The New Departure refers to the political strategy used by the US Democratic Party after 1865 to distance itself from its pro-slavery and Copperhead history in an effort to broaden its political base and to focus on issues on which it had more of an advantage, especially economic ones. The New Departure theory also argued that the Fourteenth Amendment and the Fifteenth Amendment had already given women suffrage, but that argument was rejected in state and federal courts.[1]
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)