THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE, KANSAS, AND THE RISE OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY
President Franklin Pierce and the
Democratic Party leaders rape and plunder Kansas, shown here as a flag-draped
woman. “Border ruffians” was the term
for pro-slavery Missourians who, in their effort to make Kansas Territory a
slave state, rigged elections and attacked free state settlers.
“Address of the Independent Democrats in Congress; to the People of the
United States. Shall Slavery be
Permitted in Nebraska?” in Facts for the
People, Washington, D. C., March, 1854.
This address of January
22 by two Senators and four Representatives is perhaps the earliest call for a
new political movement to resist the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and is indicative of
the fusion and merging of political tendencies that marked the birth of the
Republican Party. It is signed by,
among others, Sen. Charles Sumner (upper left) of Massachusetts, a “Conscience
Whig” turned Free Soiler; Rep. Joshua R. Giddings (lower left) and Sen. Salmon
Portland Chase (upper right) of Ohio, a Whig and a Democrat; and Rep. Gerrit
Smith (lower right) of New York, a radical Liberty Party abolitionist.
Widely circulated in
pamphlet editions and newspapers, the Address
is shown here in Facts for the People,
the monthly supplement to Gamaliel Bailey’s antislavery newspaper, The National Era. Bailey’s newspaper actively promoted the rising Republican
movement. A few months earlier, Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s antislavery classic, Uncle
Tom’s Cabin, unfolded in weekly installments in this newspaper before its
publication as a best-selling book.
“Map of Kanzas &
Nebraska,” reproduced from Edward Everett Hale, Kanzas and Nebraska: the History, Geographical and Physical
Characteristics, and Political Position of those Territories; and Account of
the Emigrant Aid Companies, and Directions to Emigrants (Boston: Phillips,
Sampson and Company, 1854).
Hale’s book was the first to promote
mass emigration of northern settlers to the new territory to ensure its
eventual admission as a free state. His
map reproduced here shows the Missouri Compromise line in the lower right, just
below Kansas’s southern border.
Included in this guidebook for settlers is an account of the emigrant
aid societies in New England and New York formed to organize the migration of
northerners and immigrants into the new territory.
New England Emigrant
Aid Company, Charter. An Act to Incorporate the New England
Emigrant Aid Company [Boston, 1855].
If “popular sovereignty” was to
determine freedom or slavery in Kansas, then the solution was to flood the
territory with free state settlers.
Such was the program of the New England Emigrant Aid Company. This brief pamphlet outlines the objects of
the Company to transport emigrants, secure land, and provide the material
support for establishing communities.
Illinois Woman’s
Kansas Aid and Liberty Association, Constitution
and By-Laws (Chicago: Daily Tribune Book and Job Office, 1856).
Activist women of the free states were a driving force in reform efforts
of the 1850s and indispensable in promoting the antislavery elements of the
emerging Republican Party. As the
violent assaults of proslavery Missourians on free state settlers increased,
Illinois women organized to provide money, clothes, and other aid to free state
supporters. “All the horrors of a civil
war are now impending, for the purpose of steeping the generous soil of
Kansas in the pollution and blood of slavery.”
This pamphlet was issued from the presses of Joseph Medill’s newspaper, The Daily Tribune, an important voice in
the early Republican movement.
Henry Ward Beecher, Defence of Kansas (Washington, 1856).
Beecher, of Plymouth Church in
Brooklyn, and brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, was the best known of the
abolition clergy who would rise to prominence in the Republican movement. For him, free Kansas was a moral crusade
pitting free labor northerners against the violence and tyranny of slavery in a
war of contending civilizations. “The
Free State men come hither with books, newspapers, free schools, Lyceums,
churches, and the whole retinue of beneficent institutions of Christian
civilization. The Slave State men come
without books, without schools, or a wish for them. They come with statutes framed for making free thought a sin,
free speech a penitentiary offense, a free press punishable with death if it in
the least loosens the bonds of oppression.”
He supported armed resistance to the pro-slavery forces; the rifles
supplied to free state supporters in Kansas were known as “Beecher’s Bibles.
The Voice of Kansas, Let the South Respond. Appeal by the Law and Order Party of Kansas Territory to Their
Friends in the South, and to the Law-Abiding People of the North (New
Orleans? 1856).
David R. Atchison and other
proslavery leaders urge southerners to come to the aid of slavery in Kansas
against the violent aggression of abolitionist free state forces. The proslavery forces had recently attacked the
free state town of Lawrence, and John Brown had begun his bloody campaign
against proslavery settlers. Atchison
and his comrades agreed with Henry Ward Beecher that they were engaged in a war
of contending civilizations. “Kansas
they [free state settlers] justly regard as the mere outpost in the war now
being waged between the antagonistic civilizations of the North and the South;
and winning this great outpost and stand-point, they rightly think their march
will be open to an easy conquest of the whole field.”
The Republican Party quickly began
to emerge in what one commentator called “the confusion of fusion,” as the
politically various opponents of the Pierce Administration’s pro-slavery
policies sought to find common ground.
