Toleration Party

The Toleration Party, also known as the Toleration-Republican Party and later the American Party or American Toleration and Reform Party, was a political party that dominated the political life of Connecticut from 1817 to 1827. The American name referred not to nativism or the later Know Nothing, which was also known as the American Party, but to the party's national orientation.^[1] The party was formed by an alliance of the more conservative Episcopalians with the Democratic-Republicans, as a result of the discrimination of the Episcopal Church by the Congregationalist state government. In the 1817 elections, the Toleration Party swept control of the General Assembly. At the Connecticut Constitutional Convention in 1817, 111 of the 201 convention delegates belonged to the Toleration Party. The resulting Constitution of 1818 generally adhered to the Tolerationist platform, especially their two major issues: increasing the electorate and the democratic nature of the government and disestablishing the Congregational Church. By the end of the 1820s, the Tolerationists had developed into the Jacksonian branch of the Connecticut Democratic Party.