Welcome to the zany world of American politics in the 1800s! Please, step on in to the Cave of the Moonbat - you'll see that your resident historiorantologist has decorated the place with all the bunting, flags, log cabins, and cider casks that it takes to throw a good ole' fashioned election.
Join me, if you will, for an historiorant about a fractious period in U.S. history - a time when spin was everything, left-wingers and right-wingers were at each other's throats, and there were arguments over morality and public policy that caused party-destroying fissures in hitherto-solid political organizations. From a distance of three long lifetimes, let's laugh (ironically) at how utterly dissimilar (not) the period of the Second Party System is from our own.
Of course, if anyone asks you about what you learn here tonight, the appropriate response is, "I don't know nothing"...
It takes some effort to get one's head around what American politics looked like in the mid-1800s. To illustrate, consider the following: Andrew "Trail of Tears" Jackson was a Democrat, while Abraham "Emancipation Proclamation" Lincoln was a Republican. Now ask yourself, "Would President Gore have forcibly removed the Cherokee?" and then, "What circumstances would compel President Bush to sign a document benefiting disenfranchised, non-citizen, nonvoters that was opposed by wealthy elites?"
See what I mean? Everything from Dems and Repubs to the very definitions of "liberal" and "conservative" have flipped-flopped from what they meant in the 19th century. To get at what the politics of the era was about, then, I propose we look at it like a three-ring circus in which the rings frequently overlap: The context of the arguments that shaped the debates of the time; the common themes that we continue to see played out in today's cat box liners and infotainment transmissions newspapers and television broadcasts; and little biographical information about the neverending stream of whackjobs and blowhards who founded splinter groups every time they got overruled in a strategy session.
Oh, and you might want to brew up a cup of chicory coffee and get comfy - this is a rather long story, even by Moonbat standards.
The Second Party System
Naw, it doesn't refer to the Tyranny of the Minority/Obsequiously Loyal Opposition model favored by today's Republicans. Rather, the "second" in this party system should be read in its ordinal sense: It was the second evolution of what would eventually become the black-and-white flowering of democracy that we enjoy today. The First Party System (which has not yet been Moonbatified) had grown out of the pissing contests in George Washington's cabinet, and lasted from the election of John Adams in 1796 to the "Corrupt Bargain" that installed his son in office in 1824. When Andrew Jackson - who was as unsurprised as he was pissed off after the younger Adams appointed Henry Clay (the very guy who had Scalia'ed him into office) as his Secretary of State - came roaring back in 1828, his campaign inaugurated an entirely new era in party politics.
Andrew Jackson was one of the most polarizing figures in American history, but in an entirely different way from George W. Bush. Whereas the current resident of the White House was ensconced by the manipulations of media and power elites, Jackson's support came almost entirely from the funky, fist-waving mob that was "the People." Prior to the groundswell of 1828, elections had been more staid affairs (even if the accusations the "gentlemen" involved in the process hurled at one another were over-the-top, even by today's standards), conducted by a small cadre of elected officials. After getting screwed in '24, Jackson went looking for men that could help him win an undeniable victory in the next presidential contest.
Historiorant: Here's some cruel historical irony for you: After having been squeezed out of the Oval Office by the electoral college system, Jackson tried and failed to have it written out of the Constitution. Had he been successful - and given, of course, the ridiculous assertion that history between 1830 and 2000 would have been otherwise unchanged - George W. Bush would never have come to "lead" our great nation.
Jackson's people in Tennessee built an impressive message machine to ramp up enthusiasm among the frontiersmen and farmers; eventually, this group would form the Democratic Party. In the pubs and taverns of the functionally-illiterate-but-totally-enthusiastic common folk, the people were reminded both of the debt they owed to the Hero of New Orleans, and of the power of the popular vote - something which had hitherto been a little underplayed by the establishment. Back in Washington, the Karl Rove of the era sprang into action.
Old-School Mass Marketing
But it's like I said before: the 1800's is Bizarro-World, and everything is a little skewed from the things we recognize. A great example: The preeminent political strategist of the time, a New Yorker named Martin Van Buren, saw in the nascent parties a potential for communication and debate of ideas that would be utterly alien to a cynical, stay-on-message manipulator like Bush's Brain. That's not to say that Van Buren was unfamiliar with "the message" - in a sense, he developed the concept for the 1828 election. For three years, he and his people hammered away at two simple-to-understand ideas: 1.) Adams is an illegitimate president, and 2.) only Jackson could bring citizens "true democracy."
