[DiogenesLamp]

Here we go again, selling a misleading version of history because it sounds like a cute sound bite.

Several things wrong with this article, including the notion that it was *ONLY* the election of Lincoln that was the problem. Completely ignores the fact the Southern states had been wanting to secede since the early 1820s, because the young government always favored the wealthy Northern interests over theirs.

The 1860 Democrats believed in low taxes and small government. They opposed social "change". They wanted laissez-faire economic policy. They opposed government spending programs.

Their views and policies better conform to Modern conservatives, while the views of the liberal Republicans better conform to modern Democrats.

They even lived in the very same areas of the country that are still hotbeds of liberalism today. Places like Boston, Chicago, Washington DC and New York.

[CottonBall]

“They even lived in the very same areas of the country that are still hotbeds of liberalism today. Places like Boston, Chicago, Washington DC and New York.”

And the confederate south, Democrats, were the same states that are now completely red.

[x]

More nonsense from you. Washington DC didn't have the vote then, but if it did it would have gone with the Democrats. The surrounding counties did. Democrats also carried the city of New York and pretty much all the counties in the metropolitan area. Lincoln won New York state because he got votes from the western part of the state.

Lincoln did carry Chicago narrowly. He was a native son. Moreover Chicago was a relatively new city, a city of upstarts, not of the Establishment. The Republicans won Massachusetts easily, but Lincoln didn't get a majority in Boston, falling short by a couple of percentage points. The Constitutional Union candidate John Bell did rather well there. In 1860's four-way race, Lincoln barely got a majority in Philadelphia. The Democrats were surprisingly strong there.

Then as now, Democrats were the party of the big city machines and the big city masses. Wealthy Establishment urbanites also favored the Democrats, the status quo party who didn't rock the boat. Republicans were stronger in the rural, small town, and small city North.

Democrats had thrown the country into a fiscal crisis. They weren't opposed to government programs, like railroad subsidies. They wanted to be in control of them. They didn't like the Homestead Act preferring to allow the rich to buy up land in the West, rather than open it up to homesteaders. You have to stretch things to make it look like protective tariffs, subsidies for railroads that both parties favored, and the Homestead Act added up to big government.