Factionalism and Representation: Some Insight from the Nineteenth-Century United States

Abstract

Historians of mid-nineteenth-century American politics all know it to be an era when intraparty factional rivalry was almost as bitter as the struggle between parties. Recent studies, such as Joel Silbey’s A Respectable Minority (1977) and Michael Perman’s The Road to Reaction (1984), concentrate on disagreements between “legitimists” and “purists” in both parties. My own A Compromise of Principle (Benedict, 1975) stressed factionalism among Republicans in the 1860s, while the first chapter of Robert D. Marcus’s study of political structure in the Gilded Age, Grand Old Party (1971), is entitled “Faction.”