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Era I · 1854–1860

Formation

Born in Northern protest against the Kansas–Nebraska Act, a coalition of former Whigs, Free Soilers, antislavery Democrats and some Know-Nothings became, in six years, the party that elected Abraham Lincoln.

Overview

The Republican Party began as a protest. In January 1854 Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, a Democrat, proposed organizing the Nebraska country on the principle of “popular sovereignty,” leaving settlers to decide whether to permit slavery. Antislavery members of Congress led by Senator Salmon P. Chase of Ohio answered with the “Appeal of the Independent Democrats,” and when President Franklin Pierce signed the Kansas–Nebraska Act on May 30, 1854, it repealed the Missouri Compromise line of 1820, which had barred slavery from the Louisiana Purchase lands north of 36°30′ outside Missouri. Across the North, “anti-Nebraska” meetings drew former Whigs, Free Soilers, antislavery Democrats and many members of the nativist American, or Know-Nothing, movement. Two gatherings are most often remembered as the party’s birthplace: a meeting in a schoolhouse at Ripon, Wisconsin, on March 20, 1854, where Alvan E. Bovay suggested the name “Republican,” and a mass convention “Under the Oaks” at Jackson, Michigan, on July 6, 1854, which adopted the name and nominated a statewide ticket.

The new party grew with remarkable speed. In the congressional elections of 1854 and 1855 the Democrats lost their House majority, falling from 157 seats to 83, and in February 1856 the anti-Nebraska forces elected Nathaniel P. Banks of Massachusetts Speaker after 133 ballots. Violence in “Bleeding Kansas” and the May 1856 beating of Senator Charles Sumner at his Senate desk hardened Northern opinion. The first Republican National Convention, meeting in Philadelphia in June 1856, nominated the explorer John C. Frémont on a platform declaring that Congress had both the right and the duty to prohibit slavery in the territories. Campaigning under the slogan “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Men, and Frémont,” he carried eleven of the sixteen free states—a striking showing for a party barely two years old—though the Democrat James Buchanan won the presidency.

Events kept slavery’s expansion at the center of national life. In Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) the Supreme Court held that people of African descent could not be citizens of the United States and that Congress had no power to bar slavery from the territories, a ruling that struck at the heart of the Republican program. Accepting the Illinois party’s endorsement for the Senate in June 1858, Abraham Lincoln warned that “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” and in seven debates that summer and fall he pressed Douglas on whether popular sovereignty could survive the Dred Scott decision. Lincoln lost the seat when the Democratic legislature returned Douglas to the Senate, but the contest made him a national figure. In the 1858 elections Republicans became the largest party in the House, and Senator William H. Seward of New York spoke of an “irrepressible conflict” between free labor and slavery.

By 1860 the Republicans were the leading party of the North. At Cooper Union in New York on February 27, Lincoln argued that a majority of the Constitution’s signers had shown by their votes that Congress could control slavery in the federal territories. The party’s convention at the Wigwam in Chicago passed over the front-runner, Seward, and nominated Lincoln on the third ballot, pairing him with Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, a former Democrat. With the Democrats split between Douglas and John C. Breckinridge, and John Bell running for the new Constitutional Union Party, Lincoln won 180 of 303 electoral votes with about 40 percent of the popular vote. The victory was entirely sectional: his name did not appear on the ballot in most slave states, and he won no Southern electoral votes. South Carolina seceded on December 20, 1860, and as Southern members withdrew, Republicans gained control of both houses of the 37th Congress, which first met in 1861.

Timeline

  1. Protest meeting at Ripon, Wisconsin

    Opponents of the Nebraska bill meet in a schoolhouse in Ripon, where organizer Alvan E. Bovay suggests that a new party would take the name “Republican.” Ripon is one of several towns that claim to be the party’s birthplace.

    Historical Record

  2. Kansas–Nebraska Act becomes law

    President Franklin Pierce signs the act organizing Kansas and Nebraska territories under popular sovereignty, repealing the Missouri Compromise restriction on slavery north of 36°30′.

    Primary Source

  3. “Under the Oaks” at Jackson, Michigan

    A crowd too large for any hall meets in an oak grove outside Jackson, adopts the Republican name and nominates a statewide ticket. That November, Kinsley S. Bingham is elected governor of Michigan on the Republican ticket.

    Historical Record

  4. Banks elected Speaker after 133 ballots

    After a two-month deadlock, the House adopts a plurality rule and elects Nathaniel P. Banks of Massachusetts, the candidate of the anti-Nebraska forces, over William Aiken of South Carolina by 103 to 100—an early sign of the new coalition’s strength.