As the campaign drew nigh, proud Democrats started strutting the streets carrying hickory canes to show support for their man, who had been carefully packaged as a war hero by Van Buren and the Nashville gang. They organized rallies where they gave away liquor, developed Bu$hCo/Faux News-style relationships with certain newspapers, and fed massaged polling data to their supporters. The Adams campaign fought back with a pretty legitimate outline of Jackson's character: he was described as "a temper-driven dueler, a slaveholder, and a general who had overstepped the orders of his president during military raids into Spanish Florida." (source) In the end, taking the fact-based route did Adams as much good as it did John Kerry: 176 years later, a significant percentage of the American population was still inclined to vote for a presidential candidate because they thought he'd more fun to have a beer with than the other guy, who looked "French."
King Mob
True to form, Old Hickory invited "The People" - apparently all of them - to the White House for a little get-together upon his assumption of office. David S. and Jeanne T. Heidler describe the "Majesty of the People," on Inauguration Day, March 4, 1829:
The surging crowd made mingling impossible, and as people pushed toward Jackson and lunged toward refreshments, they collided with fragile furniture and shoved servants laden with punch bowls and trays of food. Waiters trying to maneuver with a large bowl of spiked orange punch crashed into a crowd and spilled it all on the carpet. Men in work boots, straining to see Jackson, stood on expensive upholstered furniture. That such people were even present at so august an event represented the triumph of democracy to some. To others, the much-reported mayhem demonstrated the danger of giving the ungovernable rabble political rights. Both views were exaggerations. Senator James Hamilton of South Carolina, a Jackson supporter, struck a balance when he described the event as a "regular Saturnalia," but with the qualification that most of the damage was trivial. The people had gotten out of hand-Jackson's opponents thought it an apt evaluation of the election as well as the inaugural reception-but whether they had done no real harm in either instance was a matter of opinion.
From "Not a Ragged Mob" The Inauguration of 1829, White House History Journal ; emphasis courtesy Unitary Moonbat, with thoughts of Connecticut
Debating the policies of Andrew Jackson has been a staple of American civic conversation for the past century and a half, but the focus of this particular historiorant is supposed to be on political parties, not on why a particular individual might have wound up on the 20-dollar bill. Hence, just as I bypassed the massive public works projects and scientific inquisitiveness of Adams' domestic policy, so, too, shall I restrict myself to only those facets of the Gin'rul's administration that resulted in the coalescence of his opposition into politcal parties, and leave it to other diarists to look at the way he actually ran things in greater detail.
Taken together, Jackson's actions - regarding Native Americans and the Supreme Court, the Second National Bank of the United States, and his generally Ceasar-ish behavior - followed a trend that really disturbed the congressional potentates of the day. They feared "the rabble," and dubbed Jackson "King Mob." It's worth noting that the French Revolution, with its storied mob, was only 40 years in the past, and Napoleon, another mob-king, only 15. The aristocratic class in America may have been rather young by European standards, but they felt every bit of the sense of entitlement of their counterparts before and since. To fight back against what they saw as an "Imperial Presidency," the elites of the time formed the Whig Party (a name which conjured up images of the anti-monarchical faction of England's Parliament) in the aftermath of their defeat in the 1832 election, and they set about trying to recapture Joementum from the hoipoloi.
The Whigs were essentially of the Hamiltonian school of Federalism (though there were some cast-iron hat Anti-Masons among them), which led them to believe in a strong central government run by a benevolent group of elder statesmen consisting of themselves. Jackson ignored the niceties of the day in his dealings with these power elites: he was as uncouth as George W. Bush, as arrogantly self-certain as Teddy Roosevelt, and as revered by his base as Ronald Reagan. Were he alive today, Andrew Jackson's campaigns would likely generate little more press than a couple of hilariously condescending pieces on "The Daily Show," but back then, he seemed like the only sort of champion that would ever rise on behalf of the common man, and became a political juggernaut as a result.
The Nullies: Sectionalism Gone Wild!
