Jack Hammer posted:Incorrectamundo...You Wish...Lying Liberals...Uncoolamoundo
Did you even graduate from high school?
“CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION
In the 1850s, the debate over whether slavery should be extended into new Western territories split these political coalitions. Southern Democrats favored slavery in all territories, while their Northern counterparts thought each territory should decide for itself via popular referendum.
At the party’s national convention in 1860, Southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckinridge, while Northern Democrats backed Stephen Douglas. The split helped Abraham Lincoln, candidate of the newly formed Republican Party, to victory in the 1860 election, though he won only 40 percent of the popular vote.
The Union victory in the Civil War left Republicans in control of Congress, where they would dominate for the rest of the 19th century. During the Reconstruction era, the Democratic Party solidified its hold on the South, as most white Southerners opposed the Republican measures protecting civil and voting rights for African Americans.
By the mid-1870s, Southern state legislatures had succeeded in rolling back many of the Republican reforms, and Jim Crow laws enforcing segregation and suppressing black voting rights would remain in place for the better part of a century.
DIXIECRATS
Roosevelt’s reforms raised hackles across the South, which generally didn’t favor the expansion of labor unions or federal power, and many Southern Democrats gradually joined Republicans in opposing further government expansion.
Then in 1948, after President Harry Truman (himself a Southern Democrat) introduced a pro-civil rights platform, a group of Southerners walked out of the party’s national convention. These so-called Dixiecrats ran their own candidate for president (Strom Thurmond, governor of South Carolina) on a segregationist States Rights ticket that year; he got more than 1 million votes.
Most Dixiecrats returned to the Democratic fold, but the incident marked the beginning of a seismic shift in the party’s demographics. At the same time, many black voters who had remained loyal to the Republican Party since the Civil War began voting Democratic during the Depression, and would continue to do so in greater numbers with the dawn of the civil rights movement.
CIVIL RIGHTS ERA
Although Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed civil rights legislation (and sent federal troops to integrate a Little Rock high school in 1954), it was Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat from Texas, who would eventually sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law.
Upon signing the former bill, Johnson reportedly told his aide Bill Moyers that “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come.”
Over the course of the late 1960s and 1970s, more and more white Southerners voted Republican, driven not only by the issue of race, but also by white evangelical Christians’ opposition to abortion and other “culture war” issues.”