Democratic Party - Navo

• Democratic Party, the oldest mass-based political party in the world. The party traces its ancestry to the collaboration between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison of Virginia and Aaron Burr and George Clinton of New York. The four founders of the party may first have gathered in upstate New York in 1791 when Jefferson and Madison were allegedly on a botanical expedition to observe the vegetation and wildlife of the region. 
• The fateful alliance between Virginia and New York, between the planters and small farmers of the South with the small farmers of the West and urban workers of the East, began a durable coalition of American politics that endured into the middle of the twentieth century.
• Jefferson, Madison, Burr, and Clinton began their party as an organized opposition to the politics of Alexander Hamilton.
• Hamilton and his supporters favored a strong central government, debt, credit, banking, and trade policies to further commercial and manufacturing interests, an expanded military and naval budget, and a conciliatory policy toward Great Britain.
• The Democrats came back into power in 1845 with the accession to the presidency of another Tennessean, "Young Hickory," James K. Polk. Polk, like Jackson, was an ardent expansionist, and he campaigned for the presidency with promises to annex the republic of Texas to the Union and to extend Oregon Territory to the border of Russian Alaska: "Fifty-Four Forty or Fight!".