Fun fact: The 1840's seems to be the earliest time when political factions actually started to refer to themselves as "progressive" and "conservative."
See Michael F. Holt's *The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party*--was the dispute within the New York Whig Party in the 1840's the first time in US history that polotical factions actually used the *words* "conservative" and "progressive" to refer to themselves?
"Since 1844, New York's self-consciously "progressive" Whigs led by Weed and Seward had clashed with their self-styled "conservative" rivals over nativism, state constitutional revision, Anti-Rentism, black suffrage, and what seemed to conservatives the increasingly radical antislavery stance of the Weed-Seward wing. Yet neither faction was monolithic, and the contest for the presidential nomination jumbled alignments still further. Although Seward and Weed had allies in New York City's wealthy mercantile, banking, and legal community like Simeon Draper and Moses Grinnell, that community, along with wealthy busi-nessmen and lawyers in Brooklyn and in towns along the Hudson River, provided the heaviest concentration of conservative opposition to them. Many of these Whigs had been National Republicans in the early 1830s, rather than Antimasons, and many of their fathers had been Federalists. Millard Fillmore and his Buffalo associates Nathan Kelsey Hall, Solomon G. Haven, and the editor Thomas Foote cooperated with these eastern conservatives but were distinct from them. Like Seward and Weed, Fillmore began his political career as an Antimason, but over the years he and his friends had grown increasingly disillusioned with Weed's control over Whig nominations, state patronage, and canal contracts. The two conservative groups, therefore, were united by common antagonism to Seward and Weed, not by common economic or policy interests or common presidential preferences.”
https://books.google.com/books…
There was likewise a split in the New York Democratic Party at that time, but I think that in the Democratic party the factions were called Conservatives and Radicals. E.g., Silas Wright to John Dix in 1846: "I do not think it impossible that we may have a majority of sound radical democrats in the convention; but the chances are against it, in consequence of the variety of factions, and the distinct effort of the conservatives to throw the convention into whig hands."
https://books.google.com/books?id=KwEFAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA1716
Interestingly, the term "the Progressive Democracy" seems to have been used largely by Whigs as a term of scorn, but proudly adopted by Democrats, as in the following speech by J. M. Niles of Connecticut in 1848:
"I have said that Democracy is progressive. Federalism has wagged her head, and in reproach and derision called us “the progressive Democracy,” and we have not taken the saying as a reproach, but as praise. Monarchy has progressed from that which was despotic to that which is limited. Kings "progress' as the people demand of them, or, in default, have “progressed” into exile, leaving the place where a throne was, to be occupied by the tribune. Literature, science, philosophy, the arts, and belles-lettres “progress,” and their adaptation to use “progresses.” Moral and physical man “progresses.” Animals, by culture and the crossing of breeds, “progress” in beauty and useful qualities. The moral world and the physical terra firma keep moving; the planets roll on in their courses; systems career through immense space; nature, and art, and mind, are in progress. Even religious creeds-—not religious truths-—undergo modification, and, for good, “progress.” . Federalism alone is stationary. She changes her name, and may blink her favorite ideas for a time, till an election can be carried upon an “availability;” but in creed, opinion, principle, wish, and instinct, she changes not. Unchanged, except in mere externals, since 1787, she stands in her ancient and murky temple, and grows dizzy as she looks out, in amazement, upon the whirl of all things as they flit past her in their PROGRESS. Aware that her principles are, generally, unacceptable, the late Federal-—I beg pardon, Whig I believe is the word now—-convention adjourned without the formal or informal declaration of any creed or platform. Resolutions having a squinting that way were declared to be out of order by the presiding officer. A novel, but prudent decision, without precedent or reason, was this. The emergency called for it. . Like the bird of the wilderness, our friends of the Whig party hid their head in the bush, and fancied the world would fail to see their tail. The precaution was vain. The absurd alliance between the political party which pronounced the late war unnecessary and unjust, and the general who led one wing of our conquering army, has excited a burst of ridicule and disgust from one end of my district to the other. It will, if I mistake not, give occasion for loud guffaws of derision from Maine to Texas, from Oregon to California, and the *quidnunc*s and wits of Europe will join in the cachinnatory chorus. Even if the great Federal, National Republican, Whig party had not estopped itself from a resort to the supposed availability of military reputation, the Democratic party, always ready to honor *Democratic* heroes, has blundered upon a couple of availabilities in that line which cannot be defeated. The day is not now when radical Democracy, represented in the persons of two “volunteers” of 1812, will be even endangered. The people will remember Jackson's Secretary of War [Cass] and Jackson's aid-de-camp [Butler], and will endorse the preferences of “the Man of the Age.”"
https://books.google.com/books?id=7Eo2AQAAMAAJ&pg=RA46-PA7