Book Excerpts

Excerpt
Chapter 1 - The Development of the Republican Party in the South

Political partisanship developed early in the young United States of America. The first two presidents were Federalists, and the third elected president, Thomas Jefferson, was a Democratic Republican, and he is regarded as having laid the foundation for the Democratic Party when he was elected president in 1800. Andrew Jackson, the seventh president, was the first to be elected as a Democrat. In the 1830s and 1840s, control of the presidency and dominance in Congress shifted between the Democratic Party and the newer Whig Party. Democrats in this era generally did not support a strong governmental role in economic development activities, such as canal construction and road building, while Whigs advocated the national government’s involvement in these types of economic activities and others, such as protective trade tariffs and the continuation of a national bank. The Whig Party began to decline in popularity following Democrat Franklin Pierce’s landslide presidential victory in 1852.1 In the South the Democratic Party gradually became more dominant and southern Democrats in Congress held several important leadership positions that they used to try to protect their system of slavery. With growing anti-slavery sentiment and greater concern over the expansion of slavery into western territories in the 1850s, a new national political party emerged to counter the Democratic Party’s laissez-faire policies accommodating slavery. In Congress in 1854, southern Democrats influenced the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which declared the Missouri Compromise on slavery to be null and void.

This legislation permitted the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska to settle the issue of slavery each within its own borders, making it potentially easier for slavery to expand into these new territories. Anti-slavery forces in the North were significantly agitated by this possibility. In March 1854, a coalition of dissident Democrats, Whigs, and members of the Free Soil Party met in Ripon, Wisconsin, and formed a new Republican Party. That summer in Jackson, Michigan, Republicans held their first state convention to nominate candidates for state offices and adopt a party platform.2 Then, in 1856 several Republicans were elected to Congress, and former army officer and explorer James C. Fremont became the first Republican presidential contender when he challenged Democrat James Buchanan but lost the presidency, running on a platform that condemned slavery. When it was organized, the new Republican Party was “strictly a northern party and made no effort to hide its regional identity.”3

Consequently, this new party horrified Southerners, and understandably so. Just four years later, Abraham Lincoln ran as a Republican on a platform that opposed slavery’s spread outside of the South, and he won the presidency in the 1860 election. The Republicans subsequently took control of Congress following the secession of eleven southern states from the Union. After the 1864 Union elections, Republicans outnumbered Democrats by more than three to one in the new Thirty-ninth Congress. Soon thereafter, the more radical Republicans in Congress began to push for freedom for all slaves and also advocated for the blacks’ right to vote.4

At the conclusion of the Civil War and following the assassination of President Lincoln just a few weeks into his second term, slavery was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Then in 1866, Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibited states from abridging the equality of any citizens and provided for a reduction in a state’s representation in Congress proportional to the number of male citizens denied suffrage by that state. The new amendment also prohibited states from paying the debts of the Confederacy and proposed to bar from national or state elective office any male who had previously held federal or state office and taken an oath to support the Union and had later aided the Confederacy, thereby opening up opportunities for Unionists and other interlopers to secure most of the elective offices in the southern states.5

Not surprisingly, between October 1866 and January 1867, in a display of intransigence, all of the southern state legislatures except Tennessee overwhelmingly repudiated the proposed constitutional amendment. Shortly thereafter, radical Republicans in Congress responded with the Reconstruction Act of 1867 that imposed military rule on the South, denied Confederate loyalists the right to vote, and conditioned any Confederate state’s readmission to the Union on the adoption by their state legislatures of the Fourteenth Amendment and the adoption of a state constitution that would essentially provide for suffrage for freed black slaves. President Andrew Johnson vetoed the legislation, but the Republicans in Congress overrode his veto, despite the opposition of most Democrats.

In response to the new federal law, radical Republicans in Congress and the northern military leaders overseeing Reconstruction of the South instituted programs that actively registered adult black males to vote, resulting in the election of many African Americans and “carpetbagger” northern Republicans to most of the high public offices in the states of the old Confederacy.6 The emancipation of slaves also substantially disrupted the economy of the South. Reconstruction historian Eric Foner describes the attitudes of most Southerners toward the new freedom of their former slaves and the devastation to their cotton-growing economy: “The blacks’ quest for economic independence not only threatened the foundation of the southern political economy, it put the freedman at odds with both the former owners seeking to restore plantation labor discipline and northerners committed to reinvigorating staple crop production.”7 In reaction to these sudden economic, social, and political changes foisted upon them by the Republicans in the federal government, most conservative southern whites banded together under the banner of the Democratic Party and sufficiently organized themselves to stamp out radical Republican elected officials in the South by the beginning of the 1870s.