Though Horace Greeley took credit for the party name, it seems to have
arisen spontaneously among many westerners seeking to reclaim the Jeffersonian
heritage from the Democrats. Exact
origins of the party are unclear. The earliest gathering to take the name may
have been a convention in Ripon, Wisconsin, in early 1854. In July, in Jackson, Michigan, Zachariah
Chandler (left) helped organize the state Republican Party that sent Kingsley
Bingham (right) to the statehouse as a Republican Governor, and launched
Chandler on his twenty-year stint in the Senate in 1857.
In Illinois, Stephen Douglas’s home
state, Free Soiler Owen Lovejoy (left) spearheaded an unsuccessful effort to
organize a state Republican Party in 1854.
Whigs and anti-Nebraska Democrats, reluctant to abandon their parties,
organized an opposition movement that sent Democrat Lyman Trumbull (right) to
the House in 1854 and next year to the Senate.
He became a Republican in 1857.
Lovejoy won a House seat as a Republican in 1856.
In Indiana the Republican movement
was initially a fusion of anti-administration Democrats, Whigs, Free Soilers,
temperance advocates, and Know Nothings organized in 1854 as the People’s
Party. Schuyler Colfax, a Whig editor,
and at one time a Know Nothing supporter, rode the fusion movement to the House
in 1854, and again in 1856 as a Republican.
He served six consecutive terms and was later vice-president under
Ulysses S. Grant.
United States
Congress, House of Representatives, Report
of the Special Committee Appointed to Investigate the Troubles in Kansas; With
the Views of the Minority of Said Committee (Washington D. C.: Cornelius
Wendell, Printer, 1856).
Though Ohio was home to dedicated antislavery men such as Salmon P.
Chase, Ben Wade, and Joshua Giddings, the July convention that marked the
beginnings of the Republican Party was dominated by moderates like John
Sherman. From the conglomeration of
Free Soilers, Whigs, opposition Democrats, and Know Nothings emerged a movement
that variously called itself the People’s Ticket, the Anti-Nebraska Ticket,
and, in a few cases, Republican.
Running on a platform limited to resisting the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the
opposition swept the state in the 1854 elections. In 1856, Congressman Sherman headed this massive investigation
exposing proslavery violence and electoral fraud in the Kansas Territory.
The Whig Almanac and United States Register for 1855 (New York:
Greeley & McElrath, 1854).
The fall elections in 1854 saw a
resounding vote of no confidence in the Pierce administration’s Kansas policy
as opponents took control of the House of Representatives. Forty-eight of them – from Illinois,
Indiana, Ohio, Maine, Michigan, and Pennsylvania – called themselves
Republicans. In this tabulation of
election returns opponents of the Kansas policy of all political tendencies are
noted in roman type.
In 1855 the 34th Congress
was rocked by three months of angry debate over the Speakership of the House of
Representatives. Finally, Massachusetts
Republican Nathaniel Banks was selected as Speaker. Pierce administration opponents stymied further administration
efforts to support slavery in Kansas.
In Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, and New
Hampshire, the Know Nothing movement advanced as rapidly, if not more so, than
the Republican movement. Fusion efforts
were partially successful, but it soon became a question of whether the Know
Nothings would consume the Republicans, or vice-versa. Who would form the national political party
to compete with the Democrats?
When the Know-Nothings’ American Party assembled in a national organizing
meeting in Philadelphia in July, 1855, Henry Wilson, a Massachusetts Republican
and Know Nothing member, led an effort to put the party on record opposing the
extension of slavery — essentially to graft Republican politics onto the Know
Nothing movement. Fearing loss of
southern support, the Convention refused, and anti-slavery nativists were
increasingly driven into the Republican fold.
In New York early Republican fusion efforts were overrun by the rapidly
growing Know Nothing movement and temperance supporters. “Anti-Rome” and “Anti-Rum” eclipsed
antislavery. Whig leaders Senator
William H. Seward (left) and newspaper publisher Thurlow Weed (right) resisted
efforts to dilute Republicanism and opposed the fusion movement. Among the early Republicans, Seward was one
of the most outspoken opponents of the Know Nothing movement.
Republican Party, Address of the Republican Convention,
Convened at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, On the 22nd of February, 1656 [sic.]
(Washington: Published by the Republican Association, Buell & Blanchard,
Printers, 1856).
The American Party’s refusal to
adopt any position opposing the extension of slavery underscored for
Republicans the necessity of forming a new national political party. At their organizing convention in Pittsburgh
the delegates adopted this statement by New
York Times editor Henry Raymond condemning the Democrats for becoming the
tool of slavery expansion: “Believing
that the present National Administration has shown itself to be weak and
faithless, and that its continuance in power is identified with the progress of
the slave power to national supremacy . . . it is a leading purpose of our
organization to oppose and overthrow it.”
Republicans prepared for their national convention in Philadelphia in
June to select candidates for the
coming presidential campaign.