Democratic Politics, Religious Revival, and Reform

Introduction

The concept of political culture refers to the political attitudes and behavioral patterns of the population, and it is assumed that this culture largely determines the relation of citizens with the political system. Most studies on political culture claim that specific elements of that culture have an impact on the way political institutions function, although it has to be noted that the reverse causal logic (institutions determining the political culture) has been argued as well by authors adhering to an institutionalist perspective on politics (Cain, 77).

The institutional expression of American political culture started as a subtle and runny set of political section among small leaders, whose members believed themselves the custodian of the true significance of the federal Union. In the 1830s these factions began to resemble the organized political parties that dominated politics into the twenty-first century. Before the Civil War the major political parties were coalitions eager to impose their visions of the nature of Union to further their own political agendas. On the eve of the Civil War all but two of these political parties, the Democratic and Republican Parties, had disappeared. The history of organized politics of national scope after the Civil War is largely the history of these two parties. They along with numerous smaller and more short-lived factions gave political culture tangible expression and became the primary vehicles for the effective expression of political ideas in the United States.

Immigration

Consecutive waves of immigration interrupted and broke politics in the nation and in almost every state. Immigration shaped openings for new leaders to come up and use the mechanism of government for their own and their society benefit. Bribery and localism were significant indicators for political culture, and particularly after 1865, both were ever more associated with the huge urban political machines which started to have an effect on the business of the political parties.

The physical division of the Cherokee tribe into separate nations started during the presidency of Andrew Jackson. The federal policy became one of forced elimination with the fleeting of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 (Cain, 77).

Immigration sharpened divisions based on religion and language. For the first half of the nineteenth century the American population was substantially northern European in origin and Protestant in religion. Politics aimed to contain or assimilate the increasingly Catholic, mostly Irish and German, and—after the Civil War, immigrants who began to vie for control of the political machinery and culture first at the state level and then at the national level. Whigs before the Civil War and Republicans after 1860, for example, fearing the effects of extending suffrage to immigrants, sought to minimize these effects through campaigns of assimilation and containment. During the 1850s the radical, strongly anti-Catholic and nativist Know-Nothing or American Party captured the governorships of Massachusetts and Delaware before it split over the slavery question and lost ground to the Republican Party in the early 1860s.

Immigration affected the cultural politics of language. The state was used to ...