The Revolutionary Beginnings of the Republican Party

Looking back at the Civil War era, we often remember the Republican Party as a force dedicated to preserving America in the face of rebellion by the Confederate States. But, as historian Matthew Karp writes, at its birth the party was itself a rebellion, channeling popular fury over the oligarchic power of enslavers into a national electoral force.

In the 1850s, Karp writes, rebellion was in the air. Informal “vigilance committees” of all political stripes popped up to challenge existing authorities. In San Francisco vigilantes took over a city government they deemed irredeemably corrupt. Members of the nativist Know-Nothing movement rioted in St. Louis, Cincinnati, and other cities.

Anti-slavery forces also formed vigilance groups. In Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, and other cities, these committees fought against the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which Senator Charles Sumner declared “totally devoid of constitutional obligation.” Mass opposition to the law made it largely unenforceable across the North.

Meanwhile in Bleeding Kansas, pro-slavery forces, largely from over the border in Missouri, captured the official territorial government, leading antislavery Kansans to found an alternative government in 1855. Despite frequently engaging in vigilante attacks, pro-slavery forces in Kansas referred to themselves as the Law and Order Party.

Karp writes that it was in this environment that the first Republican Party convention kicked off in June of 1856 with what were described at the time as “revolutionary speeches.” John Alexander Wills, a delegate from California, told the assembled party supporters that the United States, while “in form a democracy, was in reality an oligarchy, an aristocracy,” and that the majority of the North must rise up “against the encroachments of the slave power.” Another speaker, Massachusetts Senator Henry Wilson, announced that “our object is to overthrow the Slave Power of the country.”

The party platform that came out of the convention called only for slavery to be blocked from expanding into new states, not destroyed entirely. Yet abolitionists like Frederick Douglass were soon convinced that the party represented the electoral wing of a broad movement against the Slave Power, and a means to unify anti-slavery forces nationally.

In contrast, Karp writes, throughout the 1856 race, the Democrats and the nativist American Party focused on maintaining the integrity of political institutions. Democrat James Buchanan, who would ultimately win the election, decried “the agitation of the question of domestic slavery” as a threat to the nation’s peace.

Of course, the Republicans’ candidate, John C. Frémont, lost the 1856 election. But Republicans won pluralities, and in many cases majorities, across most of the non-slaveholding states.

“Flipping over the checkerboard of precedents and hierarchies that made up the federalized political system, the new party claimed the authority of ‘the people’ as its chief warrant against the Slave Power,” Karp writes. “This did not simply produce a national political realignment; it set the stage for a national political revolution.”

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