ABSTRACT
This chapter helps the reader to understand the party redevelopment by examining the broad contours of the involved electoral shifts and their geographic and social sources. Those examinations can provide clues into the nature and significance of the change in party political characters. The massive coalitional readjustments of the 1890s did more than create a new electoral universe. They altered the factional balances within the parties and transformed their political characters. The decade of the 1890s witnessed an abrupt, massive, and durable shift in the competitive balance between the nation's major parties, ending two decades of partisan stalemate in which neither major party regularly commanded the allegiance of a majority of the nation's voters. The Republican party was the political church of the pietist groups. It encompassed those native Baptists, Con-gregationalists, Methodists, and Presbyterians who had internalized the revivalist ethos and who sought actively to purge the world of sin.
