In 1848, the New York Herald took stock of the various “isms” sprouting in the North throughout the Jacksonian period. Fourierism, socialism, the free land or homestead movement, anti-Masonry, abolitionism, and other “fanaticisms” dotted the Yankee landscape. By 1848, it concluded, it was Martin Van Buren and his breakaway antislavery Democrats the Barnburners who united “all those various shoots into one immense movement.” All of the “isms” the paper enumerated seemed to culminate in the Democratic reform of the Van Buren Free Soilers in 1848. True, the new Free Soil Party also tapped former Whig and Liberty Party strength. But the driving force behind its organization lay with groups like the New York Barnburners, which for many contemporaries typified the truer reform instincts of the antebellum era.

Only in our day do historians assume that Whigs and evangelicals represented the essence of antebellum reform. At the time, and in some limited historiographical contexts, New Democrats symbolized the vanguard of social change. Southern domination of the party, coupled with its imperialistic course during the 1840s, has prompted observers to write off the Democrats as racists and reactionaries. Although on the whole this may have been true, there were numerous strands of the Democracy that hungered for human perfectibility no less than the Whigs. Democrats pursued their reform in different ways (focusing less on religion than the Whigs, for example), but they championed improvement as fervently as their opponents.