I'd be surprised if you found many posters here with red avatars who would not have been proud Republicans in roughly the 20 years between 1855 and 1875. Any decent person would have been.
While that's true (at least I hope so), the annoying part is when said avatars make the following conclusion: I am a liberal now --> I would have been a Republican then --> the Republican Party was a strictly liberal party then. Needless to say, this is comically simplistic, but it also ignores things like early Republicans trying restrict voting rights of poor Whites in the North, support for prohibition and sin taxes and clear pro-business tendencies.
An important point. Republicans always represented banking and industrial interests. Regarding prohibition and sin taxes: They were a progressive element in that era (trying to prevent the destruction of family life in working class families and improve living conditions, especially for women and children). Cheap alcohol was a curse in that type of society. Prohibition proved to be a disaster, but it was to a large extent a progressive cause.
