There has never been a national political party in the United States called the Conservative Party. All major American political parties support republicanism and the basic classical liberal ideals on which the country was founded in 1776, emphasizing liberty, the pursuit of happiness, the rule of law, the consent of the governed, opposition to aristocracy and fear of corruption, coupled with equal rights before the law. Political divisions inside the United States often seemed minor or trivial to Europeans, where the divide between the Left and the Right led to violent political polarization, starting with the French Revolution.
No American party has advocated European ideals of conservatism such as a monarchy, an established church, or a hereditary aristocracy. American conservatism is best characterized as opposition to utopian ideas of progress. Historian Patrick Allitt expresses the difference between conservative and liberal in terms not of policy but of attitude.
Unlike Canada and the United Kingdom, there has never been a major national political party named the Conservative Party in the United States. The Conservative Party of Virginia, founded in 1867, elected members to the House of Representatives from two other states (Maryland and North Carolina). Since 1962, there has been a small Conservative Party of New York State. During Reconstruction in the late 1860s, the former Whigs formed a Conservative Party in several Southern states, but they soon merged into the state Democratic parties.
Founding
Colonial era
The conservatism that prevailed in the Thirteen Colonies before 1776 was of a very different character than the conservatism that emerged based on revolutionary principles. This old conservatism centered on a landed elite and on an urban merchant class that was Loyalist during the Revolution. In Virginia, the largest, richest and most influential of the American colonies, conservatives held full control of the colonial and local governments. At the local level, Church of England parishes handled many local affairs, and they in turn were controlled not by the minister, but rather by a closed circle of rich landowners who comprised the parish vestry. Ronald L. Heinemann emphasizes the ideological conservatism of Virginia, while noting there were also religious dissenters who were gaining strength by the 1760s: The tobacco planters and farmers of Virginia adhered to the concept of a hierarchical society that they or their ancestors had brought with them from England. Most held to the general idea of a Great Chain of Being: at the top were God and his heavenly host; next came kings...who were divinely sanctioned to rule, then a hereditary aristocracy who were followed in descending order by wealthy landed gentry, small, independent farmers, tenant farmers, servants....Aspirations to rise above one's station in life were considered a sin.
In actual practice, colonial Virginia never had a bishop to represent God nor a hereditary aristocracy with titles like "duke" or "baron". However it did have a royal governor appointed by the British Crown, as well as a powerful landed gentry. The status quo was strongly reinforced by what Jefferson called "feudal and unnatural distinctions" that were vital to the maintenance of aristocracy in Virginia. He targeted laws such as entail and primogeniture by which the oldest son inherited all the land. The entail laws made land-ownership perpetual: the one who inherited the land could not sell it, but had to bequeath it to his oldest son. As a result, increasingly large plantations, worked by white tenant farmers and by black slaves, gained in size and wealth and political power in the eastern ("Tidewater") tobacco areas. Maryland and South Carolina had similar hierarchical systems, as did New York and Pennsylvania. During the Revolutionary era, the new states repealed all such laws. The most fervent Loyalists left for Canada or Britain or other parts of the Empire. They introduced primogeniture in Upper Canada (southern Ontario) in 1792, and it lasted until 1851. Such laws lasted in England until 1926.
American Revolution
Russell Kirk saw the American Revolution itself as "a conservative reaction, in the English political tradition, against royal innovation". David Lefer has emphasized the central role of conservative Founding Fathers in shaping the key documents such as the United States Constitution.