[Grand Old Partisan]

It is a Democrat myth that Reconstruction cemented the southern states as soldily Democrat. The South was soldily Democrat since before the Civil War -- the 1860 Republican ticket got ZERO votes in ten of the eleven states which were to secede. Reconstruction was but a brief interregnum in the Democratic Party's domination of the South which began when the southern Whigs shifted into the Democrat Party in the 1850s over slavery.