Meanwhile, the defeated Democrats were angry. They had defended slavery, and sought maintain and support slavery. But now their former slaves were free citizens and able to vote. Even though the Democratic Party had lost the war, it hoped to find ways to prevent African-Americans from having civil rights.
This conflict between the Democrats and the Republicans in the postwar years was actually the same conflict they had in the prewar years. This postwar era is called the ‘Reconstruction’ era.
In the prewar years, the conflict took the form of the Republican Party, its goal of abolishing slavery, and its candidate, Abraham Lincoln, as historian Dinesh D’Souza writes:
In the years leading up to the war, in multiple addresses and in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln himself stressed the main issue that separated the two parties. “The difference between the Republican and the Democratic parties,” Lincoln said in a September 11, 1858, speech at Edwardsville, Illinois, “is that the former consider slavery a moral, social and political wrong, while the latter do not consider it either a moral, social or political wrong.”
The Democrats defended slavery so strongly that they were willing to start a four-year-long war about the issue, causing more than 500,000 deaths.
During the war, in the election of 1864, the Democrats nominated George McClellan, a pro-slavery candidate, to be president. McClellan lost, and Abraham Lincoln won reelection.
After the war’s end, the Democratic Party had a strong affection for the “plantation” lifestyle, a lifestyle which ended when Lincoln freed the slaves in 1863. The Democrats wanted their slaves back, as Dinesh D’Souza reports:
Even in the aftermath of the Civil War, so strong was their attachment to the plantation that an overwhelming majority of Northern Democrats refused to vote to permanently end slavery. Again, we are speaking of Northern Democrats; Southern Democrats who may have been expected to vote against the amendment were not permitted to vote at all. And when the Thirteenth Amendment went to the states for ratification, only Republican states carried by Lincoln voted for it; Democratic states that went for McClellan all voted no.
The Republican Party promoted three constitutional amendments: the Thirteenth Amendment, which protected and made permanent Lincoln’s decree that slavery be permanently abolished; the Fourteenth Amendment, which declared that former slaves would have full citizenship and enjoy equal protection under the law; and the Fifteenth Amendment, which specified that all citizens, including former slaves, had right to vote, regardless of race.
These three “Republican Amendments” revealed the core beliefs of the Republican Party. The Democratic Party opposed all three.
Even after the end of the Civil War, the Democrats hoped somehow to recreate a slave-like condition for African-Americans. Their main way of doing this was the ‘sharecropping’ system, which exploited certain legal agreements to keep former slaves, and other Blacks, in poverty.
Sharecropping was one way the Democratic Party fought against the “Republican Amendments” during the ‘Reconstruction’ era. Opposing the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments was another way. After 1877, the end of the Reconstruction era, Democratic legislatures began to write “Jim Crow Laws,” another attempt to reverse the Republican Party’s achievements.
