[BroJoeK]

Sherman Logan: "But they weren't initially particularly regional in nature.
Both parties were well-represented in all sections till at least 1850."

We've had this conversation before, so again I invite you to review every presidential election, beginning in 1796.
Once you're there, it's relatively easy to flip through them -- 1800, 1804, 1808, etc., etc.

What you'll notice is that the South always voted, nearly unanimously for the current version of Jefferson's Slave-Power Democrats -- unanimous except when:

1. More than one slave-owner was running for President, for example, in 1832 all three candidates were Southerners, and then, yes, the South split its votes.
   However, most still went for the Democrat, in this case, Andrew Jackson.
   Similar results in 1844.

2. The Democrat is a northerner and there are Southerners running against, i.e., in 1836 New York Democrat Van Buren defeated four different Whig candidates, two from the South, which caused the South to split its vote.
   Similar results in 1848.

3. There was no Southerner on the ballot, i.e., 1840 New York Democrat Van Buren split the Southern vote with Ohio Whig Harrison, who won.

Likewise, northern states usually supported the northern Federalist - Whig - Republican candidate, though not nearly as consistently.
If there was a Northerner on the ballot, New Englanders nearly always voted for him.
However, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, etc. often voted Democrat, even if the Federalist-Whig-Republican was a Northerner.
For an example, consider 1852.

Point is: yes, the Southern vote could be split, but not when they were given the choice of a Democrat Southerner versus a non-Democrat Northerner.
By contrast, the Northern vote, especially outside New England, often supported Southern Democrat candidates versus Northern non-Democrats.

These were the much-disparaged "Dough-faced" Northerners, who were willing to kiss-b*tt of the Southern Slave-Power in exchange for:

• Preserving the Union
• being part of the majority Democrat party.

1828 -- Jackson (blue) versus JQ Adams (yellow):

[Sherman Logan]

Thanks for the interesting reply.

But, sorry, I don’t buy it. The Democratic Party in the prewar years was dominated by southern pols, not particularly surprising since the nation as a whole was so dominated. Just look at the statistics for presidents, supreme court justices, cabinet members and military officers.

But the DP was not Servant of the South or of Slavery. It was a loose alliance of a bunch of state parties.

Yes, the Democrats were not as group particularly hostile to slavery. Again, this is not surprising. For most of this period neither was the nation, even in most of the North.

In fact, there WAS no North vs. South split in a political sense until southerners overreached themselves in 1850. For the previous 50 years the regional split had been North(east) vs. South vs. West.

And the split was not entirely slave vs. free. MO, TN and KY were generally considered Western, not Southern states.

It wasn’t until the Compromise of 1850, the Dred Scott decision, the Kansas-Nebraska Act and Bleeding Kansas that the country split decisively on slave vs. free lines.

In fact, the decade of the 1850s were one of the most interesting and bizarre periods in American history, with several third-party groups popping up, some not at all oriented towards the slavery issue. The Know-Nothings, for instance, were big in parts of both North and South.