Talk:Opposition Party (Southern U.S.)

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This article was nominated for deletion on 13 April 2008. The result of the discussion was no consensus.

Presentation of congressional delegations?

I'm thinking at the moment that the significance of the Oppostion party might best be shown be a graphic representing the makeup of the 33rd, 34th and 35th Congresses. --studerby 00:03, 25 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This article is mostly wrong

There was not and never has been such a thing as the "Opposition Party" as a formal entity in the United States, and the fact that the Congressional Biographical Directory rather haphazardly calls some anti-Democrats in the 34th Congress "Know Nothings," some "Whigs," some "Republicans," and some "Oppositionists" does not create such a party. It was merely an informal term that those opposed to the Democrats in some states called themselves. I am certainly not aware of any clear line separating the "Opposition" from the Know Nothings - it was mostly a matter of the particular political alliances formed within each state as to what the opposition group called themselves. This article has taken a very vague concept and reified it into an official political party. The fact that the various non-Democrats in the 34th Congress sometimes called themselves simply "the Opposition" indicates, in fact, the lack of any organized political party opposing the Democrats at that point, not the existence of a party called the "Opposition Party". This article should be deleted with prejudice. john k (talk) 18:15, 13 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Kept

Sigh, so I see the article has been kept. If it is to be kept, I think it should only apply to the Southern post-Know Nothing opposition, and not to the period of confusion in 1854-1856. Before 1856, just about everyone would have either considered themselves to be a Whig, a Republican, a Know Nothing, a Free Soiler, or an anti-Nebraska Democrat. It's only during the Buchanan years that one sees the emergence of these "Opposition" parties in the south, which ultimately become the basis of support of the Constitutional Union Party in 1860. If we're to have an article, that's what it should focus on. john k (talk) 13:29, 28 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Baggett (2003, p. 33) says "From the 1856 Whig wreckage emerged Opposition Party spokesmen hoping to coalesce the nation's conservatives...These Whigs championed the so-called Opposition Party (that is, opposition to the Democratic Party), which ran candidates in state elections." McKnight (2006, p. 21) says "The Opposition party, which achieved considerable success just before the war, emerged out of the Whig tradition. When the Whig party died before the 1854 elections, a gaping political void appeared. Hoping to fill it was the American, or Know-Nothing party...The Opposition party became a popular torchbearer of old Whig ideals during the last years of the 1850s...Because of the inevitable sectional sectional alienation, a national Opposition proved proved an impossibility." Richardson (2004, Others: Third-Party Politics from the Nation's Founding to the Rise and Fall of the Greenback-Labor Party, p. 248) wrote "Following the party's demise, a number of ex-Whigs briefly drifted into the Know-Nothing Party. Alienated by that party's nefarious attraction to nativism and angered by the Buchanan administration's attempt to force the Lecompton constitution on Kansas, a number of prominent former Whigs in the South formed a short-lived Opposition Party in the late 1850s."

It's like what you said before the AfD, the current starting time in the article of 1854 is based on government website biographies and/or party division web page, which designates "Oppositions" as the winner of a majority of the 1854 Congressional elections, and not based on the referenced books AFAICT, unless I've overlooked something. Settler (talk) 18:00, 2 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

So I'd suggest we remove the list, and rewrite entirely so as to focus on the pre-war "Opposition" movement in the south. We could list leading figures, like Crittenden, Bell, and so forth, although I imagine it would be largely identical to "southern supporters of Bell and the Constitutional Union Party in 1860." john k (talk) 04:43, 3 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]