Known at the moment for its full-throated acceptance of socialism, it’s worth noting that the Democratic Party once represented the most conservative elements of American politics. The memory of those long-gone Democrats can serve conservatives very well at a moment when it seems like everything is up in the air.

From 1861 to 1913, only one Democrat, Grover Cleveland, took office as president of the United States. Best known for his non-consecutive terms (1885 to 1889 and 1893 to 1897), Cleveland was a staunch conservative and an honest man who punctuated all those years of radical Republican rule. During a period of unprecedented political corruption, his success was unlikely. Yet his political and personal virtues were a product of the group of conservative Democrats he led and from which he originated.

The erstwhile governor of New York, Cleveland was the most successful member of a cohort, dubbed the “Bourbon Democrats” by their Republican enemies. The critics intended the name to suggest Southern sympathies and counter-revolutionary pieties. The Bourbons were a curious coalition of New Yorkers and Southerners. They saved the Democratic Party—and American conservatism—in the years immediately after the Civil War. Defenders of states’ rights, republican liberty, and economic temperance, they opposed military Reconstruction, direct democracy, and redistributive measures.

Unsurprisingly, they have been slandered as reactionary racists for their opposition to plans like those of Grant and Sherman to transform the South. The Bourbons were the reputed heirs to the notorious “Doughfaces,” those Northern Democrats like Buchanan and Pierce who tried to be judicious in handling the sectional crises of the 1840s and ‘50s. Despite all this maligning, they were remarkably successful at winning the support of voters and protecting the tradition of American conservatism in what Kirk might have called a “rear guard action.”

Yet if Cleveland’s initial success was only a rear guard action, it was also a tactical masterstroke. He shattered the Tammany Hall machine, so long a pernicious influence in American politics, and routed William Jennings Bryan’s populist offensive. In doing so, he united the Northern and Southern halves of the Democratic Party while also drawing support from the anti-corruption “Mugwumps” of the GOP. His election in 1884, against the corrupt, anti-Catholic James G. Blaine, brought a temperate, conservative, and honest politician to the White House.

Cleveland stood on the shoulders of honorable and prudent men, his Bourbon antecedents, who had chipped away at the Republican domination of American politics. The most accomplished among them was Samuel J. Tilden, once governor of New York. Tilden is best remembered for his defeat in 1876 and as the victim of one of the most corrupt bargains ever perpetrated in American electoral history. He remains the only candidate to have ever won an outright majority of the popular vote—50.9 percent to opponent Hayes’s 47.9 percent—and still lose the Electoral College.

Tilden lost the Electoral College by a single vote, his 184 to Hayes’ 185, and that outcome was the result of 20 disputed electoral votes. Of those, Tilden need to win only a single vote to win the election, but he lost all of them. In Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana, three disputed states, statewide returns had Tilden victorious; however, the Republican-dominated state electoral commissions rejected enough Democratic votes to secure their states for Hayes.

At the end of months of legal challenges and legislative injunctions, Democratic leaders capitulated to achieve the withdrawal of federal troops from South Carolina and Louisiana, the last two states under occupation. Tilden, the leader of his party, became little more than a bargaining chip in Reconstruction-era power politics.

Lamentations about the electoral miscarriage of 1876 are well warranted. But they also shouldn’t serve to obfuscate the ideas and principles that elevated Tilden and later Cleveland to national popularity. That platform was founded upon the hard rock of conservative governance and built up with classical liberal reason. The watchwords of Tilden’s campaign—“retrenchment and reform”—capture the Bourbons’ politics of prudence and their value to contemporary conservatives.

Tilden’s campaign inveighed against the corruption and exploitative policies of the Grant administration, labeling Grant’s ideology “corrupt centralism.” Tilden took strong stances against Grant’s high taxes and soft money, and wanted to introduce the gold standard. Tilden and his allies placed themselves firmly on the side of limited government and against the misuse of the vast power attendant to the Lincoln presidency. They rejected the transformative agenda of the radical Republicans, and while the campaign did not focus on Reconstruction per se, that was expectedly a central issue of the ’76 election. Still, the Democrats dismissed the possibility of war reparations to the formerly Confederate states to dispel any accusations that they supported disunion.

Tilden and Cleveland were alike in their disdain for the Tammany Hall machine that had long ruled the Democratic Party in New York. Tilden even broke with the faction publicly amid the 1871 revelation of the extent of Boss Tweed’s misdeeds. As governor of New York, Cleveland fought Tammany as hard as he was able, and prevented the re-election of the machine’s proxy, Thomas Grady, to the state senate. He worked with reform-minded legislators, such as the young Theodore Roosevelt, to circumvent Tammany’s bloc in the statehouse and pass anti-corruption legislation that reformed the civil service and municipal governments.

