Document Type

Dissertation

Date of Award

1976

Keywords

North Carolina, Politics and government, 1775-1865

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

History

First Advisor

Albert House

Second Advisor

Richard Dalfiume

Third Advisor

Charles Forcey

Abstract

The history of North Carolina's Democratic Party between 1800 and 1892 is one of changing party leadership and membership composition. Wealthy landowners—the planter elite—saw their power and total dominance of state affairs slowly ebbing away until shifting populations, war, and a greater demand for political equality swung the balance of party power to the smaller farmers and businessmen. In effect, a political metamorphosis took place. The alteration was not a smooth process nor even a consistent one. New ideas and change were resisted stoutly by a succession of leaders, and intra-party conflict was more often the rule than the exception.

This study offers an historical profile of the Democratic Party leadership during the years of sweeping change. It discusses party leadership and highlights the major sources of conflict during the periods of transformation. No attempt is made to tell the complete story of North Carolina politics from the time when “Jeffersonian Republicans” was adopted as a political label (ca. 1800) until the agrarians captured the state legislature in 1892. Good period studies have been written already by Clarence C. Norton (The Democratic Party in Ante-Bellum North Carolina 1835-1861), J. G. deRoulhac Hamilton (Party Politics in North Carolina 1835-1860), and also (Reconstruction in North Carolina 1865-1877), and finally William S. Hoffman (Andrew Jackson and North Carolina Politics). Any discussion of party leadership in the years covered by this study requires considerable reference to the political issues and trends of the times. An extended analysis and review of this background material would be largely redundant in that it would merely reiterate the contents of the volumes cited.

This treatise portrays significant items in the long-range development of the Democratic Party in North Carolina. For the first time, the political leadership and party conflicts are viewed in a time span covering more than a few years or an isolated topic. As such, the kinds of details that make overall political studies so fascinating often are assimilated into generalizations describing simultaneous eras and areas of party development. At first glance, the scope and time span of this topic may seem broader than is traditional for doctoral dissertations. This writer feels, however, that the criteria for such graduate efforts should include the needs of the scholarly community as well as its traditions. A competent study of the overall development of the Democratic Party in North Carolina will fill a gap in the historiography of the Tarheel State.

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