Where a republic demands equality, and equality tends to ensure mobility, oligarchy is about hierarchy and stasis. - Allen C. Guelzo

[T]he real issue of the Civil War was a terrible ideological derangement that had lifted an entire portion of the American Republic away from the ideological moorings of the founders...

[V]ery little has changed in the fundamental ideology of the Democratic Party since Jackson's day.

Even though Lincoln won a resounding victory at the polls in his re-election campaign in November 1864, the Democratic opposition did not, by any means, disappear, and much of it remained militantly hostile to black enfranchisement and black equality, North as well as South.