what was the common bond between both political parties in the 1800s
History of the United States Democratic Party The Democratic Party is the oldest voter-based political party in the world and the oldest existing political party in the United States, tracing its heritage back to the anti-Federalists and the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican Party of the 1790s.[1][2][3] During the Second Party System (from 1832 to the mid-1850s) under Presidents Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren and James K. Polk, the Democrats usually bested the opposition Whig Party by narrow margins. Both parties worked hard to build grassroots organizations and maximize the turnout of voters, which often reached 80 percent or 90 percent.[citation needed] Both parties used patronage extensively to finance their operations, which included emerging big city political machines as well as national networks of newspapers. The Democratic Party was a proponent for slave-owners across the country, urban workers and caucasian immigrants.
History of the United States Republican Party The Republican Party, also commonly called the GOP (for "Grand Old Party"), is one of the world's oldest extant political parties. It is the second oldest existing political party in the United States after its primary rival, the Democratic Party. It emerged in 1854 to combat the Kansas–Nebraska Act, an act that dissolved the terms of the Missouri Compromise and allowed slave or free status to be decided in the territories by popular sovereignty. The party had almost no presence in the Southern United States, but by 1858 in the North it had enlisted former Whigs and former Free Soil Democrats to form majorities in nearly every Northern state.