History of conservatism in the United States

In the United States there has never been a national political party called the Conservative Party. All major American political parties support republicanism and the basic classical liberal ideals on which the country was founded in 1776, emphasizing liberty, the pursuit of happiness, the rule of law, the consent of the governed, opposition to aristocracy, and fear of corruption, coupled with equal rights. Political divisions inside the United States often seemed minor or trivial to Europeans, where the divide between the Left and the Right led to violent polarization, starting with the French Revolution.

No American party has advocated European ideals of "conservatism" such as a monarchy, an established church, or a hereditary aristocracy. American conservatism is best characterized as a reaction against utopian ideas of progress. Although the laissez-faire policy goals of American conservatives have never been popular, historian Patrick Allitt expresses the difference between liberal and conservative in terms not of policy but of attitude.

The conservatism that prevailed in the Thirteen Colonies before 1776 was of a very different character than the conservatism that emerged based on revolutionary principles. This old conservatism centered on a landed elite and on an urban merchant class that was Loyalist during the Revolution. In the largest and richest and most influential of the American colonies, Virginia, conservatives held full control of the colonial and local governments. At the local level, Church of England parishes handled many local affairs, and they in turn were controlled not by the minister, but rather by a closed circle of rich landowners who comprised the parish vestry. Ronald L. Heinemann emphasizes the ideological conservatism of Virginia, while noting there were also religious dissenters who were gaining strength by the 1760s:

In actual practice, colonial Virginia never had a bishop to represent God nor a hereditary with titles like "duke" or "baron". However it did have a royal governor appointed by the British Crown, as well as a powerful landed gentry. The status quo was strongly reinforced by what Jefferson called "feudal and unnatural distinctions" that were vital to the maintenance of in Virginia. He targeted laws such as entail and primogeniture by which the oldest son inherited all the land. The entail laws made land-ownership perpetual: the one who inherited the land could not sell it, but had to bequeath it to his oldest son. As a result, increasingly large plantations, worked by white tenant farmers and by black slaves, gained in size and wealth and political power in the eastern ( "Tidewater") tobacco areas. Maryland and South Carolina had similar hierarchical systems, as did New York and Pennsylvania. During the Revolutionary era, the new states repealed all such laws. The most fervent Loyalists left for Canada or Britain or other parts of the Empire. (They introduced primogeniture in Upper Canada (southern Ontario) in 1792, and it lasted until 1851. Such laws lasted in England until 1926.)

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