CHAPTER LV

COMPOSITION OF THE PARTIES

THE less there is in the tenets of the Republicans and Democrats to make their character intelligible to a European reader, so much the more desirable is it to convey some idea of what may be called their social and local, their racial and ecclesiastical complexions.

The Republican party was formed between 1854 and 1856 chiefly out of the wrecks of the Whig party, with the addition of the Abolitionists and Free Soilers, who, disgusted at the apparent subservience to the South of the leading northern Whigs, had for some time previously acted as a group by themselves, though some of them had been apt to vote for Whig candidates. They had also recruits from the Free Soil Democrats, who had severed themselves from the bulk of the Democratic party, and some of whom claimed to be true Jeffersonians in joining the party which stood up against the spread of slavery.1 The Republicans were therefore from the first a Northern party, more distinctly so than the Federalists had been at the close of the preceding century, and much more distinctly so than the Whigs, in whom there had been a pretty strong Southern element.

The Whig element brought to the new party solidity, political experience, and a large number of wealthy and influential adherents. The Abolitionist element gave it force and enthusiasm, qualities invaluable for the crisis which came in 1861 with the secession of all save four of the slave-holding States. During the war, it drew to itself nearly all the earnestness, patriotism, religious and moral fervour, which the North and

1 The name Republican was given to the new party, not without the hope of thereby making it easier for these old school Democrats to join it, for in Jefferson's day his party had been called Republican.

West contained. It is still, in those regions, the party in whose ranks respectable, steady, pious, well-conducted men are to be looked for. If you find yourself dining with one of "the best people" in any New England city, or in Philadelphia, or in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Chicago, or Minneapolis, you assume that the guest sitting next you is a Republican, almost as confidently as in English county society you would assume your neighbour to be a Tory; that is to say, you may sometimes be wrong, but in four cases out of five you will be right. In New York the presumption is weaker, though even there you will be right three times out of five. One may say that all over the North, the merchants, manufacturers, and professional men of the smaller perhaps even more than of the larger towns, tend to be Republicans. So too are the farmers, particularly in the North-west. The working class in the cities is divided, but the more solid part of it, the church-goers and total abstainers, are generally Republicans. A number, still large, though of course daily diminishing, are soldiers of the Civil War; and these naturally rally to the old flag. When turning southwards one reaches the borders of the old slave States, everything is changed. In Baltimore the best people are so generally Democrats that when you meet a Republican in society you ask whether he is not an immigrant from New England. This is less marked by the case in Kentucky and Missouri, but in Virginia, or the Carolinas, or the Gulf States, very few men of good standing belong to the Republican party, which consists of the lately enfranchised negroes, of a certain number of native whites, seldom well regarded, who organize and use the negro vote, and who twenty-five years ago were making a good thing for themselves out of it; of a number of Federal officials (a number very small when the Democrats are in power), who have been put into Federal places by their friends at Washington, on the understanding that they are to work for the party, and of a few stray people, perhaps settlers from the North who have not yet renounced their old affiliations. It is not easy for an educated man to remain a Republican in the South, not only because the people he meets in

1 This statement, written in 1888, is now less true, for both the Democrats and the so-called 'People's Party' have gained strength in the North-western States since that date.

society are Democrats, but because the Republican party managers are apt to be black sheep.

In the Middle States, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, to which one may for this purpose add Ohio and Indiana, and on the Pacific slope, the parties are nearly balanced, and the majority of votes sways now this way now that, as the circumstances of the hour, or local causes, or the merits of individual candidates, may affect the popular mind. Pennsylvania, for instance, is now, as she has been since 1860, a Republican State, owing to her interest in a protective tariff. New York, whose legislature is frequently Republican, in presidential elections generally goes Democratic. In these doubtful States, the better sort of people have been mostly Republicans. It is in that party you look to find the greater number of the philanthropists, the men of culture, the men of substance who desire to see things go on quietly, with no shocks given to business. confidence by rash legislation. These are great elements of strength. They were gained for the Republican party by its earlier history, which drew into it thirty years ago those patriotic and earnest young men who are now the leading elderly men in their respective neighbourhoods. But against them must be set the tendency of a section of the Republican party, a section small in numbers but including some men of character and intelligence, to break away, or, as it is called, "bolt" from the party platform and "ticket." This section explains its conduct by declaring that the great claims which the party gained on the confidence of the country by its resistance to slavery and its vigorous prosecution of the war have been forfeited by mal-administration since the war ended, and by the scandals which have gathered round some of its conspicuous figures. If intelligence and cultivation dispose their possessors to desert at a critical moment, the party might be stronger without this element, for, as everybody knows, a good party man is he who stands by his friends when they are wrong.

