Andrew Jackson founded the Democratic Party in the 1820s. Jackson himself hailed from Tennessee, and thus Tennessee may be said to have been the founding region of the Democratic Party. In 1828, Jackson was elected president, becoming both the first Democrat and the first Tennessean to do so. He won over 95% of the vote in Tennessee. In 1844, Tennessee Democrat James K Polk, a Jackson protege, was elected president. By the late 1850s, Tennessee, a slave-state, was dominated by Democrats. In 1856, in fact, the antislavery Republican party was not even on the ballot in Tennessee.