[BillyBoy]

I'd probably nominate the post civil war reconstruction era (1866-1876) as the "Era of bad feelings", where the two parties were pretty much at each other's throats all the time. It ended after the bitterly contested 1876 election where Rutherford Hayes agreed to withdraw federal troops from the south. Impy told me once that if was president, he would have reneged on that pledge and told the RATs to screw themselves...which mostly likely would have resulted in them drawing up articles of impeachment. Ironically, for all the "hyper-partisanship" of the late 1800s, I don't think the two parties differed much ideologically except for opposite views on tariffs. They pretty much aligned to where they are today during the elections of 1896 and 1900.

[fieldmarshaldj]

Few ideological differences ? Well, except for one huge thing: Blacks. More than a few Democrats in the South would’ve taken care of that “problem” via mass murder. In the case of leaders like SC’s Ben Tillman, they actually did. Of course, Republicans didn’t want them murdered, but similarly, they weren’t going to go balls to the walls to protect their rights (as it would likely require yet another war), nor did they want to move them up en masse out of the South.