And he was up against the greats, there was no doubt about that. Very few contemporary American politicians (perhaps none of them) are fit to tie the figurative shoelaces of the oratories of a Daniel Webster or a Henry Clay; men and women who think in terms of bumper stickers would simply wither in the face of the old-time rhetoricians. Still, though they were masters of political discourse and hated Jackson as passionately as anyone in the land, even these two occasionally disagreed - Webster went so far as to back Jackson in one of most important debates of the time.
Nowadays, the word "nullification" is most often associated with jurors who upend trials by declaring the laws underlying the charges against the accused to be unworthy of enforcement - a famous 1997 case involved Laura Kriho of Gilpin County, Colorado, who was found to be in contempt of court for failing to vote for the conviction of a petty drug offender - but in the 1830s, "nullification" was all about state's rights. Specifically, the question was, "does a state have a right to countermand federal laws with which it disagrees?," and in effect, it represented something just short of outright secession. In terms of cause-and-effect, it was an argument over free trade that brought the whole thing to the fore: some Whigs supported Jackson's idea of a high tariff on imported goods, while others did not. The issue wound up dividing the Great Debaters more on the basis of where they came from than to what party they belonged - hence, "sectionalism." Personal interests and biases began to run afoul of the national-unity ideal their party espoused, and had far-reaching implications when the wheels really started coming off a couple of decades later.
The "American System" that most pre-Whigs favored was based on a strong central government and a nationalist (as opposed to Jeffersonian-style republican) public policy. American System advocates favored the aggressive building of roads and canals to link the scattered markets. As we all (well, except for contemporary Republicans) know, infrastructure costs money, so to fund these ventures, supporters favored a high protective tariff, coupled with continued high prices for land sales to settlers on the frontier. This worked better for some areas of the country than it did for others.
New England - Daniel Webster (MA): profits from trade-based economy protected by high tariff; new factories assured of plenty of workers because high land prices kept the poor stuck in the cities
The West - Henry Clay (KY): Salazared his constituents by backing the tariff against their wishes; citizens wanted more markets, which didn't agree with their Senator's more mercantilist schemes. This was part of what cost him the Presidential election of 1832 and the death of the National Republican Party
The South (esp. South Carolina) - Vice President John C. Calhoun; Senator Robert Hayne (both SC): Hated tariff; sought to exempt their state by passing a law nullifying the federal legislation implementing it
The Senatorial exchange between Senators Webster and Hayne regarding nullification is one of the classics of American debate. A good blow-by-blow can be found here, but for now, suffice to say that Webster carried the day, in part by painting an apocalyptic - and highly prophetic - image of the civil war that could result from states being permitted to pick and choose what federal edicts they would follow. The tariff would continue to be an issue in the election of 1832 and beyond, but Webster's cry for "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!" resonated with people, and South Carolina grudgingly backed down.
The Short, Unhappy Reign of Martin Van Ruin
Sectionalism became a serious undercurrent in American politics, as regional economies and interests interacted in a number of different arenas. Competition in one area often had a counterpart alliance in another, and the resultant arguments often made for strange bedfellows, at least at first. In the election of 1836, the Whigs were badly divided along sectional lines, and decided on a uniquely self-defeating strategery: they ran locally popular candidates - including Daniel Webster in New England and William Henry Harrison in the West - in three regions, hoping to siphon enough Democratic support away from Martin Van Buren to throw the decision into the House of Representatives, where the Whigs were making impressive gains.
It didn't do any good. In an election where the candidate from the at-least-it's-honestly-named Anti-Jackson Party received 11 electoral votes, Van Buren outdistanced the nearest Whig by nearly 100. He rode into office as Jackson's handpicked successor, and for about a month, it looked like morning in America. Unfortunately for "Old Kinderhook" (a nickname derived from Van Buren's birthplace; he was so Dutch that English was his second language), several time bombs went off during his administration.
Weird Historical Sidenote: Van Buren was the last Vice President to succeed by election the President under whom he had served until George Bush pulled the same stunt in 1988. Surely it's just a coincidence that the economic policies of their predecessors came around to bite both of them in the ass; each was a one-term wonder.
