Arkady
President
Recently I've been studying the area of American history between the Revolution and the War of 1812. It's really fascinating because the political divides were so different from today. In a lot of later eras in American history, even though the party names are different, the fundamental political divide was remarkably similar to today. For example, if you were transported back to 1900, as soon as you managed to get your familair associations with the word "Democrat" and "Republican" out of your head, the political landscape would start to seem very familiar to you, only with the opposite political labels attached.
For example, check out the following electoral map:
That looks pretty damned close to the famous red-blue map of 2000, only with Red and Blue reversed. McKinley, the Republican, won almost all the same states as Gore, the Democrat, did 100 years later. And it wasn't just state-level reversal -- there was a reversal on other demographics, too (e.g., who appealed to urbanites versus rural residents, blacks vs. whites, etc.) And a lot of the issues would have seemed very familiar to a modern person, just in a reverse fashion as to the parties (states rights, minority rights, worker protections, etc.)
If you go a century earlier, though, things are fairly different. Although there's the same general North/South divide we've had nearly from the beginning, with Federalists in the north and Democratic Republicans in the south, it wasn't nearly as rigid. Jefferson was elected (with backing from the South) partly because the Federalists split their own vote across a north/south divide, with Adams in the north and former South Carolina governor Thomas Pinckney, backed by Alexander Hamilton, in the south. And there were lesser divides among the Democratic Republicans -- for example, former Massachusetts governor Samuel Adams, second cousin of the Federalist candidate John Adams, was a backer of the Democratic Republicans in that election.
Some of the issues were consistent with what we see today (a southern faction more concerned with states' rights and agrarian issues). But some of the issues put our modern assumptions in the blender. For example, the southern faction was more internationalist, closely aligned with France, and at least nominally more egalitarian (at least among white, propertied males). These Democratic Republicans were oft attacked as "Jacobins," for their supposedly radical hostility towards the very wealthy. The north, meanwhile, was closely tied with the standing army -- one of Jefferson's first acts upon taking office as president was pushing for a major scale-back to the military, which was seen as sympathetic to Washington and Hamilton. The northern Federalist faction was also the group far more hostile to immigration (the "Alien" part of the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts the Federalists pushed through). Meanwhile, slavery and women's rights, as political issues, had not yet become a driving consideration.
So, it was a bit like today's Democratic/Republican divide, if nobody was talking much about race, the Republicans were anti-militaristic and pro-French, and the Democrats accused them of "class warfare," while working to prevent immigrants from getting legal status. I find it all very interesting, since it's a period when you can see the later forms first coalescing, but still with many essential differences from what we see today.
For example, check out the following electoral map:
That looks pretty damned close to the famous red-blue map of 2000, only with Red and Blue reversed. McKinley, the Republican, won almost all the same states as Gore, the Democrat, did 100 years later. And it wasn't just state-level reversal -- there was a reversal on other demographics, too (e.g., who appealed to urbanites versus rural residents, blacks vs. whites, etc.) And a lot of the issues would have seemed very familiar to a modern person, just in a reverse fashion as to the parties (states rights, minority rights, worker protections, etc.)
If you go a century earlier, though, things are fairly different. Although there's the same general North/South divide we've had nearly from the beginning, with Federalists in the north and Democratic Republicans in the south, it wasn't nearly as rigid. Jefferson was elected (with backing from the South) partly because the Federalists split their own vote across a north/south divide, with Adams in the north and former South Carolina governor Thomas Pinckney, backed by Alexander Hamilton, in the south. And there were lesser divides among the Democratic Republicans -- for example, former Massachusetts governor Samuel Adams, second cousin of the Federalist candidate John Adams, was a backer of the Democratic Republicans in that election.
Some of the issues were consistent with what we see today (a southern faction more concerned with states' rights and agrarian issues). But some of the issues put our modern assumptions in the blender. For example, the southern faction was more internationalist, closely aligned with France, and at least nominally more egalitarian (at least among white, propertied males). These Democratic Republicans were oft attacked as "Jacobins," for their supposedly radical hostility towards the very wealthy. The north, meanwhile, was closely tied with the standing army -- one of Jefferson's first acts upon taking office as president was pushing for a major scale-back to the military, which was seen as sympathetic to Washington and Hamilton. The northern Federalist faction was also the group far more hostile to immigration (the "Alien" part of the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts the Federalists pushed through). Meanwhile, slavery and women's rights, as political issues, had not yet become a driving consideration.
So, it was a bit like today's Democratic/Republican divide, if nobody was talking much about race, the Republicans were anti-militaristic and pro-French, and the Democrats accused them of "class warfare," while working to prevent immigrants from getting legal status. I find it all very interesting, since it's a period when you can see the later forms first coalescing, but still with many essential differences from what we see today.
