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Democratic Party
3 articles on Democratic Party
Democratic Party
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 4302 Includes: From Jefferson to Jackson | Prewar Platform | Southern Control of the Dominant Party | Slavery Causes Party Division | Civil War and Civil Rights | BibliographyThe Democratic Party traces its origins to the political disputes between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton in the early 1790s. In its early years the party was known as the “Republican Party.” After about 1801 the followers of Jefferson were known as Democratic-Republicans, and after the War of 1812 the same politicians were called National Republicans. Despite these early party labels, there is a continuous line from Jefferson in the 1790s to Jackson in the 1830s and then to the modern Democratic Party. Between 1801 and 1841 every president was, in this sense, the candidate of the Democratic party, although some were known at the time as “Republicans” or “National Republicans.” The last president elected under this label was John Quincy Adams in 1824, who was technically a Democrat elected ...
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Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 1936One of two major political parties in the United States; long dominated by white Southerners until the 1930s and 1940s, when Democrats began to advocate civil rights legislation and other measures of interest to African Americans, resulting in a massive shift in the political allegiance of black voters. The Democratic Party, formed in the late 1820s, is the world's oldest existing political party. Together with the Republican Party, which appeared during the 1850s, it makes up the American two-party system. In many respects, the two parties have reversed nineteenth-century positions, and African Americans, who strongly identified as Republicans through the 1920s, have become equally firm since the 1940s in their commitment to the Democrats.During the nineteenth century virtually no African Americans supported the Democratic ...
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Source: The Oxford Companion to United States History
Word Count: 1993No certain date marks the beginning of the Democratic party, but its intellectual heritage can be traced to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, both of whom shunned parties even as they shaped the policies and sensibility of the so-called Democratic-Republican political movement during the 1790s. Opposing the centralizing programs of Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, who urged a revenue system based on tariffs, excise taxes, a federal bank, and funding of the national debt, Jefferson and Madison established enduring party themes. Champions of the common people, especially small farmers, they spoke for small and frugal government, of states' rights, and the people's sovereignty. In their presidential administrations from 1801 until 1817, the two Virginians sought to retire the national ...
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