It's The Economy, Stupid
Jackson had managed to pay off the national debt in 1835, but he did so in spite of the compromise Tariff of 1833, which had had the effect of reducing the government's income. His hardheaded commitment to accepting only gold or silver in payment for lands bought from the government - as opposed to allowing independent banks to issue their own currency - led him to issue the Specie Circular, which commanded banks to accept nothing but hard metal in payment. As stupid pieces of legislation tend to do, the Specie Circular had the opposite of its intended effect: instead of the Treasury being flooded with gold and silver, enormous demands were placed on metal-holding banks in the East by Western banks that didn't have the reserves to cover the money they'd been printing.
The result was the Panic of '37, one of the all-time great depressions in U.S. history, which began five weeks after Van Buren took office. The economy, unaided by the President's laissez-faire approach to economic woe, never recovered during Old Kinderhook's administration, and his Whig opponents rode the misery index to victory after a single term.
In doing so, they would also inherit another legacy of the waning days of the Jackson years: The Lone Star Republic had achieved independence from Mexico in 1836, placing Jacksonian Democrat Sam Houston in charge, though he did contend with a faction of Texans under Mirabeau Lamar, which favored a less conciliatory, more expansionist policy. The issues which brought on the Texas revolt in the first place could be traced in part to its Anglo residents voting to abrogate the slavery ban in the Mexican constitution, which presaged a much wider - and increasingly sectional - debate over the spread of slavery into newly-formed territories and states.
Weird Historical Sidenote: The southern border wasn't the only one where there were "incidents" during the Van Buren years - and one was weirdly similar to current events: In 2006 1837, members of Hezbollah a Canadian independence movement erected fortifications in Southern Lebanon Navy Island, near Niagara Falls, and declared regional hegemony the Republic of Canada. Sympathetic Syrians and Iranians Americans began supplying the political/social/military organization rebels, primarily by means of smugglers with trucks a steamboat named SS Caroline. Angry at the Lebanese government's American government's inability/unwillingness to stop the provocative behavior, the Israelis British colonial troops and supporters crossed the Lebanese American border and captured and seized hills and towns the Caroline. They then shelled suspected enemy positions set the ship alight and sent her over Niagara Falls. Hundreds of soldiers and civilians One American sailor was killed in the incident, though exaggerated press reports contained sensationalized accounts that had many more dying.
Turning Rotten Apples Into Hard Cider
After four years of Martin Van Ruin, people thought all Democrats sucked; it was the Whig's election to lose, and they chose not to. Tearing a page out of the Democrat "run-a-war-hero" strategy book, the Whigs chose as their candidate for the 1840 election the aged victor of the 1811 Battle of Tippecanoe, William Henry Harrison, with an ex-Jacksonian southerner John Tyler as his running mate.
The campaign turned out to be the most raucous to date. When one Democratic commentator mentioned ironically that Harrison would be just as happy drinking a jug of hard cider in front of a log cabin as he would serving as president, the Whigs responded by throwing the imagery back in the public's face: They made the ex-governor of the Indiana Territory out to be a rugged, jug-slugging frontiersman, despite his aristocratic upbringing - really, not all that different from a silver-spoon Connecticut blueblood making himself out to be a brush-clearin' Texan. To hammer home the theme, they started serving copious amounts of hard cider at their rallies, and "Tipecanoe and Tyler, too" won an easy victory electoral victory, though the popular count was a little closer.
Harrison set a few long-enduring records while in office. He was, for 140 years, the oldest man elected President (Ole Tip' was 68; the Gip was 69). He gave the longest inaugural address ever, and he did it in a driving sleet storm. He became the shortest-serving president when he died of pneumonia 31 days after his record-setting speech, and also the first to die in office. In so doing, he became the first to compel his vice president to step into shoes which he had not been directly elected to fill, which wound up fostering a debate of its own: was the newly-ascended Veep to be an "acting" or a "real" president? The Constitution wasn't all that clear, and the new President was the type of guy who just seemed to attract enemies.
Harrison probably would have instituted Whig-approved policies, but John Tyler was more of a disaffected Democrat than he was a true-believing devotee of the American System. He was excommunicated by the Whigs a few months after taking office, when he twice vetoed some banking legislation being pimped by Henry Clay, and went on to be known as "the Man Without a Party," the "Acting President," and "His Accidency." Whig association with the North, and Democrat association with the South, burst into full metaphoric conflagration when Tyler nominated John C. Calhoun to be his Secretary of State - where he would be in a position to "reform the Democrats," as Tyler so elegantly put it.
