Whenever I brought up the topic of equal or civil rights in a blog on my previous web outlet, my former trolls, a certain number of them anyway, would ignore real history and condemn Democrats because the party was supposed to have opposed these in the past.
So I thought it might be good to analyze things.
The Republican Party really did not come into its own until Abraham Lincoln’s time.
Hence, “The Party of Lincoln”.
It appears one of the first major actions the party got involved in was to save the Union, and this morphed into freeing the slaves.
It is not hard to understand that in a two party system, after the Civil War when the Confederate States came back into the Union, the South certainly was not going to join the “Party of Lincoln”.
They maintained power in congress because of the sudden increase in population as former slaves became whole people, but it did not mean that the whole Democratic Party was of one mind with them.
More states were entering the Union, and this watered down the South’s representational advantage, and slowly the Southern Democrats, still not being able to see joining the Republican Party as anything more than treason to their Confederate roots, became the Dixie-crats.
Not Republican, and not totally Democrat either.
I know from local history that the Democratic Party was involved in making living conditions better for the Irish in such places as Boston, New York, and Chicago as it was during this time that Irish politicians rose to where they could get rid of their people’s second class status, and, while not being Republican, also were not the same party as the Dixie-crats.
Slowly, as the Republican Party began to accept more of the Dixie-crats’ ideology, and as the Democrats seemed to get more open minded, especially when it came to race relations and equality for women, being a third party would have been self-defeating, so Dixie-crats began to gravitate toward the Republican Party, as it began to become closer to them in ideology and action.
The Democrat/Republican division was not as clear cut for quite some time as those whose only argument in a discussion on politics is “Yeah, but” would like people to accept it was.
What was finally responsible for the South turning Republican was that the Republican Part became closer to the Confederate South.