The Democratic party suffers in the North and West from exactly the opposite causes to the Republican. It was long discredited by its sympathy with the South, and by the opposition of a considerable section within it (the so-called Copperheads) to the prosecution of the war. This shadow hung heavy over it till the complete pacification of the South and growing

prominence of new questions began to call men's minds away from the war years. From 1869 to 1885 it profited from being in opposition. Saved from the opportunity of abusing patronage, or becoming complicated in administration jobs, it was able to criticize freely the blunders or vices of its opponents. It may however be doubted whether its party managers have been, take them all in all, either wiser or purer than those whom they criticized, nor do they seem to have inspired any deeper trust in the minds of impartial citizens. When, as has several times happened, the Democrats have obtained a majority in the House of Representatives, their legislation has not been higher in aim or more judicious in the choice of means than that which Republican congresses have produced. Hence the tendency to desert from the Republican ranks has enured to the benefit of the Democrats less than might have been expected. However, the Democratic party includes not only nearly all the talent, education, and wealth of the South, together with the great bulk of the Southern farmers and poor whites, but also a respectable and apparently increasing minority of good men in the Middle States, and a somewhat smaller minority in New England and the North-west.1

In these last-mentioned districts its strength lies chiefly in the cities, a curious contrast to those earlier days when Jefferson was supported by the farmers and Hamilton by the townsfolk. But the large cities have now a population unlike anything that existed eighty years ago, a vast ignorant fluctuating mass of people, many of them recently admitted to citizenship, who have little reason for belonging to one party rather than another, but are attracted some by the name of the Democratic party, some by the fact that it is not the party of the well-to-do, some by leaders belonging to their own races who have risen to influence in its ranks. The adhesion of this mob gives the party a slight flavour of rowdyism, as its old associations give it, to a Puritan palate, a slight flavour of

1 In 1892, however, several North-western States were carried by the Democrats.

2 Jefferson regarded agriculture as so much the best occupation for citizens that he was alarmed by the rumour that the codfish of the North-eastern coasts were coming down to the shores of Virginia and Carolina, lest the people of those States should "be tempted to catch them, and commerce, of which we have already too much, receive an accession."

VOL. II

D

irreligion. Twenty years ago, a New England deacon-the deacon is in America the type of solid respectability — would have found it as hard to vote for a Democratic candidate as an English archdeacon to vote for a Birmingham Radical. But these old feelings are wearing away. A new generation of voters has arisen which never saw slavery, and cares little about Jefferson for good or for evil. This generation takes parties as it finds them. Even among the older voters there has been a change within the last ten years. Many of the best Republicans, who remembered the Democrats as the party of which a strong section sympathized with the slaveholders before the war, and disapproved of the war while it was being waged, looked with horror on the advent to power in 1885 of a Democratic president. The country, however, was not ruined by Mr. Cleveland, but went on much as before, its elements of good and evil mixed and contending, just as under Republican administrations. However, the Republican leaders still point to the fact that the Democratic party commands the solid vote of the States where slavery formerly existed as a reason why it should excite the distrust of good citizens who fought for the Union.

Now that differences of political doctrine are not accentuated, race differences play a considerable part in the composition of the parties. Besides the native Americans, there are men of five nationalities in the United States - British, Irish, Germans, Scandinavians, French Canadians. Of these, however, the English and Scotch lose their identity almost immediately, being absorbed into the general mass of native citizens. Though very numerous, they have hitherto counted for nothing politically, because they have either been indifferent to political struggles or have voted from the same motives as an average American. They have to a large extent remained British subjects, not caring for the suffrage. Recently, however, an effort has been made (apparently chiefly for the sake of counterworking the Irish) to induce them to apply for citizenship and exert their voting power as a united body. It may be doubted

1 There are also Poles, Czechs, Italians, Russian Jews, and Slavs from Hungary (as well as a few Roumans and Armenians): but their number, though it has increased rapidly of late years, is relatively small, except in two or three of the Atlantic cities, in Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, St. Paul, Minneapolis, New Orleans, and in the mining regions of Pennsylvania.