It doesn't really pay to try to compress either party, at any time, into one coherent position.
When you have a winner-take all election system, having just two parties is strongly favored. It follows that everyone's diverse viewpoints and interests must somehow or other be shoehorned into one or the other (or if a person shifts between them, both).
Thus--some Democrats, quite a few, were pro-slavery before the Civil War. Quite a few were openly and proudly racist for a century after the Civil War.
Throughout that entire time period, there were other Democrats who were against slavery and even against racism.
The Republican party formed as a coalition of many prior movements. They cohered in part because I think there was something of a common thread to those movements, one that united--for a time--a diverse group of people. It sounds good to reduce what that coherency was to some ringing phrase and to claim it resonates forever, but that is not true. The fact is, the Republican coalition started to split up after the Civil War, as the Free-Soiler farmer types started noticing a severe divergence of interests from the big-money business types. But they had started out in the same bed for good reasons. Both sides denounced the others for failing to adhere to true Republican values, but actually both were adhering to different evolutions of the same core concepts. Quite a few of the rural yeoman Republicans wound up becoming Greenbacks, then Populists, then this led them to wind up voting for Democrat William Jennings Bryan.
Meanwhile the Democrats have always had wings for different interests too and has always appealed both as a party of the lowly working-man and as an advocate of certain visionary business interests. It has never been true that
all businessmen are
all Republicans (or before that, Whigs). (The slavery lobby is a case in point--but actually the Southern Whig party was of course quite as much captive to slave interests as the Southern Democrats were. But business leaders, particularly those who are pioneering developing new fields and technologies, very often appeal to the Democratic party to break the mold of the tried-and-true establishment that tends to gravitate more toward the more explicitly "pro-business" party of the day).
I think it is meaningful to make distinctions between them and even to hold that certain things have always been characteristic of each, but it simply won't do to flatten it down to stark and simple differences.
Unless of course one is indulging in political polemics.
