Why They Invented the Republican Party

The little schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin, where it is said to have all begun.

(Library of Congress, Historical American Buildings Survey Collection)

Every year on this date the residents of Ripon, Wisconsin—population 7,630—recall a historic gathering on February 28, 1854, when several dozen local people converged on the town’s simple one-room wood-frame schoolhouse to forge a new political party.

Called together by Alvan E. Bovay, a local political activist, these pioneers cut a wide swath across the American political spectrum. Some were members of the moribund Free Soil party, which had formed in 1848 to oppose the extension of slavery into the Western territories. Others were “conscience Whigs,” who shared the Free Soilers’ distaste for slavery. Still others were disgruntled Democrats, who opposed the Whigs on most economic policy questions but also found slavery socially and politically unacceptable.

These odd political bedfellows were driven to common cause by a bill in the United States Congress, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, designed to organize the last unsettled parts of the Louisiana Purchase. The bill, drafted by Senator Stephen Douglas, Democrat of Illinois, explicitly broke with the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which established the 36’30” parallel as a dividing line between free and slave territory in the Louisiana Purchase area.

As Kansas lay above the parallel, it should rightfully have been free-soil. But Douglas needed the support of Southern senators to push his bill through Congress, so even though he privately acknowledged that it would “raise a hell of a storm,” he included in the bill a provision for “popular sovereignty,” whereby the citizens of the new territories would decide for themselves whether to allow slavery in their midst.

This unexpected turn of events enraged many Northerners, who had come over the preceding decade to view slavery as an insidious institution. They perceived deep social divisions between the North, with its thriving mixed agricultural and industrial economy, an emerging public school system, and impressive public infrastructure, and the South, which they saw as a depressed backwater hobbled by an economic, social, and cultural evil.

“It was necessary that I should travel in Virginia to have any idea of a slave state,” wrote William Henry Seward, who served New York as governor and in the U.S. Senate. “. . . An exhausted soil, old and decaying towns, wretchedly-neglected roads, and, in every respect, an absence of enterprise and improvement, distinguish the region through which we have come, in contrast to that in which we live. Such has been the effect of slavery.”

People like Seward believed that in a free-labor system, workers were naturally industrious, inventive, and ambitious, and that these virtues led to economic progress. By contrast in a slave system, slaves had little incentive to work hard or work smart (“Enslave a man and you destroy his ambition, his enterprise, and his capacity,” the newspaper editor Horace Greeley argued), while whites identified manual labor as “slave work” and developed a sense of complacency and idleness. As a result, Seward claimed, “Go ask Virginia—go ask even noble Maryland . . . to show you her people, canals, railroads, universities, schools, charities, commerce cities, and cultivated areas.” The implication was clear: Virginia and Maryland had no such things because they had slavery.

The emerging Northern critique of slavery wasn’t simply an economic one. Henry Adams, the son and grandson of U.S. Presidents, recalled late in life that when he was growing up in New England, “bad roads meant bad morals.” Here is where antislavery sentiment could be slippery. When they spoke of slavery as a great moral evil, antislavery politicians didn’t necessarily mean to imply that they shared with abolitionists a belief in the humanity and equality of African-Americans. Many antislavery politicians were, by the standards of their day, conventionally racist. Rather, they meant that slavery degraded the places where it existed and the people who lived in those places.

What made the Kansas-Nebraska Act so explosive was that it threatened to allow slavery to spread its cancer over vast new Western territories. This scenario had already sounded alarm bells years before when, on August 8, 1846, Representative David Wilmot, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, introduced a measure that would have barred slavery from territories acquired during the Mexican War. Party discipline broke down as congressmen voted by region—rather than as Whigs and Democrats—on Wilmot’s proviso. In 1850 Douglas engineered a compromise that barred slavery in some of the Mexican territories but also strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act.

Still, with new territories yet to be organized, a country that prided itself on “Manifest Destiny” was sure to come to blows over the slave system. In the popular American mind, the West was synonymous with the nation’s future. Many Northerners, believing that “slavery withers and blights all it touches,” were determined to see it confined to the areas where it already existed.

The activists who met in Ripon to form a new antislavery coalition were not alone. In fact, it’s clear that Ripon wasn’t really the site of the “founding” of the Republican party at all. No such site exists.

At hundreds of political meetings around the country, Free Soilers, conscience Whigs, and anti-Nebraska Democrats abandoned their political bases for new fusion tickets. In some states these fusion tickets were called Anti-Nebraska, Democrat-Republican, or Free Soil. In Wisconsin the name Republican stuck. Ultimately, national leaders of the movement agreed on this name, and in the November elections they won a plurality in Congress. Two years later they ran their first presidential candidate, John C. Frémont, who garnered a respectable number of electoral votes against the victor, the Democrat James Buchanan.

It was far from clear on February 28, 1854, that the citizens of Ripon, Wisconsin, were founding a new party. It would take six years and many a firestorm to harden voters’ commitment to the fledgling organization and to attract a majority of Northern votes to the antislavery position.

But in November 1860 a prairie lawyer from Illinois carried the party’s banner to victory, and American politics would never be the same.

—Joshua Zeitz is a contributing editor of American Heritage magazine and author of Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern, to be published in March.