It was Cleveland’s reputation for honesty, perseverance, and diligence that secured him the Democratic nomination in 1884. Yet his unwavering commitment to his policy goals—the end of trade protectionism, for instance—came at a real political cost when he lost his bid for re-election to Benjamin Harrison in 1888. Harrison, the Republican nominee, enjoyed considerable support from domestic industrialists and their laborers, who favored high tariffs. He kept his campaign promises by raising the average import duty up to 50 percent, which helped precipitate the economic stagnation that would limit his presidency to a single term.

When the Democratic Party nominated ex-president Cleveland in 1892, their platform was the diametric opposite of Harrison’s. The recession of the early 1890s had vindicated Cleveland’s rejection of tariffs, and Harrison’s high spending had done little to improve economic conditions. The pragmatic and restrained Cleveland offered the opposite of those policies.

Revealing himself as an anti-imperialist, Cleveland led the opposition to Harrison’s military spending and adventurist-imperialist foreign policy. Harrison was the first presidential proponent of the so-called “large policy,” which for him meant directing the internal affairs of Latin American nations and asserting U.S. control throughout the Pacific. Earning the acclaim of Theodore Roosevelt, Harrison threatened war upon Chile over a diplomatic incident and brokered the division of the Samoan Islands with the German and British Empires. In the final months of his presidency, he gave his implicit, ex post facto approval for the 1893 coup d’état that overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy and placed the islands in America’s sphere of influence. An annexation treaty was sent to the Senate.

While Harrison’s ambitions would later manifest during the reigns of Wilson and the Roosevelts, Cleveland stepped out boldly against him. Upon taking office in March 1893, he immediately withdrew the annexation treaty from the Senate and sent J.H. Blount to investigate the conditions in Hawaii. Blount found the populace opposed to American annexation, and so Cleveland told Congress of his intention to reinstate the deposed queen. Senate Democrats, antagonistic to Cleveland’s view on the matter, commissioned their own report that dismissed Blount’s findings. Recognizing his position as untenable, Cleveland yielded and recognized the post-coup Hawaiian regime.

Cleveland’s December 1893 remarks to Congress on the subject of Hawaii are worthy counsel to any American statesmen pondering the questions of our foreign relations:

If national honesty is to be disregarded and a desire for territorial expansion or dissatisfaction with a form of government not our own ought to regulate our conduct, I have entirely misapprehended the mission and character of our government and the behavior which the conscience of the people demands of their public servants.

During his second term, Cleveland was not able to achieve his desired tariff reforms: he reluctantly allowed a “compromise” bill with only slight reductions to enter into law without his signature. Economic issues resulting from those high tariffs eventually sapped his political capital and hobbled his presidency.

Triggered by high prices in international commodities and a shortage of gold, a stock market crash in May 1893 spiraled into an economic panic as bank runs caused a widespread scarcity of credit. The sudden crisis was the worst in the country’s history up to that point. In one of his greatest accomplishments, Cleveland rallied the stunned Congress to repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890, which had forced the Treasury to start valuing dollars in silver by purchasing millions of ounces of it. It was an expansionary monetary policy that caused consumers to sell their gold dollars out of circulation, which caused deflation. That repeal destroyed Cleveland’s popularity with the burgeoning Free Silver movement, which sought the unlimited coinage of U.S. dollars in silver. It sabotaged his popularity in the increasingly “silverite” Democratic Party, which was being coopted by populists like Bryan.

Despite his decisive actions, Cleveland’s political base deserted him, and many Americans blamed him for the crisis. Yet his repeal of Sherman and Cleveland’s decision to borrow $65 million in gold from private bankers probably shortened the depression by years. He did what he had to do to serve the nation, despite the potential political costs. The blow from the initial panic, however, had damned his administration, and Cleveland did not seek re-election to a third term in 1896. The protectionist-imperialist William McKinley trounced the Free Silver populist Bryan, who had secured the Democratic nomination with his notorious “Cross of Gold” speech at the party convention.

So ended the conservative promise of the Democratic Party and their leaders the Bourbons. Originally a disciple of the Bourbons, Woodrow Wilson, the next Democratic president, became one of the most radical progressives and interventionists ever to occupy the White House.

The Bourbon legacy is an “old-fashioned” tonic of anti-imperialism, fiscal discipline, and limited government. In accordance with a transcendent moral order, those principles form the basis of the robust and vital conservatism that American leaders and thinkers have sought to cultivate since the Founding. The efforts of Cleveland and Tilden must remind us that economic and political freedoms as well as integrity are necessary for the maintenance of traditional American society.

Today’s Democratic Party has become a bastion of the “corrupt centralism” that the Bourbons denounced. Even as the Republican Party has embraced varying forms of statism, it’s remained a decentralized body and boasts a diverse pantheon of political forefathers. The Bourbon Democrats deserve a prominent place among them.

Daniel M. Bring studies history and economics at Dartmouth College. His work has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New Criterion, and Modern Age.