It was all about slavery. And once again Southerners were duped by the greedy idiot rich, the slave owners/plantation owners...
It had nothing to do with slavery until Lincoln decided to free the slaves as a war measure.
It had to do with the fears of southern aristocrats and their dupes. The usual conservative bigot operation.
You must be missing the part where they weren't conservatives, but Democrats that were keeping slaves. Hence your party being the one that filled the KKK and passed the Jim Crow laws~
The South has always been conservative throughout. You can't have slaves and not be conservative. It demands a hierarchical view of humans. You're perhaps too young to have seen enough of the world to know this but trust me. I grew up a child of parents from each side of the Mason Dixon line. I was immersed in both from an early age. White Southerners, while as a group conservatives, weren't Democrats
because they were conservative but
in spite of it. To get this you have to grasp something of the emotional history.
When the Civil War began there was no Republican Party in the South. Lincoln's name didn't even appear on ballots there in either election he ran in. The party was only six years old and concentrated its efforts in the North and Midwest, where it knew its support would be. Consequently in 1861 there were no Republicans in the South.
When the War was over the Republicans were seen culturally as the heavy hand of federal gummint (they were after all largely Whigs) and most deeply as the "party of Lincoln", the man who had defeated and humiliated it. Consequently it became unthinkable for white Southerners, who very much saw themselves as playing defense, to be a Republican, for a long long time. 99 years to be exact. As a result of that, the South was in effect a one-party State. You wanted to run for office, your choices were: (1) run as a Democrat, or (2) lose. That had to do much more with
tradition than with any ideology. Tradition and the emotional baggage of Lincoln's name.
But that conservatism was always at odds with the rest of the Democratic Party's base, which was to its shame trying to be all things to all people to amass votes (which is after all what a political party exists for). Case in point, George Wallace in the 1960s constantly railing against "Liberals" -- he's talking about the other side of his own bipolar party. Case in point, the Dixiecrats who walked out of the Democratic convention in 1948 and ran their own candidates --- even got Harry Truman pulled off the ballot in at least one state. They did that because they were hearing way too much Liberalism from Truman and from then-Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey who made an impassioned speech for civil rights.
This bipolar tension was always there, even back to 1860 when Southerners also walked out of that year's convention and again ran their own ticket.
The short version --- "conservative" doesn't necessarily mean "Republican", even when Republicans became conservatives.
That all didn't change until 1964 (there's your 99 years) when Strom Thurmnd did the unthinkable and became a Republican. And he did that because the Democrats just weren't conservative enough and he couldn't hack it any more. It was a big step at the time because it was a
huge break with tradition.
(Thurmond was a bit of a maverick though --- after he endorsed Eisenhower in 1952 the state Democrats kicked him off the ballot and he had to run as a write-in ..... which he won.)
The last part of your post ---- no, the Klan wasn't founded by or comprised of "Democrats" except to the point where they may have been coincidental. But it required no political party. Were some of the Klan also Democrats? Almost certainly. If you were white and registered with a party at all, you were usually a Democrat, whether you were a racist or not. Just as in Maine (the largest chapter outside the South) if you were a Klanner you were probably a Republican, again simply because they dominated Maine for the same hundred year period (1855-1955). But that doesn't make either party a
causation.
