"Southern conservatives in the 1800s belonged to which party?"
Democrats, Whigs, the Know-Nothing Party, the post-1880s Lily-White Movement Republicans.....
Basically all parties in the South were conservative - like now, acutely obsessed with this race issue, evidently in a desperate psychological bid to feel better about themselves as they continue to live as they have ever since they were of the lowest of classes in Britain and dumped in the South as penal colony convict laborers to forever live in the shadow of the manufacturing, trading, and economic hub that is the North which itself originated from more industrious colonists of means.
Remember, the same South vs North tropes we have now applied back then as well, Southerners held in something treading on contempt. Look how they were often (derisively) portrayed in movies. Look at Lil' Abner. We all loved that comic strip. Heck did lil' Modda know it perpetrated negative streotypes?
Country n whatnot used to be called "Hillbilly Music," the change in name soon came because that label was seen as insulting. Let that sink in. Try to insult me or you for where we live and our roots, we take it as jealousy, a compliment, in effect. Speak with a twang and they take it as mockery. Which is really sad because Southern accents are beautiful. And the music, etc, too.
We are talking one big complex of the negative kind weighing down on them - and that's for the popular parts of their culture. The negative aspects, such as racism, can be looked at as something of its own, but instead it's rendered into just another link to the chain weighing them down since before they got to these shores. I'm not saying this to rank on them, it really is (mostly) undue and thus unjust.
But it's what they have to deal with and they do that by retreating into fantasies of a revival of a mythologized golden era where they were on top of a class of people held beneath them in a clearly defined stratified society. Funny thing is, the good times folks refer to is the 1950s, the post-war boom, which, obviously, didn't make it far past that decade.