    Historical Record

  5. Senator Charles Sumner beaten in the Senate chamber

    Days after Sumner’s “Crime Against Kansas” speech, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina beats him with a cane at his desk. Sumner is absent from the Senate for most of the next three years, and the assault becomes a rallying point for Northern Republicans.

    Historical Record

  6. First Republican National Convention

    Meeting in Philadelphia, delegates nominate John C. Frémont and William L. Dayton on a platform affirming Congress’s power to prohibit slavery in the territories and calling for the immediate admission of Kansas as a free state.

    Historical Record

  7. Dred Scott v. Sandford

    Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s opinion holds that people of African descent could not be U.S. citizens and that Congress lacked power to prohibit slavery in the territories—rejecting the central plank of the Republican platform.

    Primary Source

  8. Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech

    Accepting the Illinois Republican convention’s endorsement for the U.S. Senate, Lincoln argues that the government cannot endure “permanently half slave and half free.”

    Primary Source

  9. The Lincoln–Douglas debates

    Lincoln and Douglas meet in seven Illinois towns, from Ottawa to Alton, debating slavery in the territories and the meaning of the Declaration of Independence. The Democratic legislature returns Douglas to the Senate, but Lincoln emerges as a national figure.

    Historical Record

  10. John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry

    The abolitionist John Brown seizes the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, hoping to spark an uprising of enslaved people. Republican leaders disavow the raid, and the party’s 1860 platform condemns armed invasion of any state “as among the gravest of crimes,” but many Southerners hold the party responsible.

    Historical Record

  11. Cooper Union Address

    In New York City, Lincoln argues from the votes of the Constitution’s signers that the founders believed Congress could regulate slavery in the federal territories, and answers the charge that Republicans are a sectional party.

    Primary Source

  12. Lincoln nominated at the Wigwam

    At Chicago, Lincoln overtakes the front-runner, Senator William H. Seward of New York, and wins the nomination on the third ballot. Hannibal Hamlin of Maine is named for vice president.

    Historical Record

  13. Lincoln elected president

    Lincoln wins 180 of 303 electoral votes, carrying every free state except New Jersey, which divides its electors. He receives no electoral votes from the slave states.

    Historical Record

  14. South Carolina secedes

    Pointing to the election of a president it considered hostile to slavery, a South Carolina convention declares the state’s withdrawal from the Union. Six more Deep South states follow by February 1861.

    Historical Record

People

  • Illinois lawyer and former Whig congressman; Republican nominee for the Senate (1858) and the presidency (1860)

  • Democratic senator from Illinois

    Stephen A. Douglas

    Author of the Kansas–Nebraska Act and champion of popular sovereignty; Lincoln’s opponent in 1858 and 1860.

  • Explorer and the first Republican presidential nominee (1856)

    John C. Frémont

    Known as “the Pathfinder” for his expeditions to the Far West.

  • Senator from New York

    William H. Seward

    The best-known Republican of the 1850s and front-runner for the 1860 nomination; later Lincoln’s secretary of state.

  • Senator and governor of Ohio

    Salmon P. Chase

    Leading author of the 1854 “Appeal of the Independent Democrats”; later secretary of the Treasury and chief justice.

  • Senator from Massachusetts

    Charles Sumner

    Beaten at his Senate desk in 1856 after his “Crime Against Kansas” speech.

  • Abolitionist editor and orator

    Frederick Douglass

    Welcomed the new party’s stand against slavery’s expansion while pressing it to work for slavery’s end.

  • Representative from Massachusetts; Speaker of the House, 1856–1857

    Nathaniel P. Banks

    Elected Speaker by the anti-Nebraska coalition after 133 ballots.

  • Senator from Maine; Lincoln’s running mate in 1860

    Hannibal Hamlin

    Left the Democratic Party over slavery’s expansion and became the first Republican vice president.

  • Organizer of the March 1854 meeting at Ripon, Wisconsin

    Alvan E. Bovay

    Credited with suggesting the name “Republican.”

Documents

  • March 6, 1820

    Missouri Compromise

    Held by National Archives

    The 1820 settlement whose 36°30′ line the Kansas–Nebraska Act repealed.

    Primary Source

  • May 30, 1854

    Kansas–Nebraska Act

    Held by National Archives

    Organized the Kansas and Nebraska territories under popular sovereignty; the law that called the Republican Party into being.

    Primary Source

  • June 18, 1856

    Republican Party Platform of 1856

    Held by The American Presidency Project (transcription)

    The party’s first national platform, adopted at Philadelphia.

    Official GOP Position1856 Republican Platform

  • 1856

    Investigation of the Assault on Senator Charles Sumner

    Held by U.S. Senate

    Congressional records of the inquiry into Representative Preston Brooks’s attack, reproduced by the Senate Historical Office.

    Primary Source

  • March 6, 1857

    Dred Scott v. Sandford

    Held by National Archives

    Supreme Court judgment denying Black citizenship and congressional power over slavery in the territories.

    Primary Source

  • May 17, 1860

    Republican Party Platform of 1860

    Held by The American Presidency Project (transcription)

    Opposed slavery’s extension while pledging non-interference with slavery in the states; endorsed a homestead law, a Pacific railroad and tariff protection.

    Official GOP Position1860 Republican Platform

Elections

YearElectionResultElectoral votes
18541854–1855 Congressional ElectionsRunning under a patchwork of labels—Republican, People’s, Anti-Nebraska and American—opponents of the Kansas–Nebraska Act won most Northern House seats. House Democrats fell from 157 seats to 83.Anti-Nebraska candidates sweep much of the North; Democrats lose their House majority—
1856Election of 1856In its first national campaign, the Republican ticket of Frémont and William L. Dayton won 114 electoral votes and carried eleven of the sixteen free states. Fillmore carried only Maryland.James Buchanan (D) defeats John C. Frémont (R) and Millard Fillmore (American)174 of 296
18581858 Midterm ElectionsRepublicans won 116 of 238 House seats—short of a majority but well ahead of the divided Democrats—and gained ground across the North. In Illinois, the Democratic legislature returned Stephen A. Douglas to the Senate over Lincoln.Republicans become the largest party in the House—
1860Election of 1860Lincoln won about 40 percent of the popular vote and every free state except New Jersey, which split its electors. He received no electoral votes from the slave states, in most of which his name did not appear on the ballot.Abraham Lincoln (R) defeats Stephen A. Douglas (Northern Democrat), John C. Breckinridge (Southern Democrat) and John Bell (Constitutional Union)180 of 303

Policies

  • 1856

    No extension of slavery into the territories

    The first Republican platform held that the Constitution gave Congress sovereign power over the territories and that it was “both the right and the imperative duty of Congress” to prohibit slavery there.

    Official GOP Position1856 Republican Platform

  • 1856–1860

    Admission of Kansas as a free state

    Both early platforms demanded that Kansas be admitted immediately under a free-state constitution adopted by its settlers; the 1856 platform called this the most effectual way of ending the civil strife there.

    Official GOP Position1856 and 1860 Republican Platforms

  • 1854–1860

    Free soil and free labor

    Republicans argued that slavery degraded free labor and closed opportunity to farmers and wage earners, and that the western territories should be kept open to free settlers. Historians regard this free-labor outlook as the ideology that held the coalition together.

    Historical Record

  • 1860

    Non-interference with slavery in the states

    While opposing slavery’s expansion, the 1860 platform affirmed the right of each state to control its own domestic institutions—a pledge that Republicans would not use federal power against slavery where it already existed.

    Official GOP Position1860 Republican Platform

  • 1860

    Free homesteads

    The 1860 platform demanded passage of a “complete and satisfactory homestead measure” and rejected any view of settlers “as paupers or suppliants for public bounty.”

    Official GOP Position1860 Republican Platform

  • 1860

    Encouragement of industry through the tariff

    The platform called for adjusting import duties “to encourage the development of the industrial interests of the whole country,” a plank widely read as an endorsement of tariff protection, which became a defining Republican policy for decades.

    Official GOP Position1860 Republican Platform

  • 1860

    Protecting the rights of naturalized citizens

    Responding to a Massachusetts measure that delayed voting by naturalized citizens, the 1860 platform opposed any change in the naturalization laws or any state law abridging immigrants’ rights, and pledged protection to “all classes of citizens, whether native or naturalized.”

    Official GOP Position1860 Republican Platform

  • 1860

    Suppression of the African slave trade

    The platform branded the recent reopening of the African slave trade “a crime against humanity” and called on Congress to suppress it completely.

    Official GOP Position1860 Republican Platform

Speeches

  • October 16, 1854

    Speech at Peoria

    Abraham Lincoln

    Lincoln’s return to politics: a long answer to Douglas and the Kansas–Nebraska Act that grounded opposition to slavery’s spread in the Declaration of Independence.

    “What I do say is, that no man is good enough to govern another man, without that other’s consent.”
    Primary Source

  • June 16, 1858

    “House Divided” Speech

    Abraham Lincoln

    Delivered at the Illinois Republican State Convention in Springfield after delegates named Lincoln their choice for the U.S. Senate.

    ““A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.”
    Primary Source

  • October 25, 1858

    “Irrepressible Conflict” Speech

    William H. Seward

    Speaking at Rochester, New York, during the 1858 campaign, Senator Seward described the struggle between slave and free labor as permanent—words opponents cited as proof of Republican radicalism.

    “It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces”
    Primary Source

  • February 27, 1860

    Cooper Union Address

    Abraham Lincoln

    An address in New York City, less than three months before the Chicago convention, that introduced Lincoln to Eastern Republicans and made the constitutional case against slavery’s expansion.

    “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”
    Primary Source

Criticism & Debate

A historical institution earns trust by recording disagreement. It does not rewrite history around what a movement believes today. Each perspective below is stated in terms its own proponents would recognize.

Opposing View / Debate

Stop slavery’s spread, or abolish it?

The early Republican Party promised to keep slavery out of the territories, not to abolish it where it already existed, which most Americans then believed the Constitution left to the states. Abolitionists and Republicans disagreed sharply over whether that program was enough.

Free-soil Republicans

Leaders such as Lincoln argued that Congress could and should bar slavery from the territories, that the founders had tolerated slavery as a necessity while expecting its decline, and that stopping its spread would place it “in course of ultimate extinction.” They pledged not to interfere with slavery in the states, which they believed the federal government had no constitutional power to do.

Abolitionists

Abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass regarded non-extension as a half-measure that left millions in bondage. Garrison’s followers condemned the Constitution itself as a compact with slavery, while Douglass came to argue that the Constitution, rightly read, was an antislavery charter. Many criticized Republicans for declining to challenge the Fugitive Slave Act and for appealing to Northern voters who opposed slavery’s spread but also opposed racial equality.

Historians

Many historians note that both North and South understood containment as a long-term threat to slavery, one reason Lincoln’s election led directly to secession. Others emphasize the limits of free-soil thinking, which at times sought to reserve the West for white settlers.

Sources

  1. House Divided Speech · National Park Service, Lincoln Home National Historic Site
Opposing View / Debate

What role did nativism play in the early party?

The Republican coalition absorbed many voters and politicians from the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic American (Know-Nothing) movement, which peaked in 1854–1855. How far the party accommodated nativism, and how much its rise depended on those voters, remains debated.

Coalition builders

Organizers argued that defeating the proslavery Democrats required uniting every Northern opponent of the Kansas–Nebraska Act, including antislavery Know-Nothings. In several states, fusion tickets and shared candidates brought nativist voters into the Republican column; Speaker Banks himself had been elected to the House on the American Party ticket.

Anti-nativist Republicans

Many Republicans, including Seward, Lincoln and the party’s German-American leaders, rejected nativism as inconsistent with equal rights. Lincoln wrote privately in 1855 that he was not a Know-Nothing, asking how anyone who abhorred the oppression of Black Americans could favor “degrading classes of white people.” The 1860 platform opposed any abridgment of the rights of naturalized citizens.

Historians

Historians continue to debate whether Northern Know-Nothing voters were moved mainly by antislavery or by nativist appeals, and how much the Republican showings of 1856 and 1860 depended on winning them over.

Opposing View / Debate

Was a purely Northern party a danger to the Union?

The Republican Party had almost no organization in the slave states and won its victories entirely in the North. Opponents warned that a sectional party threatened the Union; Republicans insisted that their principles were national and constitutional.

Republicans

Republicans answered that their principles were those of the founders and that the party lacked Southern support only because the slave states suppressed antislavery speech. At Cooper Union Lincoln met the charge directly: “You say we are sectional. We deny it.” They pledged not to interfere with slavery in the states.

Northern Democrats

Douglas and his allies argued that popular sovereignty was a national compromise that let each territory decide for itself, and that a party organized around a single sectional issue made compromise impossible and pushed the country toward disunion.

Secessionists

Leaders in the Deep South argued, in their own secession declarations, that the election of a president hostile to slavery left the institution, and what they claimed as their constitutional rights in enslaved property, insecure, and that their states could lawfully withdraw from the Union.

Sources

  1. Civil War and Reconstruction: 1851–1877 · U.S. Senate

Images

Archival image collections. Rights are checked item by item before anything is reproduced on this site.

Sources

  1. Civil War and Reconstruction: 1851–1877 · U.S. Senate
  2. The 1858 Midterm Election · U.S. Senate
  3. Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) · National Archives
  4. Party Divisions of the House of Representatives · U.S. House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
  5. Abraham Lincoln: Campaigns and Elections · Miller Center, University of Virginia
  6. Lincoln-Douglas Debates · National Park Service, Lincoln Home National Historic Site
  7. Republican Party Platform of 1856 · The American Presidency Project
  8. Election of 1860 · The American Presidency Project

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