Where Do Policy Demanders Come From? Protestants and Party Formation in the Antebellum Period

Abstract The early 1830s were years of intense religious fervor, when well-organized moral reform movements seemed destined to remake the political landscape. Curiously, however, the party system that emerged from this period was premised on the exclusion of moral issues from party politics. How did the early Jacksonian Democrats and Whigs manage to construct an essentially amoral party system during a decade marked by large-scale moral reform movements? And why did the resulting system unravel in the mid-1850s? Answering these questions requires shifting the focus from party activists and elected officials to organized religion. Specifically, I show that the nation's largest Protestant denominations, in an effort to stave off sectional schisms, used internal disciplinary procedures to suppress antislavery activism at the precise moment that the contours of the Second Party System were taking shape. Then, in the early 1850s, following the departure of their Southern branches, these same groups reversed course to promote both antislavery and temperance activity—a shift that profoundly destabilized the Second Party System. The finding that developments in the sphere of party politics were “downstream” of changes in the religious sphere has important implications for group- and social-movement theories of party formation.