At issue was nothing less than control of the Republic. Southerners knew that the growing abolitionist movements in the North would eventually result in attempts to ban slavery, and that the only means to forestall this eventuality was to maintain legislative parity with their opposition. Since they would never control the population-apportioned House (even if they counted slaves as citizens, which wasn't going to happen), and couldn't be assured of having one of their own in the White House, the Senate was where they chose to make their stand. This is why the Great Compromises of the time always involved a tit-for-tat admission of new states: each side got an equal number of new Senate seats, and the precarious balance was maintained for a little while longer.
The antebellum sides were beginning to be drawn, and Tyler had one more means of tilting the sectional balance toward the South. Without a party apparatus to support a re-election bid - though he did try to organize one, until Democrat James K. Polk stole his thunder by jumping on the expansionist bandwagon - not to mention the fact that he'd pissed off just about everyone who was anyone, the presidency was essentially an open seat in the election of 1844. Tyler decided to muddy the waters by running anyway, and talking loudly about why he thought Texas should be annexed - Mexico's opinion and the issue of slavery be damned. Though the Whigs blocked a treaty that would have brought Texas into the Union, Tyler annexed the territory via a joint resolution of Congress that passed on a close vote in the waning days of his term.
Of Dark Horses and the Always-a-Bridesmaid Thing
The old Whig Henry Clay was confident going into the campaign of 1844. He and Martin Van Buren, the presumptive Democratic candidate, had cut a deal in order to avoid having to take a public stance on Texas annexation: they agreed to support it if Mexico would. Since there was about a snowball's chance in Sonora of this ever happening, they thought their asses were covered. Then a couple of funny things happened...
Playing spoiler from the Oval Office, and trying to keep the annexation issue alive as the one thing that distinguished him from the other candidates, Tyler's stance caused convention trouble for Van Buren. Out of nowhere, the nation's first "dark horse" candidate emerged, as Jackson's Tennessee protégé James K. Polk used his oratory skills and overt support for annexation to win the Democratic nomination on the ninth ballot, leaving Van Buren out in the cold. Clay still thought he could win with the pro-annexation vote splitting between Tyler and Polk, but Tyler realized the hopelessness of his cause and tossed his support to the Democrat. Riding and fanning a wave of expansionist furor, Polk drew a line in the mossy forests of the northwest, telling the Brits then occupying Oregon that it was gonna be "54'40" or Fight!"
Clay wound up belatedly opposing the war in Iraq favoring annexation, but he got labeled a drunkard and a flip-flopper in the press anyway. "Young Hickory" fared little better - the papers kept asking who he was, but they also made a bigger deal out of Clay's ownership of slaves than Polk's. Though the electoral college didn't reflect it, the popular vote was extremely close - Polk edged out Clay by just over 39,000 votes. Clay likely would have won the popular vote, and probably the election, had it not been for the meddling presence of the Liberty Party, the first of several hardline groups that would emerge over the next fifteen years - parties that were built on single issues like the abolition of slavery, rather than on plans for national unity.
Groups Start Getting Splinters
The Liberty Party was virulently anti-slavery; abolition was pretty much the only plank in its platform. It had run a candidate in 1840, but didn't even rise to "blip on the telegraph" status until the next time around, when their Nader-esque presence on the ballot cost Henry Clay the Oval Office. Abolitionist influence grew as the 1840s progressed, and the issue of slavery was placed on the front burner with the annexation of Texas to the Union in 1845, and the ensuing war with Mexico from 1846-48. When the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, the northern third of Mexico - all of the modern southwestern United States - was laid open to American expansion and settlement, and when word of gold discoveries in California reached the East, the next year's surge of prospectors clambering across the newly-captured territory was so huge that San Francisco named a football team after them.
Weird Historical Sidenote: The gold fields did not attract the highest caliber of people to the west. A song from early 1850s California gives some indication of this:
Say, what was your name in the States?
Was it Thompson or Johnson or Bates?
Did you murder your wife,
And fly for your life?
Say, what was your name in the States?
