Are you trying to tell us Robert E. Lee was a liberal?
You must be one of those idiots that thinks all Democrats are liberals.
So you admit that the Southern Democrats were CONSERVATIVES for all those years they were slavers, and then KKK'ers and segregationists.
Excellent. Now get your RW numnut pals around here to admit the same thing.
Umm no Democrats have always been a group that took a liberal view towards the Constitution and freedoms of US citizens. That's how you idiots have been able to enslave people then and now.
A truly Liberal view would not have permitted slavery to exist. But it was already here -- slavery, and specifically African transatlantic slavery, was here for three hundred years before there was such a thing as "Democrats".
But the political party that kept slavery...that fought to restart the slave trade with Africa, that fought to have slavery in new states, that seceeded from the union because a Republican President, the party that opposed slavery, won the election...was the democrat party...who after losing the war and having their slaves freed, the democrat party enacted jim crow laws, and and fought to keep blacks from becoming full citizens......including supporting the attacks of the kkk....
Didn't I just school you on Martin van Buren? Or was that somebody else? Y'all ignorami all look alike to me.
No political party "supported slavery" as a whole. The Republican Party was founded specifically and primarily to end it, but that doesn't mean its alternative in the Duopoly of 2016 therefore must have been on the other side 150-200 years ago.
Some Democrats supported it, some (as van Buren above) didn't. Just as
some Whigs supported slavery, some didn't Here's the difference --- when the RP rose up to champion the cause of Abolition they had a principle to stand behind, and stood behind it. Democrats were doing what they always do, being wishy-washy, trying to be all things to all interest groups in a quest to amass power, which is after all what any political party's purpose is. With an 1860 Republican you knew where he stood; with an 1860 Democrat he'd tell you whatever you wanted to hear.
But wishy-washy has a cost, that being you get to a point where neither the wishy nor the washy gets what they want. So when the DP tried to placate the South, sometimes it worked as an uneasy truce between liberals and conservatives, while other times it didn't, and the South picked up and walked out. They did that in 1948 and they did it in 1860. When the South didn't hear what they wanted to hear from the DP in 1860 they disrupted the convention and forced it to be shut down; the whole affair had to be moved out of the South altogether. They then proceeded to run their own candidate, as they would again in 1948. But by '48 they had lost their veto power in the convention and were off their home turf.
You binary-bots who think the entire world is made up of only "Democrat" and "Republican" atoms and always has been, need to pick up what we call a 'history book' at some point. The first century of this country saw
many political parties, major ones that held high offices. Most of them took no particular position on Slavery pro or con.
As for van Buren, who's credited with organizing the Jackson faction into the modern Democratic Party, he personally thought slavery was immoral but also saw it as protected by the Constitution (i.e. the same argument attributed to Barry Goldwater's vote against the 1964 CRA). He, like other POTUSes of the entire first half of the 19th century, tried to strike a balance between the head-butting tensions of Slave vs Free economies. That approach, it's easy to see from our latter-day perspective, was destined to fail. Arguably the Founders themselves erred in setting up those opposing dynamics and empowering the Slave faction in the first place, presumably expecting the situation would just "fix itself". It would not.
And btw another one of those political parties founded specifically to oppose Slavery was the Free Soil Party. Van Buren was its Presidential candidate in 1848.
Slavery had to go. It was already going in Europe and Latin America. It was just a matter of time before the hyperconservative South either saw the writing on the wall, or was forced to acknowledge it. Well, between those two options, I'm not sure if you can fully grok how challenging it is to get a hyperconservative to consider the fact that maybe where he's standing might be the wrong place.
So no, the "Democrat Party" (which does not actually exist) didn't secede --- the South had already seceded FROM the DemocratIC Party. Really the first stroke of that secession wasn't South Carolina declaring itself seceded, but rather the various Southern States running John Breckinridge for President against Lincoln, Bell and Douglas, in effect declaring itself independent from both the Democratic
and Republican Parties.
Political parties don't go to war. Democrats already existed in the North as well as South, and many supported Lincoln and/or the Union staying together. Douglas was one of them and he was the Party's
nominee.
