Second Party System

Not to be confused with Two-party system.
Second Party System
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United States presidential election results between 1828 and 1854. Blue shaded states usually voted for the Democratic Party, while olive shaded states usually voted for Anti-Jacksonian parties (National Republican/Anti-Masonic/Whig).

The Second Party System was the political party system operating in the United States from about 1828 to early 1854, after the First Party System ended.[1] The system was characterized by rapidly rising levels of voter interest, beginning in 1828, as demonstrated by Election Day turnouts, rallies, partisan newspapers, and high degrees of personal loyalty to parties.[2][3]

Two major parties dominated the political landscape: the Democratic Party, led by Andrew Jackson, and the Whig Party, assembled by Henry Clay from the National Republicans and from other opponents of Jackson. Minor parties included the Anti-Masonic Party, an important innovator from 1827 to 1834; the abolitionist Liberty Party in 1840; and the anti-slavery expansion Free Soil Party in 1848 and 1852. The Second Party System reflected and shaped the political, social, economic and cultural currents of the Jacksonian Era, until succeeded by the Third Party System.[4]

This party system materialized from two realignments in 1828. The first realignment was of various Democratic-Republican voting blocs realigning into the newly-formed Democratic Party, which acted as a successor to the entire Democratic-Republican Party as the conservative party of the South and non-Coastal North. The second realignment in 1828 was of leftover Federalist-aligned voters who formed the Clay and Adams factions in the Coastal North realigning into the National Republican Party in 1828.

This northern base of National Republicans in the Coastal North, alongside the wealthy slave owners of the Southern slave centers and the Anti-Masons in Vermont, Massachusetts, upstate New York and Pennsylvania, realigned into the newly formed Whig Party in 1836. With the fall of the Whig Party in 1856, the remaining Whig coalition (those not effected by the Free Soil movement in New England and the Great Lakes Region) realigned into the Know Nothing ticket that same year then realigned into the Constitutional Union Party in 1860 at the start of the next party system.

Frank Towers specifies an important ideological divide was that "Democrats stood for the 'sovereignty of the people' as expressed in popular demonstrations, constitutional conventions, and majority rule as a general principle of governing, whereas Whigs advocated the rule of law, written and unchanging constitutions, and protections for minority interests against majority tyranny."[5]

  1. ^ William G. Shade, "The Second Party System" in Paul Kleppner, et al. Evolution of American Electoral Systems (1983) pp 77–112.
  2. ^ Brown (1999)
  3. ^ Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2006)
  4. ^ Holt, Political Parties and American Political Development: From the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln (1992)
  5. ^ Frank Towers, "Mobtown's Impact on the Study of Urban Politics in the Early Republic.". Maryland Historical Magazine 107 (Winter 2012) pp: 469-75, p 472, citing Robert E, Shalhope, The Baltimore Bank Riot: Political Upheaval in Antebellum Maryland (2009) p. 147