A very brief introductory comment of the origins of the Republican Party

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

I typed this up for a facebook discussion.  Thought I'd post it here.  Feel free to add any comments.  I might refine/expand this as part of an article/blog post somewhere dealing with its implications to the possibility of 3rd party impact/success.

The first explicitly anti-slavery party was the Liberty Party, who ran their first presidential candidate, James Birney, back in 1840. They only got 0.31% of the vote. 4 years later, they managed to get 2.3%. But most people stayed loyal to the Democrats and the Whigs, both fairly new parties themselves. Slavery was causing a strain within both parties, but it had not come to dominate the conversation as much as it would.

The next party was the Free Soil Party. For a while the Liberty Party and the Free Soil party existed, but the Free Soil Party quickly became more popular and the Liberty Party's members soon joined the Free Soil fold. The most basic reason for their greater success is that the Free Soil Party was a bigger tent. It included not just die-hard abolitionists, but also those who wanted to stop the spread of slavery, under a banner the slogan "Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men." That is, the platform presented itself as not only about the blacks in slavery down South, but also about themes that spoke to the democratic traditions and aspirations of the common man in the North. Many northerners opposed slavery, but few enough to vote only on that issue without a reason they could connect to their own identity and interest

The 1850 Compromise seemed to take some of the winds out of the sails of the Free Soil Party for a while, but the Kansas-Nebraska Act blew new life into their platform by unsettling the issue and threatening slavery in any new territory by threatening to open new territories and states throughout the West to slavery, striking at the heart of the Free Soil idea. The Whigs had fractured between North and South by this time. The new Republican Party brought together ex-Whigs, Free Soilers and some Democrats (such as their first presidential candidate John C Fremont). There were divisions within the party on immigration and economic policy, and between moderates and radicals, but they managed to stick together. The Dred Scot decision made their cause even more clear and urgent. Abraham Lincoln had long been a Whig politician, but one with lots of failure in elections, not a famous man in himself, but someone of great ability who could hold together the moderate and radical factions. Had the Democrats somehow not split between Northern and Southern parties in the election of 1860, Lincoln still likely would have won, thanks to the electoral college reflecting the strong support for the Republicans throughout most of the Northern states. Ultimately it was the war itself that transformed the Republican Party into a fully abolitionist party.

If one is to take a lesson from that history, I don't think it's about star power. It's about crafting a message that can speak to people in a way that is responsive to events as they are taking place.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

I would add that a)the Mexican-American War, and the debate over the status in newly-acquired lands, was the foundational event of the Free Soil Party, and b)the debate over slavery had indeed fractured the Whigs to some degree by 1854, but they didn't totally collapse until after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

good points.