What was the ideology of the nineteenth-century Democratic party – the party of Andrew Jackson, Stephen Douglas, and Grover Cleveland? A variety of scholarly work has addressed this question, at least tangentially, and it is not surprising to find a good many propositions pertaining to that party over this long and tumultuous historical period. Three overarching perspectives, however, have dominated contemporary research on the ideology of the Democratic party. To some, the nineteenthcentury party is quintessentially liberal, in the classic nineteenth-century sense of the term – enamored of free trade, free markets, laissez-faire, industrial development, philosophical individualism, and the task of protecting civil liberties and civil rights. To others, the party appears to be the embodiment of the democratic populist ideal. This perspective, initiated by the Progressive historians and revised and reformulated in various recent accounts, interprets the party's mission as the defense of the rights of farmers and urban laborers against financial and industrial elites. Still others have rechristened the Democratic party as a coalition of ethnic and religious minorities. Accordingly, the Democratic party is said to have developed an ideology centered on personal liberty – “a toleration and defense of alternative life-styles and values, of laissez-faire social ethics, and of a government whose powers were circumscribed so as to preclude positive intervention in the daily lives of its citizens.”