The Republican Party

The political parties in the early 1850s:


1852:  Democrat Franklin Pierce becomes president and the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act happens during his presidency.  The Whig Party disintegrates and the Republican Party replaces it as the "big government" party with the primary agenda of blocking slavery's expansion into the western territories.   But there is a transitional period until the Republican party solidifies.... 



The hurting Whig Party:

The Whig Party took a blow when Whig president Millard Fillmore backed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 alienating many northern Whigs.  But in 1854, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and New York Whigs (e.g. William Seward) held out from joining the new Republican coalition groups, hoping to resurrect the Whigs.  In Illinois, Abraham Lincoln remained a Whig, thinking the Illinois coalition party was too radical.  Things get worse when southern Whigs support the overturn of the Missouri Compromise line in the Kansas-Nebraska Act.


The American Party (The Know-Nothing movement)

U.S. Immigration Statistics 




1854:


Anti-Nebraska movement  

New antislavery northern coalitions:  Anti-Nebraska, Fusion, People's, Independent, and Republican (in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois).

39 Congressmen endorse the name "Republican" in NYC on May 9.  Michigan antislavery men adopted the name, as did other political conventions in the Old Northwest.   


Illinois:  Lincoln & Douglas - The first round:  


Abraham Lincoln's Peoria (Illinois) speech - October 16, 1854 (text)  

   1.  Lincoln on slavery and the Founders:  the founders hid the word slavery in the Constitution, created the slave free Northwest Territory, and ended slavery in the northern states with gradual emancipation.

   2.  Lincoln says slavery is immoral but does not condemn southerners.  He knows it will be hard to get rid of.  He covers the problems of letting them live free in America, saying most Americans would not accept it. 

  3.  He says slavery should be left to exist where it is, but not expand into the territories because it would then be "on the high road to perpetuity."

  4.  When Douglas claims that "popular sovereignty" is "self-government" for the Kansas population, Lincoln replies that when white men govern themselves, that is self-government.  When the govern other men (and Negros are men) then that is despotism.    

5.  To end slavery is not only to save the Union, but "make it worth saving."


Lincoln, running for the Senate as a Whig, gathered little support and threw his support behind an anti-Nebraska (antislavery) Democrat to help defeat Stephen Douglas.


The House elections in 1854 rebuked the northern
Democrats and southern Whig backing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.  A very loose coalition of small parties, collectively known as the Opposition Party, controls the House in 1855 with 100 members to the Democrats 81.  A third party, with 52 representatives, is the American Party.  Their main political goals nativist (anti-immigrant) but they are also mostly antislavery, too.  25% of northern Democrats leave the party.  Seeing their party as hopelessly ruined, many northern Whigs like Lincoln and Seward join the growing Republican Party.


Key Republican Ideas:

      1)  Preventing the Southern "Slave Power" from gaining more power over the country's politics.  

   2)  An antislavery interpretation of the Constitution


 Two tricky Massachusetts politicians:

Nathaniel Banks  - Originally a Democrat, Banks publicly opposes slavery in 1854, switches to the American Party (without having any real interest in their cause), and is elected by the Massachusetts Know-Nothings to the U.S. House of Representatives.  Banks turns Republican in 1855, is elected Speaker of the House in early 1856 and appoints numerous antislavery men to important positions.  His election as speaker is considered a milestone in the development of the Republican Party.


Henry Wilson  Ex-Free Soiler who was nominated by the new Massachusetts Republican Party for governor in 1854.  But he converts to a Know Nothing and loses the governor's race but gains the Know Nothing Massachusetts legislator's votes for the U.S. Senate.  In the Senate, he helps establish the Republican Party and backs antislavery and other progressive legislation, but not anti-immigrant acts.


1856:

At the beginning of the 1856 election year, it is not clear whether the Republican Party or the nativist American Party will emerge as the main challenger to Democratic Party.

Republicans hold their first national organizing convention in February and their first successful presidential nominating convention in June.  John Charles Frémont is nominated.  They create the Republican National Committee (RNC) and the 1856 Republican platform. 

When the American Party nominated Millard Fillmore, who had backed the Fugitive Slave Law when he was president as their candidate, northern antislavery Know-Nothings are enticed away from the party by Republicans who use anti-Catholic rhetoric to procure their support in states such as Connecticut, Indiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania and New York. 

And yet, many who voted Republican in 1856 and 1860 were not nativists; many saw the Know Nothings as bigoted thugs.  But they cared nothing for slaves and disliked northern free blacks.  Republicans coaxed them to the party saying that slavery was at war with republican institutions and hostile to the interests of northern whites.

Just after the pro-slavery raid on Lawrence, Kansas and the Sumner caning, a California Democrat in the House of Representatives, Philemon T. Herbert, shot and killed a Irish waiter in a Washington hotel dining room.  When the Republican papers found out Herbert was from an Alabama slaveholding family, they warned northern workingmen how southern slave-owners treated common labors like slaves.  When the Pierce-appointed Democratic judge who refused to prosecute Brooks for caning the wealthy Sumner also refused to prosecute Herbert, Republicans made much about the "slave power's" attempts to suppress the liberties of northern working men.  All northern men were threatened by southern slaveholders, they said.   

During the 1856 election race, Democrats labeled Republicans as "disunionists" and supporters of political equality for blacks.  Some were, but the Republican party denied they were for racial equality, pointing out how the Kansas "free constitution" prohibited both slaves and free blacks from Kansas.  

While these events gave Frémont 11 of the 15 free states in the 1856 election, the conservative Whig and and Democratic vote in lower northern states, along with the southern Democratic vote, put the Pennsylvania Democrat James Buchanan in the White House.  Buchanan was a northern supporter of slavery.