Zsa Zsa,

Less so than you think. Parties as National entities didn’t really come into effect until the late 19th and early 20th centuries:

Conventional Wisdom
Don’t look for either party to have a brokered convention next year.

BY MICHAEL BARONE
Monday, September 17, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

…

Political parties were then and remained for years alliances of state parties, many of which had little in common. The Whigs, as Jackson’s opponents came to be known, had no national convention in 1836 but nominated three regional candidates to oppose Van Buren in 1836; Michael Holt’s definitive “The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party” is an account not of a national party, but of separate state parties.

I have also heard it argued, though I cannot present the case well myself, that the modern Democrat party was a coalition of the rural KKK and the urban Communists from the late 1920′s into the late 1950′s.

Food for thought…

I think that the Dems have changed some since then. They are not the same Dem party that my Grandfather Knew.

zsa, I think you’re right. Even the southern slave holders were free market oriented wanting to sell their cotton where they could get the best price or exchange (which was the UK). Interestingly this was opposed by the northern republicans who imposed ruinous tariffs on cotton exports.

How party philosophies seem to have changed.

Smack!