President Polk was a dyed-in-the-wool, PNAC-type expansionist, which created problems not only for the Native Americans and former Mexicans whose land had been seized, but for the Anglos who would administer it, as well. Specifically, the issue of whether or not a newly-organized territory would permit slavery was the political third rail of the day, and politicians sought cover from having to take a stand on it with a wussiness that would make even contemporary inside-the-beltway Dems cringe. But like the Iraq War, it was such a divisive issue that public opinion ran ahead of the politician's ability to duck it, and the resultant loss of control led to violence and acts of terror, even as the talking heads blamed one another for the rising anarchy.
The issue began to split the Democratic party, as a handful of ambitious leaders with small groups of followers fought over the nuances of the anti-slavery agenda. In upstate New York, rival Democrat factions fought (literally) over minimizing or exploiting the slavery and corporate/banking issues. Favoring in-your-face conflict were the Barnburners, so named because they were the type of people who would burn a barn in order to rid it of rats; they were opposed by the Hunkers, who apparently "hankered" after political offices and funny dialects. The Hunkers even split into "Hard" and "Soft" factions when it came time to bury the hatchet with the Barnburners after the divisive election of 1848.
"I Don't Know Nothing"
The side we modern types would probably identify as conservative, meanwhile, was having its own factional problems. The expansion of slavery was not exactly a given among the Whigs, but the Tom Tancredos of the time saw other, even more nefarious threats to the American way of life. In their world, Pope Pius IX was sending legions of Irish Catholics, led by an officer corps of his own priests and bishops, on a mission to demographically overwhelm the cities of the United States. This view became even more prevalent after the failed liberal revolutions of 1848, but the "party" can trace its origins to a few years earlier than that.
Potato Blighted Potato
The nativist appetite for red meat was, strangely, fed by a fungus on a far-off island. The Irish Potato Famine began in 1843 (though Irish immigration had been on the rise for a couple of years already), and resulted in a huge influx of Bridgets and Micks to the East Coast, where the old-money Protestants lived. Feeling politically and culturally threatened, they began forming secret societies dedicated to curbing immigrant rights. Later, when the party had coalesced and was operating more above-board, they would openly call for such reasonable measures as a 21-year waiting period for naturalization, mandatory readings from Protestant Bibles in public schools staffed by only Protestant teachers, and, of course, severe quotas on immigration from Catholic countries.
Since their positions were abhorrent to a growing percentage of the population, the groups had to operate covertly. They used money and backroom influence to push their agendas and candidates, but when confronted with a direct question about orchestrated conspiracies they had all sworn to reply, Tony Snow-like, "I don't know nothing." From possible 1843 origins as the American Republican Party in New York through its spread to other states as the Native American Party, the movement attracted a surly, close-mouthed following across the country.
Their power grew into eventual legitimacy; the parties formed out of the Know-Nothing movement toppled the sputtering Whig Party in the 1854 elections, and they became something from which any good abolitionist distanced themselves. In 1855, none other than Abraham Lincoln wrote this in a letter to Joshua Speed:
August 24, 1855
I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we begin by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty-to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.
(sic)
His rationale might be distasteful ("if I wouldn't do it blacks, how could I possibly do it to whites?"), but Lincoln's message is clear: Anyone could be a Know-Nothing in disguise, and it was important for liberal leaders to take a public stand based on morality in order to flush out the closet nativists. It's a shame that no reasonable analogies exist in today's political realm...
Historiorant:
Okay, this has gotten silly-long, so I'm going to close this one here. So that I don't get my head bitten off by historiokossians eager to point out all the things I've neglected to mention (please be merciful, o gracious nitpickers - this is a lot of stuff to Moonbatify, and I'm not really an American history specialist), here's a partial list of what's up for next time: Missouri Compromise, Underground Railroad, Election of 1848, Compromise of 1850, the Worst President Ever (until Bush), the Gangs of New York stuff, the Kansas/Nebraska stuff, the Know-Nothing highwater mark, and the Collapse of the Whigs and Rise of the Republicans.
This is, of course, a topic that comes up much more frequently than, say, The Crusades or Ancient Lebanon; a couple of great recent diaries/series that I've seen on the antebellum and Civil War eras include Randy Foote's three-parter on Evangelical Nationalism, Yosef52's Once and For All: Are You an American or a Confederate?, and mkfox's fantastic Forgotten Founding Fathers series, which talks about a lot of the players in the First Party System. Please feel free to post other great ones you might have seen or written in the Comments - helping one another learn is what the Cave of the Moonbat is all about.