Dismantling the Party System: Party Fluidity and the Mechanisms of Nineteenth-Century U.S. Politics

Extract

In 1868, Salmon Chase wanted to be president. This was not particularly out of the ordinary—Chase had coveted the presidency since the 1850s. But this time he was seeking the Democratic nomination, only a few years after Abraham Lincoln had appointed him to the Supreme Court. The Democrats were, in fact, the sixth political party to capture Chase's partisan allegiances; in the 1830s, he had joined the fledgling Whig Party, but left for the Liberty Party in the early 1840s. He was among those who transitioned to the Free Soil Party in 1848 and then to the Republicans in 1856. During the Civil War, he was ostensibly a member of the new National Union Party, formed by President Lincoln before the 1864 election. In the postwar years, after his stint with the Democrats, Chase turned to the Liberal Republican Party.

Historians have often explained Chase's lifelong partisan readjustment, including his 1868 Democratic campaign, as emblematic of his unwavering ambition. Changing political parties nearly every election showed that he lacked some core principle—or, at the very least, indicated a postwar abandonment of his long-held antislavery beliefs. To be sure, Chase had serious ambition. But this portrait of Chase also relies on a view of nineteenth-century politics that has trapped historians for half a century; it relies on the idea of a party system.