More so than any other region in the nation, the American South has been dominated by a single political party since the Civil War. Amazingly, however, by the turn of the 21st century, the region’s party affiliation had actually swung from the Democrats to the Republicans.
This post begins a short history, in three parts, of how that happened. And the story begins with human bondage.
It is no oversimplification to say that slavery was the single most important issue leading to the Civil War. Not only was slavery the driving force, but none of the other relevant issues, such as states’ rights or expansion into the western territories, would have mattered much if not for their indelible connection to slavery.
During the tempestuous ante-bellum era, the South was divided among the nation’s two major parties. The Democrats traced their roots back to Virginian slave owner Thomas Jefferson, and they emerged as the first modern American political party during the presidency of Tennessee slave owner Andrew Jackson. In the South, Democrats were generally favored by small, yeoman farmers.
Meanwhile, the Whigs had succeeded the now defunct Federalists, and they advocated a stronger central government committed to economic development. The Whigs were more popular in the North, but they were able to maintain an important Southern branch. However, as sectional tensions stemming from slavery increased across the nation, the Whigs crumbled. Initially, this left the Democrats as the only American political party of national standing.
During the 1850s, the Democrats increasingly became associated with defending slavery in the South and apologizing for it in the North. In reaction to these developments, many dissatisfied Northerners began to rally around the political philosophy of Free Soil: opposition to slavery on economic grounds. Northern farmers and craftsmen simply did not wan
t to compete with large slave plantations and unpaid slave labor. In 1854, Northern free soilers joined with religious moral crusaders, fervent anti-immigrationists, and old Whigs to raise a new political party: the Republicans.
No friends of African Americans, most Free Soilers were openly racist, as were the vast majority of white Americans at the time. Abolitionists, who opposed human bondage on religious grounds, were only a small minority of the North before the war, which erupted in 1861. However, as the bloody affair raged on, many Northerners began to seek moral assurance for their cause. More and more of them found it difficult to justify such slaughter for the rather secular goal of keeping all the stars in the flag.
Though preserving the Union was always by far and away Abraham Lincoln’s top priority, he astutely played to growing concerns by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation on New Year’s Day, 1863. The document effectively freed no slaves, but it did help establish abolition as the war’s moral compass. And it worked. The North persisted, won the war, abolished slavery, and forced the South to return. Along the way, the abolitionists who had once been viewed as fringe extremists, took full control of the GOP. They were now known as the Radical Republicans.
After the Civil War, Radical Republicans orchestrated the Reconstruction of the South: a military occupation of the former Confederacy, the end of slavery via the 13th Amendment, safeguarding political and some civil rights for new black citizens, and overseeing the eventual readmission of rebellious states. But white supremacist resistance throughout the South was staunch and frequently violent.
By the 1870s, Northern interest in Reconstruction was beginning to fade. So too did widespread sympathy for the former slaves; as the old Radicals retired or died off, the Republican Party was overtaken by a moderate wing that was more concerned with developing the economy by promoting business interests. Among other things, this meant maintaining a steady flow of resources (particularly cotton) from the South to feed emerging Northern industries. And with hundreds of thousands of white men having died during the war, the South was more dependent than ever on black labor to extract those resources.
The Reconstruction effort crumbled in the face of Northern weariness, Southern resistence, and mutual economic concerns. As it did, one former Confederate state after another was “redeemed,” as white supremacists called it. Southern Republican governments were overthrown by new Democratic regimes. Violence was prevalent as black leaders and voters were killed, beaten, or intimidated away from the polls. Black/white coalition Republican 
governments, which had been Lincoln’s political vision for the South, were replaced by white supremacist Democratic governments.
By the late 1870s, the South was essentially a one-party region, facing only token Republican opposition. During the 1890s, the former Confederate states as well as some of the nearby border states, codified the disenfranchisement of black voters. A rising national tide of pseudo-scientific racism and Northern European ethnocentrism found shape throughout the region in the form of enforced racial segregation and political repression. New Jim Crow laws not only contributed to the economic exploitation and cultural and social oppression of African Americans, but also erected towering obstacles to voter registration. Most blacks and even many poor whites were prohibited from casting the ballots that might overturn entrenched socio-economic class divisions.
The Solid South had been born.
Tomorrow, Part II: The Heyday of the Solid South