170 years ago today the Republican Party was formed in Ripon, Wisconsin.
In 1854, the Republican Party was founded in the Northern United States by forces opposed to the expansion of slavery, ex-Whigs, and ex-Free Soilers. The Republican Party quickly became the principal opposition to the dominant Democratic Party and the briefly popular Know Nothing Party. The party grew out of opposition to the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise and opened the Kansas and Nebraska Territories to slavery and future admission as slave states.[26][27] They denounced the expansion of slavery as a great evil, but did not call for ending it in the Southern states. While opposition to the expansion of slavery was the most consequential founding principle of the party, like the Whig Party it replaced, Republicans also called for economic and social modernization.[28]
At the first public meeting of the anti-Nebraska movement on March 20, 1854, at the Little White Schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin, the name "Republican" was proposed as the name of the party.[29] The name was partly chosen to pay homage to Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party.[30] The first official party convention was held on July 6, 1854, in Jackson, Michigan.[31]
The party emerged from the great political realignment of the mid-1850s, united in pro-capitalist stances with members often valuing Radicalism.[32] Historian William Gienapp argues that the great realignment of the 1850s began before the Whigs' collapse, and was caused not by politicians but by voters at the local level. The central forces were ethno-cultural, involving tensions between pietistic Protestants versus liturgical Catholics, Lutherans and Episcopalians regarding Catholicism, prohibition and nativism. The Know Nothing Party embodied the social forces at work, but its weak leadership was unable to solidify its organization, and the Republicans picked it apart. Nativism was so powerful that the Republicans could not avoid it, but they did minimize it and turn voter wrath against the threat that slave owners would buy up the good farm lands wherever slavery was allowed. The realignment was powerful because it forced voters to switch parties, as typified by the rise and fall of the Know Nothings, the rise of the Republican Party and the splits in the Democratic Party.[33][34]
Now they’re the New Know-Nothing Party.
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