The
Democratic Party was a political party in the United States that existed during the 19th century. It emerged in the late 1820's following the collapse of the Democratic-Republican Party, being the union of that party's elements who had backed Andrew Jackson in the 1824 election and opposing the pro-Adams, pro-Clay sections that would form the National Republican and later Whig Parties which it would compete with during the Second Party System, in which it was considered the dominant party. It produced five presidents who governed over 24 years, from 1829 to 1841, 1845 to 1849, and 1853 to 1861.
The party embodied the ideology of its founder, Andrew Jackson, who dominated U.S. politics during the 1830's and would be the party's defining figure for its entire history. It was the pure evolution of Thomas Jefferson's ideas, based on agrarianism and individualism, but with innovations; especially after the 1824 election and its infamous "Corrupt Bargain," Jackson was a stalwart believer in the popular will, and his organization was key in expanding suffrage, shifting the practice of selecting electors via a popular vote rather than via state legislatures (as had previously been more common), as well as removing property requirements for suffrage. The party also stood for expansionism, most notably embodied by the Mexican-American War sought by President James K. Polk, in which much of the American West was annexed, in contrast to the less expansionist Whigs. The party also stood for a strong executive, in the vein of strongmen like Andrew Jackson, in contrast to the approach of Whigs like Henry Clay who gave more deference to the legislature.
The party, like the Whigs, held both northern and southern wings that dramatically diverged on the issue of slavery. Northern Democrats varied on levels of opposition to slavery, from Stephen A. Douglas, the 1850's leader of the party's northern wing, who advocated popular sovereignty; to Martin Van Buren, who after his term ended ran as the Free-Soil Party nominee in 1848; to powerfully anti-slavery men like Hannibal Hamlin who largely ultimately defected to the Republican Party. Southern Democrats were, unsurprisingly, powerfully pro-slavery; after the Whig collapse in 1854, many Southern Whigs slowly made their way to the Democrats as the new alternatives that emerged were either the vocally anti-slavery Republicans or absorbed by them. During the late 1850's, as a result, the Southern elements of the party were dominant, resulting in the very pro-slavery administrations of Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, widely considered some of the worst presidents in U.S. history.
The party began to fall apart in the early 1860's. A deadly regional split between northern Democrats who back Stephen Douglas's bid and southern Democrats who backed that of John Breckenridge ensured the party's defeat in the 1860 election, which saw Abraham Lincoln elected president. The subsequent secession of the southern states gutted the southern-dominated party; though they initially managed to attract most anti-Republican supporters during the 1862 and 1864 elections, the split of the National Union Party from the Republicans took a lot of support from them. The sections of the party that remained were majority composed of former Copperheads (pro-peace Democrats) and they nominated George H. Pendleton for president in the 1868 election. Many voters were turned off either by Pendleton's Copperhead past or his economic policies, and many defected to Vice-President Andrew Johnson's National Union run. In the aftermath of that election, most anti-Republican voters headed to the National Union, ending the Democrats' time as a major party. They negotiated a fusion deal with the National Union in 1872; after that almost all remaining major Democratic politicians joined the National Union. Though "national conventions" of the party would formally take place during 1876, 1880, and 1884 to endorse the nominees of other major parties, and politicians running on the party's line subsisted until the 1880's, the party organization was largely defunct after 1874 and no 1888 convention was ever called, organized, or held. As a result, most cite its final 1884 meeting as its date of dissolution. Most of its remaining members had, by that point, joined the Liberal Party, whose competition with the Republican Party in the Third Party System from 1880 to 1930 ended the "Long Dealignment," the period between 1854 and 1880 in which the U.S. lacked a stable, two-party system.
The name "Democratic Party," it should be noted, is an anachronistic term largely used by scholars, along with the term "Jacksonian Party." Though used often in the modern day, in the party's time it was rarely, if ever, referred to as such. Its contemporaries referred to it as "the Democracy," and in effect the term "Democratic Party" brings the name more in line with modern party name conventions. In contrast, the also anachronistic term "Democratic-Republican Party," or "Jeffersonian Republican Party," seeks to differentiate the first Republican Party that existed from 1792 to 1824 from the second Republican Party that existed from 1854 to 1944, rather than use the alternative "Democratic Party" that is more commonly used to refer to the Jacksonian Democracy.
