Bad luck aside, sectional tensions between Northern anti-slavery Whigs and Southern Whig slaveholders finally proved the party's undoing. And even at their high tide, the Whigs had to paper over conflicts between the party's hard-drinking populists and its teetotaling moralists, its moss-backed bluenoses and its more flexible officeholders and party managers. Thurlow Weed's closest political friend, the New York Whig (and later Republican) William Henry Seward, despaired in the early 1840's that "my principles are too liberal, too philanthropic, if it not be vain to say so, for my party."
The Whigs died because they were "pro-choice" on the subject of slavery. The Republicans were born out of a church-based movement to end slavery, which against all odds happened only a decade after they were born as a party.
The Whig alliance with southern Whig slaveholders which the writer mentions, had nothing to do with Republicans, since Republicans were the anti-slavery party from day one. Democrats were the slavery party until after the Civil War, and they were the Jim Crow and Ku Klux Klan party after that for a century.
Seward's remark that he was "too liberal" for the Whigs was just that, a reference to the Whigs. Not the Republicans. A lot of people left the Whigs behind, obviously, since it evaporated with the birth of the Republicans.
You have to be careful with the word "liberal" in discussing the 19th century, though, when liberal still meant liberal and did not yet mean socialist. The writer may not know that, few modern "liberals" have any idea what a liberal is.
The writers references to the "religious right" as being a burden for the Republicans ignores a historical fact. The Whigs disappeared when religious Americans could no longer abide it. When religious Americans abandon the Republican Party it will go the way of the Whigs.
The reference to "states rights" also misses the point. Republicans believe in the Constitution, and that includes the sadly atrophied 9th and 10th ammendments. The writer sees "states rights" as a racial thing, because the Democrats made it so. You can't use "states rights" as a justification to enslave people and rob them of their civil rights, as Democrats did right up until recently.
Having been denied the use of "state's rights" as a tool for beating black people, the Democrats abandoned those principles and no longer believe in them.
Republicans understand "state's rights" the way they understand the concept of co-equal branches of government, as a barrier to repression. If one branch of government oppresses you, you can appeal to another. If one level of government oppresses you, again, you can appeal to another. That is very different to the Democrat understanding of states rights, as a cover for the most awful repression this country ever saw.
"You have to be careful with the word "liberal" in discussing the 19th century, though, when liberal still meant liberal and did not yet mean socialist. The writer may not know that, few modern "liberals" have any idea what a liberal is."
I am continually annoyed that the left has hijacked the term....and yet they're too ignorant to embrace its meaning. I have never like the term "Conservative", because it is used worldwide to describe the reactionary parties, like the communists in the former Soviet republics. The Republican party is anything but reactionary, we are indeed the progressive party, questioning the status quo of govt dependance, protecting individual freedom etc.
Most people on Freepers are Liberals in the traditional sense of the term. However, as political terms shift, the meaning of Liberal today is nearly a 180 from Liberal in the nineteenth century. I am a Classical Liberal.