On November 7, 1874, Harper's Weekly featured a cartoon about criticisms of President Grant, an image which includes the first important use of the Republican Elephant.
Uh, please look at any newspaper. The elephant is the symbol of the REPUBLICAN party! Anyway, look up information about the 19th-century cartoonist Thomas Nast for the story of the elephant and donkey symbols.
The Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant were created by the cartoonist Thomas Nast.
He was actually a candidate for the then newly formed Republican party.
to combat slavery and preserve the Union
Hitler's mustache.
The modern Democratic Party in the US originated with the Republican Party: now referred to as the Democratic-Republican Party (1791-1825). The Democratic Party was founded in 1828. After the original Democratic-Republican Party split in 1825, those who opposed Democratic president Andrew Jackson formed the Whig Party in 1833.
The Donkey- Presidential candidate Andrew Jackson was the first Democrat ever to be associated with the donkey symbol. His opponents during the election of 1828 tried to label him a "jackass" for his populist beliefs and slogan, "Let the people rule." Jackson was entertained by the notion and ended up using it to his advantage on his campaign posters. But cartoonist Thomas Nast is credited with making the donkey the recognized symbol of the Democratic Party. It first appeared in a cartoon in Harper's Weekly in 1870, and was supposed to represent an anti-Civil War faction. But the public was immediately taken by it and by 1880 it had already become the unofficial symbol of the party. The Elephant- Political cartoonist Thomas Nast was also responsible for the Republican Party elephant. In a cartoon that appeared in Harper's Weekly in 1874, Nast drew a donkey clothed in lion's skin, scaring away all the animals at the zoo. One of those animals, the elephant, was labeled "The Republican Vote." That's all it took for the elephant to become associated with the Republican Party. From the website- infoplease!
Illinois; Republican
The history is not perfectly clear, but the link below provides the official explanation by the Republican Party.
Because the South blamed the Civil War & Reconstruction on the Republican Party, the South was dominated by the Democrat Party for decades.
False.
In a way it did. The dissolution of the Whigs created a political vacuum that enabled the new Republican Party to gain power. It essentially comprised many of the same (or similar) people that had once belonged to the Whig Party. The Republican party was formed by former Whigs, by abolitionists, free-soilers, frontiersmen, farmers from the middle west, businessmen, common workers, industrialists, merchants from the eastern States and New England. The Republican Party formed around 1854; Abraham Lincoln became their first elected President in 1860.