A reversal of the nation’s post-war economic expansion, referred to as the Panic of 1873, and a cotton market price depression slowed the pace of Reconstruction activity in the South. Eric Foner describes the effect of the economic downturn on the politics of Reconstruction: “Voters reacted to hard times by turning against the party in power. In the greatest reversal of partisan alignments in the nineteenth century, they erased the massive Congressional majority Republicans had enjoyed since 1861, transferring the party’s 110-vote margin in the House into a Democratic majority of 60 seats.”8 In the 1874 national elections, Democrats reclaimed more than two-thirds of the southern state seats in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. Southern Democrats whose states had now returned to the Union also reclaimed more than half the committee chairmanships in the House. In the remaining two years of the Grant administration, the federal government began to retreat from its earlier harsh Reconstruction policies.

The presidential election of 1876 resulted in an even more pronounced withdrawal of the federal government from Reconstruction of the South. In that election, the Democratic candidate, New York governor Samuel J. Tilden, ran against the Republican Party nominee, Ohio governor Rutherford B. Hayes. In an extremely close election, vote results in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina for Hayes were challenged by Tilden, and a bipartisan electoral commission was charged to oversee the vote recount. The commission decided for Hayes, providing him an electoral vote victory of 185 to 184. Allegedly as the result of a political compromise newly elected President Hayes made with southern Democrats, he ordered federal troops surrounding the Louisiana and South Carolina state capitols to “return to their barracks,” signaling the beginning of the end of federal military oversight of Reconstruction in the South.9 The eventual return to “Home Rule” in the region allowed southern state governments a freer hand in managing their domestic affairs, and the national Republican Party slowly lessened its support of universal suffrage and equal opportunity for African-Americans in the South. Soon thereafter, southern “redeemers” in the Democratic Party were able to reduce substantially the political power of blacks and begin to reshape the legal systems in support of racial and economic subordination of African-Americans in the South. By the late-1870s, Republicans essentially disappeared from elective offices in the South, and the region basically became a one-party political bastion for the Democrats from which African-Americans were effectively excluded from participation in voting by poll taxes and through a whites-only primary election process.

In the mid-1890s, Republicans in the South briefly aligned with some disaffected white and black southern agrarians under the banner of the Populist Party, but the Democrats were able to decimate both the Populists and the southern Republicans by the end of the nineteenth century. As a consequence, elected Republicans became even rarer in the South.

Nationally, however, the Republican Party, which was now colloquially referred to as the Grand Old Party or the GOP, increasingly became the dominant political party in the rest of the nation in the late nineteenth century and into the early decades of the twentieth century. In the 1894 national elections, Republicans increased their representation in the U.S. House from 113 seats to 244 seats in what historian Lewis Gould labeled as “the greatest transfer of strength from one party to another in the nation’s history.”10 Republicans held the White House for every term between 1861 and 1913, except for the two terms in which Grover Cleveland served as president from 1885 to 1889 and from 1893 to 1897. During the decades of Republican dominance at the federal government level, the various administrations expanded the role of the national government into many economic development activities, such as the establishment of a national banking system, imposition of a federal income tax, building a transcontinental railroad and dispersing public lands in western territories to encourage settlement there. According to Gould, by 1904 the Republican Party “stood at the pinnacle of American politics,”11 with control of the presidency and secure majorities in both the United States House and Senate. Increasingly over time, the GOP became identified with big business interests that were leading the industrial development of the nation. In this era when “Big Business” had a strong influence over national policy, there were occasional instances of corrupt business and governmental practices in Republican-controlled administrations, and the primarily agrarian Southerners became even further alienated from the pro-business Republican Party. Although Republican Theodore Roosevelt adopted some business regulatory measures during his presidency, the national Republican Party gradually moved away from those policies and toward support of a more limited role for the federal government in the regulation of business and national economic activities in the early decades of the twentieth century.12

During the years of the Great Depression, the Republican Party fell even more out of favor in the South. Not only were Republicans blamed for the Civil War, the destruction of the southern economy with the abolition of the slave labor system, and the harsh Reconstruction activities of the federal government, but now they were also blamed for the failed economic policies of the Herbert Hoover administration and the massive human suffering that accompanied the nation’s most severe economic downturn.13 The solidly Democratic South became an essential building block in a new national Democratic majority in Congress that enacted many New Deal economic relief programs during the era of the Great Depression.