The spiritual father of today’s conservative Republican Party, in the assessment of Heather Cox Richardson’s new history To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party, was really a Democrat: James Henry Hammond, a wealthy plantation owner, governor of South Carolina, and a U.S. Senator in the years before the Civil War. Like modern-day conservatives, Hammond was a Constitutional originalist, a believer in states’ rights and small government, a free trader, and an opponent of immigration.

More than that, Hammond was a spokesman for what we would now call the top one percent: the wealthiest members of society who were its natural leaders. In all societies, Hammond proclaimed, there must be an elite class, which in 1850s America was made up of its wealthiest men: the South’s largest slaveholders. Correspondingly, there also must be “a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill.”

The Republicans, according to Richardson’s history of the party, came together in the 1850s to oppose Hammond’s oligarchic vision. Abraham Lincoln, the most prominent exponent of the new party’s principles, scorned Hammond’s notion that the wealthy should control America’s government and society. Workers were not drudges but the very foundation of the country’s prosperity, since labor did more than capital to create wealth. The Republican Party therefore called for a strong national government to promote the sort of economic development that would allow individual Americans to advance themselves.

Lincoln’s election as president in 1860, and the need to fight and fund the ensuing Civil War, allowed the Republican Party to “reconceive the nation according to their principles,” as Richardson puts it—manifest in the Emancipation Proclamation, pioneering innovations that introduced a national currency and banking system, the Homestead Act granting western lands to individual settlers, the creation of public universities, and the introduction (for the first time in American history) of an income tax.

But the Republican Party, in Richardson’s telling, was born with a sort of Jekyll-Hyde complex. Initially it was a force for progressivism and equal opportunity, but after Lincoln’s assassination it came under the thrall of the new class of wealthy industrialists the Civil War had created. Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, reintroduced Hammond’s notion that government activism would lead to wealth redistribution toward the undeserving—and particularly African-Americans—while the Paris Commune sparked fears of a revolution-minded working class. By the 1880s, the Republican Party had ended Southern Reconstruction, jettisoned the idea of government helping to build a middle class, and become corrupted by Gilded Age money in the same way that antebellum Democrats had become the tool of the Slave Power. In short, “Republicans had come to embrace the very ideas their fathers had organized the party to oppose.”