The Birth of the Republican Party
Many consider March 20, 1854 (159 years ago today) to be the birth of the Republican Party. It was on that day, at a meeting in Ripon, Wisconsin, that a group of anti-slavery activists held the first public meeting of the party.
In the course of the debate over the Nebraska bill, a man named Alvan Earl Bovay (pictured below) wrote to Horace Greeley on February 26, 1854, urging Greeley to use his newspaper, the New York Tribune, to call together every opponent of the Nebraska bill and unite them under the name Republican. A preliminary meeting was called by Bovay on March 1st, 1854 and it was resolved that if the Nebraska bill passed, a new party opposed to the principles of the bill should be formed. Greeley responded offering some support for the idea, but did not mention it in his paper.
A second meeting was held on March 20th. Bovay wrote: "I went from house to house and shop to shop and halted men on the street to get their names for the meeting of March 20, 1854." Fifty four of the hundred men voting in Ripon at the time attended the meeting, held at 6:30 p.m. in the school house. Bovay reported that they were Whigs, Democrats and Free-Soilers. It was a cold, windy night and the meeting lasted late, but Bovay reported that all but two of the men ended up supporting the new party. By a formal vote, the local Whig and Free-Soil parties were dissolved and the new Republican Party was formed.
In his article The Origin of the Republican Party, Professor A. F. Gilman of Ripon College writes, at page 8:
The Nebraska Bill passed the house on May 22. The next day about thirty anti-slavery members of the House of Representatives, Whigs and Democrats, held a meeting and discussed the necessity of organizing a new party under the name "Republican" and they pledged themselves to fight against the expansion of slavery. President Franklin Pierce strongly favored the bill and signed it on May 30, 1854.
Further conventions were held in Maine and Michigan later that year, and a national conference was held in Pittsburgh on February 22, 1856. Among those present were Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley. Later that year, John C. Fremont was nominated as the party's first candidate for president.
I was surprised how little mention I was able to find about this rising tide in many of the contemporary presidential biographies. In the American Presidents Series biography of Franklin Pierce, author Michael Holt writes at pages 84-5:
In the midwestern states where Whigs were least competitive by the end of 1853 and where many Whig politicos vowed never again to cooperate with southern Whigs because of their betrayal on Nebraska - Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and the northern third of Illinois - Whig leaders in effect posted "Gone Out of Business" signs on the doors of party headquarters. These Whigs joined anti-Nebraska Democrats and Free Soilers in fusion anti-Nebraska coalitions. In Michigan, Wisconsin and northern counties in Illinois, these coalitions called themselves the Republican party, and the platform adopted by the Michigan Republican state convention in the summer of 1854 ringingly declared the mission of this new party. After denouncing slavery as a "relic of barbarism," calling for renewed defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act, and insisting that Congress prohibit slavery extension to check the "unequal representation" of the South in Washington, D.C., it declared that the Kansas-Nebraska Act was to "give the Slave States such a decided and practical preponderance in all measures of government as shall reduce the North... to the mere province of a few slaveholding oligarchs of the South - to a condition too shameful to be contemplated." The party's platform concluded: "That in view of the necessity of battling the first principles of republican government, and against the schemes of aristocracy the most revolting and oppressive of which the earth was ever cursed, or man debased, we will cooperate and be known as Republicans until the contest be terminated." In short, the mission of the Republican Party was less opposition to slavery than opposition to southern slaveholders, and this would be the primary theme of Republican campaigners until the Civil War. In other midwestern states, however, the anti-Nebraska coalitions that emerged in 1854 simply called themselves the Opposition or the People's Party. The nomenclature is important, for no one knew in 1854 and 1855 that the Republican Party might emerge as the permanent opponent of the Democrats in American political life. Instead Democrats' foes had joined in ad hoc coalitions determined to reimpose the Missouri Compromise ban on Kansas and Nebraska.
In the course of the debate over the Nebraska bill, a man named Alvan Earl Bovay (pictured below) wrote to Horace Greeley on February 26, 1854, urging Greeley to use his newspaper, the New York Tribune, to call together every opponent of the Nebraska bill and unite them under the name Republican. A preliminary meeting was called by Bovay on March 1st, 1854 and it was resolved that if the Nebraska bill passed, a new party opposed to the principles of the bill should be formed. Greeley responded offering some support for the idea, but did not mention it in his paper.
A second meeting was held on March 20th. Bovay wrote: "I went from house to house and shop to shop and halted men on the street to get their names for the meeting of March 20, 1854." Fifty four of the hundred men voting in Ripon at the time attended the meeting, held at 6:30 p.m. in the school house. Bovay reported that they were Whigs, Democrats and Free-Soilers. It was a cold, windy night and the meeting lasted late, but Bovay reported that all but two of the men ended up supporting the new party. By a formal vote, the local Whig and Free-Soil parties were dissolved and the new Republican Party was formed.
In his article The Origin of the Republican Party, Professor A. F. Gilman of Ripon College writes, at page 8:
The Nebraska Bill passed the house on May 22. The next day about thirty anti-slavery members of the House of Representatives, Whigs and Democrats, held a meeting and discussed the necessity of organizing a new party under the name "Republican" and they pledged themselves to fight against the expansion of slavery. President Franklin Pierce strongly favored the bill and signed it on May 30, 1854.
Further conventions were held in Maine and Michigan later that year, and a national conference was held in Pittsburgh on February 22, 1856. Among those present were Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley. Later that year, John C. Fremont was nominated as the party's first candidate for president.
I was surprised how little mention I was able to find about this rising tide in many of the contemporary presidential biographies. In the American Presidents Series biography of Franklin Pierce, author Michael Holt writes at pages 84-5:
In the midwestern states where Whigs were least competitive by the end of 1853 and where many Whig politicos vowed never again to cooperate with southern Whigs because of their betrayal on Nebraska - Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and the northern third of Illinois - Whig leaders in effect posted "Gone Out of Business" signs on the doors of party headquarters. These Whigs joined anti-Nebraska Democrats and Free Soilers in fusion anti-Nebraska coalitions. In Michigan, Wisconsin and northern counties in Illinois, these coalitions called themselves the Republican party, and the platform adopted by the Michigan Republican state convention in the summer of 1854 ringingly declared the mission of this new party. After denouncing slavery as a "relic of barbarism," calling for renewed defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act, and insisting that Congress prohibit slavery extension to check the "unequal representation" of the South in Washington, D.C., it declared that the Kansas-Nebraska Act was to "give the Slave States such a decided and practical preponderance in all measures of government as shall reduce the North... to the mere province of a few slaveholding oligarchs of the South - to a condition too shameful to be contemplated." The party's platform concluded: "That in view of the necessity of battling the first principles of republican government, and against the schemes of aristocracy the most revolting and oppressive of which the earth was ever cursed, or man debased, we will cooperate and be known as Republicans until the contest be terminated." In short, the mission of the Republican Party was less opposition to slavery than opposition to southern slaveholders, and this would be the primary theme of Republican campaigners until the Civil War. In other midwestern states, however, the anti-Nebraska coalitions that emerged in 1854 simply called themselves the Opposition or the People's Party. The nomenclature is important, for no one knew in 1854 and 1855 that the Republican Party might emerge as the permanent opponent of the Democrats in American political life. Instead Democrats' foes had joined in ad hoc coalitions determined to reimpose the Missouri Compromise ban on Kansas and Nebraska.