Third Party System

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The Third Party System was a period in the history of political parties in the United States from approximately 1854 to 1896. It emerged from the collapse of the Second Party System during the sectional crisis over slavery and was dominated by the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. Historians differ over its precise boundaries: the Republican coalition began forming after the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854, became a major national force in the election of 1856, and won the presidency in 1860; the election of 1896 is commonly treated as the transition to the Fourth Party System. The period encompassed the American Civil War, the abolition of slavery, Reconstruction, and the industrial and territorial transformation associated with the Gilded Age. Republicans initially united opposition to the expansion of slavery with the free-labor program of homesteads, protective tariffs, railroad construction, and federally supported economic development. During and after the Civil War, the party identified itself with preservation of the Union, emancipation, the Reconstruction amendments, and pensions for Union veterans. Democrats remained a national opposition during the war, resisted much of congressional Reconstruction, favored more limited federal economic intervention, and, after Reconstruction, built an increasingly durable base among white southerners while remaining competitive in northern cities and several closely divided states. Neither coalition was ideologically or socially uniform. Republicans were generally strongest in New England, the upper North, and much of the West; Democrats dominated most of the former Confederacy after Reconstruction and competed effectively in cities and states such as New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Indiana. Religion, ethnicity, occupation, Civil War memory, local issues, and attitudes toward government all influenced voting. African American men became a crucial Republican constituency during Reconstruction, but political violence, fraud, and disfranchising state constitutions progressively destroyed meaningful electoral competition across much of the South. National...