The "Party Period" Revisited

Abstract

In recent years the most dominant and least challenged framework for understanding nineteenth-century United States political history is easily the concept, which represents a principal legacy of the new political history of the 1960s and 1970s. In those years the party systems and realignment synthesis tended to dominate both theorizing and monographic exploration. Scholars identified five successive party systems that had appeared from the Federalist era (the 1790s) to the late twentieth century, defined primarily by their grounding in electoral coalitions that shifted during upheavals originating in socioeconomic, demographic, and cultural change. The rearrangements of electoral coalitions or realignments-also ended one party's dominance of governance and inaugurated another's.1 In the nineteenth century the most important realignments were the emergence in the 1 830s and 1 840s of the Democratic and Whig parties as the world's first mass party organizations; the 1850s realignment that destroyed the Whigs and brought the new Republican party into being; and finally the 1890s realignment that ended the political stalemate of the Gilded Age and ushered in a period of Republican dominance, which lasted to the 1930s.2 But in short order the realignment synthesis encountered skepticism and questions. Many historians doubted that the social and political upheavals of the 1820s and 1830s that lead to the second party system should be called a realignment, especially since the Federalist and Republican parties had sunk only shallow roots and seemed not to constitute any kind of system, and whatever electoral patterns had prevailed before 1815 had become amorphous by the 1820s. The 1850s realignment had brought about decisive changes in both state policy and grass-roots electoral coalitions, but the 1 890s realignment apparently produced no policy change. As doubts grew regarding the realignment-party system synthesis, the concept of the party period loomed larger as a rock of certainty: That the