The Republican Party had no single founder and no single birthday. It grew out of a season of protest in 1854, when a law passed in Washington persuaded thousands of Northerners that the parties they belonged to could no longer be trusted with the most important question in American public life: whether slavery would be allowed to spread into the nation’s western territories.
A Law That Reopened the Question
For more than three decades, the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had barred slavery from the lands of the Louisiana Purchase north of latitude 36°30′, outside the state of Missouri itself. In January 1854 Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois brought forward a bill to organize the Kansas and Nebraska territories. As it moved through Congress, the bill was rewritten to let the settlers of each territory decide the question of slavery for themselves, a doctrine its supporters called popular sovereignty, and to declare the old compromise line inoperative and void. President Franklin Pierce signed the Kansas–Nebraska Act on May 30, 1854.
To many Northerners the repeal was a betrayal. Land they had understood to be closed to slavery for a generation was suddenly open to it. Protest meetings spread across the free states even before the bill became law.
Ripon and Jackson
On March 20, 1854, opponents of the bill met in a small schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin. Alvan E. Bovay, a lawyer who had helped call the meeting, urged them to form a new party and proposed a name, Republican, that recalled the party of Thomas Jefferson. On July 6, 1854, a state convention in Jackson, Michigan, held outdoors because the crowd was too large for any hall, adopted the Republican name and nominated a full slate of candidates. That fall Michigan elected a Republican governor, Kinsley S. Bingham. Both towns still claim to be the party’s birthplace, and both claims have merit.
A Coalition Built from Fragments
The new party was assembled from the wreckage of older ones. Antislavery Whigs, whose national party was collapsing, joined Free Soilers and Democrats who had broken with their party over Nebraska. In several states they were joined by members of the nativist American, or Know Nothing, movement, an uneasy alliance that lasted through the later 1850s. Republicans disagreed about tariffs, banks and immigration. What held them together was a single conviction: slavery must not expand into the territories.
That conviction was not abolitionism. Most Republicans accepted that the Constitution placed slavery in the existing states beyond the reach of Congress. But they believed the territories belonged to free labor, to farmers and workers who owned the fruits of their own work, and that the founders had expected slavery to be contained and eventually to die out.
Lincoln Finds His Cause
Abraham Lincoln, a former one-term Whig congressman practicing law in Springfield, was drawn back into politics by the Nebraska act. At Peoria on October 16, 1854, he delivered a long reply to Douglas that set out the moral case against the law and against the claim that the spread of slavery was a matter of indifference.
“What I do say is, that no man is good enough to govern another man, without that other’s consent. I say this is the leading principle—the sheet anchor of American republicanism.”
Lincoln joined the new party in 1856 and helped organize it in Illinois. Two years later his debates with Douglas in the Senate race of 1858 made him a national figure, even though Douglas kept the seat.
From Protest to Power
Republicans held their first national nominating convention in Philadelphia in June 1856. Their platform declared it both the right and the duty of Congress to prohibit in the territories “those twin relics of barbarism—Polygamy, and Slavery,” and their nominee, the explorer John C. Frémont, carried eleven free states. It was not enough to win, but a party barely two years old had displaced the Whigs as the chief opposition to the Democrats.
Events soon forced the question to a crisis. In Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), the Supreme Court held that Congress had no power to bar slavery from the territories, a direct challenge to the party’s founding principle. In 1860 the Republicans nominated Lincoln on a platform that again opposed slavery’s extension. He won the presidency with 180 electoral votes, carrying every free state except New Jersey, which divided its electors, and without a single electoral vote from a slave state.
Why It Still Matters
The founders of 1854 were a coalition of people who disagreed about a great deal and agreed about the one question that mattered most. They grounded that agreement in the Declaration of Independence and applied it to the issue in front of them. They also left a record that can still be read in their own words: the Peoria speech, the platforms of 1856 and 1860, and the debates that carried Lincoln to the White House.