previous next

Barnburners,

A name given to radical or progressive politicians in the United States, and opposed to Hunkers (q. v.). It was given to the anti-slavery section of the Democratic party, especially in New York, which separated from the rest of the Democratic National Convention in 1846. They were opposed to certain corporations, and they desired to do away with all corporations. They received their name from the story of the man whose house was infested with rats, and who burned it to the ground to get rid of the vermin. At about that time anti-rent outrages were committed, such as burning barns, etc. The radical Democrats sympathized with the Anti-Renters, and the Hunkers called them “barnburners.” See Anti-rent party; free-soil party.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
United States (United States) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
1846 AD (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: