Rpublican Party Founded to end Slavery
In Ripon,
Wisconsin, former members of the
Whig Party
meet to establish a new party to oppose the spread of slavery into the
western territories. The Whig Party, which was formed in 1834 to oppose
the “tyranny” of President
Andrew Jackson, had shown itself incapable of coping with the national crisis over slavery.
With the successful introduction of the Kansas-
Nebraska Bill of 1854, an act that dissolved the terms of the
Missouri
Compromise and allowed slave or free status to be decided in the
territories by popular sovereignty, the Whigs disintegrated. By February
1854, anti-slavery Whigs had begun meeting in the upper midwestern
states to discuss the formation of a new party. One such meeting, in
Wisconsin on March 20, 1854, is generally remembered as the founding
meeting of the Republican Party.
The Republicans rapidly gained
supporters in the North, and in 1856 their first presidential candidate,
John C. Fremont, won 11 of the 16 Northern states. By 1860, the
majority of the Southern slave states were publicly threatening
secession if the Republicans won the presidency. In November 1860,
Republican
Abraham Lincoln was elected president over a divided Democratic Party, and six weeks later
South Carolina
formally seceded from the Union. Within six more weeks, five other
Southern states had followed South Carolina’s lead, and in April 1861
the
Civil War began when Confederate shore batteries under General
P.G.T. Beauregard opened fire on
Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Harbor.
The
Civil War firmly identified the Republican Party as the party of the
victorious North, and after the war the Republican-dominated Congress
forced a “Radical Reconstruction” policy on the South, which saw the
passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the
Constitution
and the granting of equal rights to all Southern citizens. By 1876, the
Republican Party had lost control of the South, but it continued to
dominate the presidency until the election of
Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933.
