When did the parties of Democrat and Republican come into being?
I know there was a Whig party early on; why did that disappear?
In other words, who started this whole mess???
They Whigged out.
Simon de Montfort
First American political parties (or the first ones anyone still remembers): the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans. The Democratic-Republicans changed their name over time and became the Democrats. The Federalists were considered more conservative at the time, but their conservatism was one that favored a strong federal government. Anyway, the Democratic-Republicans squared off with various other parties after the Federalists were no more, including the Whigs that you mentioned. I don’t recall explicitly when the Republican party first came on the scene, but they made their first major impact in the election of 1860, when they ran candidate Abraham Lincoln against a Democrat, a splinter-party “Southern Democrat” candidate, and a Whig, if I recall correctly.
So the Democrats have been around since the beginning of the 19th century and the Republicans since the beginning of the Civil War.
ah, but will they ever go away?
Pretty much what AHunter said. The first two big parties were the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans. The Federalists self destructed with their opposition to the War of 1812, and by 1816, were no longer a national party. In 1824, Andrew Jackson got elected. but it was a tumultous election, and he was a controversial figure. His opponents, mainly in the North-East, and parts of the West organized around Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams, calling themselves first “National Republicans”, and then “Whigs”. The Jacksonians kept the title “Democratic-Republicans” (to be changed to just “Democratic Party”)
By 1852, the Whigs themselves were dying as a national party. With Henry Clay and Daniel Webster dead, they had lost their most prominent national leaders, and a lot of former Whigs had left to form smaller single interest parties, like anti-slavery or anti-immigrant parties. In 1854, anti-slavery Whigs, the anti-slavery parties, and the anti-immigrant parties came together to form the Republican party.
Oh, sorry…Anti-slavery Democrats joined the Republicans also.
Are the Civil War-era parties called “Democrat” and “Republican” contiguous with the modern parties of those names, though? I had understood that the “Democrats” essentially disappeared after the Civil War, and that the current “Democratic” party originated afterwards with no ties to the antebellum ones.
Nope. Uninterrupted use and continuity of leadership/membership.
What AHunter3 said. The Democrats hung on after the Civil War, though chiefly in the South for a while. (That’s where the term “solid south” came from - the South used to vote block Democratic, since they were (are?) still pretty cheesed off about the Civil War) They didn’t change over to the solid REPUBLICAN south until the 1960s or so, as the aims of the rest of the Democratic party didn’t really fit with what the southern branch wanted at that point. (honestly, there’d been an ideological split earlier than that, just took people a while to change.)
So how did the Democrats go from being the party of slavery in the South to the party of ethnic minorities in the North? The two tendencies seem to have coexisted for a long time, but why did urban blacks in the north and white Southerners work together?
What happened was Rutherford B. Hayes.
He was the Republican candidate, running against Sammy Tilden for prez and the election kind of went the same way as Bush versus Gore except that it got thrown to Congress, not the Supreme Court, to sort it out. In one of those proverbial smoke-filled back rooms, the Democrats agreed to let Hayes have it as long as the Republicans turned their backs on Reconstruction. Reconstruction, as you’ll recall, was the core program for turning former slaves into citizens by giving them a starting point and putting up some bulwarks against institutional discrimination. (Not saying it was perfect, mind you). So the Republicans abandoned southern blacks to the friendly embrace of the powers that did be down there.
This took place not terribly long after the Civil War.
For decades, neither the Democratic party nor the Republican party made any particular effort to support ethnic minorities per se, and definitely not blacks in the south.
Then, in the 30s in the US, socialist and communist politics started to take root, at least a bit, on the American political scene, and during Roosevelt’s Democratic administration the Democratic party chose to coopt their better, more relevant issues. The Democrats became associated with ideas of the “left” as they were understood in relationship to Marxism, which in turn was associated with a lot of egalitarian-populist ideology that was opposed to elitist member-group factions as well as elitist wealth-defined factions. So the populist trend within the Democratic party, which had occasionally been more of a “no-nothings” / discriminatory narrow form of populism, and remained so in the south, (i.e., “our ord’nary common folk against these heathen strange fellers”), took a general turn towards an egalitarian populism.
The South remained solid-block Democratic but fissures were apparent during the elections of Kennedy and Johnson, both of whom started extending the egalitarian populism towards blacks in the south (thanks in large part to King making any other position on their part untenable), and again in the 3-way contest between Nixon, Humphrey, and Wallace. (Many of the racist/elitist white voters in the south were at this point feeling betrayed).
The Republican Party was soon undergoing changes too. If the Democrats were going to be the party of pro-active egalitarianism, people who didn’t like that were perhaps going to be willing to flock to the Republicans, so Republican Party also began attracting the other kind of populist (the know-nothing flavor) and reversing some of its old principled stands on equality (ditching, for example, their historical support for the Equal Rights Amendment) and took on an increasingly social-reactionary tone (restoring morality, social virtue, and the general fabric of society to the way it was in the 1950s, or in lieu of that at least how it was portrayed in TV sitcoms).
So yeah, there was a period during which the Democratic Party in the North and industrial midwest was the party of ethnic minorities and labor unions and other lefty causes while in the South it was still the party of protectin’ common white christian folks against yankees and reconstructionists, but it’s not like it stayed that way for a long long time. Why did they work together? Well, often they didn’t. And when they did, it was a “strange bedfellows” thing prompted by mutual desire to the see the party itself triumphant, which would benefit them both.
Well, I’d place Democratic support of and by ethnic minorities earlier than the 30s. Remember, back in the 1884 campaign, one of Blaine’s supporters accused the Democrats of being the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion”, and Tammany Hall was actively recruiting the Irish as far back as the 1830s and 1840s. I’d say that immigrants have always been drawn to the Democrats, and that nativism has been much weaker among them than among the Republicans.