Replies

In England of years before the American Revolution, there were two major parties, the Tories and the Whigs. The Whigs tended to be the more outspoken and "progressive" party of its time, while the Tories considered their purpose in life was to preserve the royalty in all its aspects. Thus the "American Tories" could be judged to be protective of the rights and powers that rested with the British Crown. With the passing of the colonial status of the nascent United States to a republic, those Tories fled to either Canada or England, or modified their politics to conform with the new idealism of the land, and became Federalists, who believed in a clear distancing of the hand of government from the everyday lives of its citizens.

But there were "American Whigs" loose upon the land as well, and they had persevered in their relatively "progressive" agenda, finally alienating a sufficient number of people that the Whig designation as a formal party was effectively dissolved about the time James Buchanan served as President, and they were never a serious coherent national party again. It was from their ashes that a new and radical movement arose, calling itself "Republican", and dedicated to the abolition of slavery, their new rallying point.

It is an interesting observation, that the two major parties have, through the last half of the 19th Century and the first third of the 20th Century, gradually changed their emphasis, so now the Republicans are considered the more conservative party, and the Democrats have embraced the radical revolution. They claim to be trashing of the old values because they were no longer reflective of the standards they admired. Sometimes it appeared they were interested in change for the sake of change alone, with no consideration of the long-term effects of their rhetoric or its legal ramifications.