The Democrats, from the founding of their party by Andrew Jackson in 1828, were committed to defending, supporting, and maintaining slavery.
The Republican Party, and its first major candidate, Abraham Lincoln, were unswervingly focused on the goal of ending slavery.
The political debates and negotiations of the prewar years, the half-million lives lost during the Civil War, and the brutality directed toward African-Americans in the postwar years are simply three phases of the same partisan conflict, as historian Dinesh D’Souza writes:
The Civil War was a deliberate attempt by the Democratic Party, both in the North and the South, to kill America by carving her into two. Had secession worked, Lincoln would have been viewed as a failed president. The North and the South would have come to terms over the bifurcation long before 1865. Slavery would have continued, and on a firmer foundation than before. White supremacy would have continued to be its bedrock, and would have reigned unchallenged throughout the United States. Lincoln’s dark warning about all of America becoming a plantation might have proven prophetic in his own lifetime.
The Democrat strategy, then, was that the Democrats in the South would secede from the Union, and the Democrats in the North would try to use their political influence to persuade the North to get the South back by promising the South that it could keep slavery. In the process, the North would be obliged to accept slavery as well.
The goal of the Democrats was, then, that the entire country, not only the South, would become slaveholding territory.
The Republicans, however, would not go along with the Democratic Party’s plans. The Democrats wanted slavery so badly that they were willing to start and endure a war in which more than 500,000 men died.
The war ended when the South faced its inevitable undersupply of men and materiel. But while the Democrats had been militarily defeated, they had not given up their dreams of slavery. The postwar years would be known as the ‘Reconstruction’ era, and the Democrats would use a mixture of political maneuvering and domestic terror strategies to maintain slavery, or at least a slavelike status.
Although the Republicans had achieved their goal of ending slavery, it was clear that they had to defend and solidify that accomplishment to make sure that the Democrats did not succeed in bringing slavery back, and it was clear that the Republicans would push for full citizenship and full civil rights for the newly-freed ex-slaves.
The Republicans in Congress worked to guarantee civil rights for African-Americans, as Dinesh D’Souza writes:
The Republicans in Congress who drove Reconstruction realized that, perhaps for the first time in history, there was an elected government that supported not merely empancipation from slavery but also full equality of rights and full enfranchisement for blacks. Admittedly this majority would not have existed had Southern Democrats also been represented. By their own choice, however, they had resigned their positions in Congress and thus forfeited their right to have their votes counted.
During the Reconstruction era, not only did the Republicans succeed in ensuring that African-Americans could freely exercise their right to vote, but they even succeeded in getting Black candidates elected to the House of Representatives and to the U.S. Senate. This was the apogee of civil rights.
