mobility for all. In practice, however, the spoils often end in the hands of those in power.
Both Jackson and Van Buren argued that their politics were principled and in service for the People writ large. Their “meritorious ordinary working people,” base, however, was propaganda. Historian Daniel Feller writes that, “once the popular Jackson left the scene, the two parties,” referring to the Democrats and their opposition the Whig Party, “were very nearly equal in their bases of popular support.”
By and large this is due to the fact that both parties were only catering to adult white men. The demographic was largely homogenous, and so too were the politics. The Whigs would even go on to copy Jackson’s persona: “Old Hickory,” with a successor of their own, Mr. Henry Harrison, or “Old Tippecanoe.”
Recognizing the difference between the propaganda and the policies opens up explanations as to how Democrats could be the party of slaveholders, secessionists, and ultimately, the Confederacy in the Civil War. It will be to these explanations that I speak to in the next part of the series, as well as what I refer to as “the Great Switch,” when Democrats truly started to look more like the party of the People.
