The "Party Period" Revisited

Ronald P. Formisano

In recent years the most dominant and least challenged framework for understanding nineteenth-century United States political history is easily the "party period" 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	1
In the nineteenth century the most important realignments were the emergence in the 1830s and 1840s 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	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 1890s 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 political world from the 1830s to the 1890s was distinguished by the dominance of political parties seemed unimpeachable.3	3
In his recent synthesis, The American Political Nation, Joel H. Silbey described the hegemony of partisanship in the mid-nineteenth century as	4
the glue that held the political nation together, provided its understanding of what was at stake, and established the structures, rules, and sanctions through which all else ran. . . . Two-party competition existed throughout the nation. . . . Of course, antipartyism still lived in several nooks and corners of the nation, but it never threatened the ever-widening acceptance of the dictates and imperatives of partisanship.4
Political parties did indeed bestride the middle decades of the century, to paraphrase Shakespeare's Cassius, "like a colossus."5 The figure of the arrogant party spoilsman is a familiar image of the Gilded Age, but the reality of political parties as patronage machines was well established in the antebellum years. While their power to reward loyal workers with government jobs no doubt increased after the Civil War, from the 1830s on political parties' sway in elections and voting was fairly continuous.	. . .