History of The United States Democratic Party - Origins

Origins

The modern Democratic Party was formed in the 1830s from former factions of the Democratic-Republican Party, which had largely collapsed by 1824. It was built by Martin Van Buren who rallied a cadre of politicians in every state behind war hero Andrew Jackson of Tennessee.

The spirit of Jacksonian Democracy animated the party from the early 1830s to the 1850s, shaping the Second Party System, with the Whig Party the main opposition. After the disappearance of the Federalists after 1815, and the Era of Good Feelings (1816–24), there was a hiatus of weakly organized personal factions until about 1828–32, when the modern Democratic Party emerged along with its rival the Whigs. The new Democratic Party became a coalition of farmers, city-dwelling laborers, and Irish Catholics.

It was weakest in New England, but strong everywhere else and won most national elections thanks to strength in New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia (by far, the most populous states at the time), and the frontier. Democrats opposed elites and aristocrats, the Bank of the United States, and the whiggish modernizing programs that would build up industry at the expense of the yeoman or independent small farmer.

From 1828 to 1848, banking and tariffs were the central domestic policy issues. Democrats strongly favored expansion to new farm lands, as typified by their expulsion of eastern American Indians and acquisition of vast amounts of new land in the West after 1846. The party favored the War with Mexico and opposed anti-immigrant nativism. Both Democrats and Whigs were divided on the issue of slavery. In the 1830s, the Locofocos in New York City were radically democratic, anti-monopoly, and were proponents of hard money and free trade. Their chief spokesman was William Leggett. At this time labor unions were few; some were loosely affiliated with the party.

Jackson's vice-president, Martin Van Buren, won the presidency in 1836, but the Panic of 1837 caused his defeat in 1840 at the hands of the Whig ticket of General William Henry Harrison and John Tyler; the Democrats got it back in 1844 with James K. Polk. Polk lowered tariffs, set up a sub-treasury system, and began and directed the Mexican-American War, in which the United States acquired much of the modern-day American Southwest. The war was strongly opposed by most Whigs, such as Illinois Congressman Abraham Lincoln.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) was created in 1848 at the convention that nominated General Lewis Cass, who lost to General Zachary Taylor of the Whigs. A major cause of the defeat was that the new Free Soil Party, which opposed slavery expansion, split the Democratic Party, particularly in New York, where the electoral votes went to Taylor. Democrats in Congress passed the hugely controversial Compromise of 1850. In state after state, however, the Democrats gained small but permanent advantages over the Whig Party, which finally collapsed in 1852, fatally weakened by division on slavery and nativism. The fragmented opposition could not stop the election of Democrats Franklin Pierce in 1852 and James Buchanan in 1856.