Posted on 03/20/2005 5:31:26 AM PST by kellynla
In Ripon, Wisconsin, former members of the Whig Party meet to establish a new party to oppose the spread of slavery into the western territories. The Whig Party, which was formed in 1834 to oppose the "tyranny" of President Andrew Jackson, had shown itself incapable of coping with the national crisis over slavery.
With the successful introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854, an act that dissolved the terms of the Missouri Compromise and allowed slave or free status to be decided in the territories by popular sovereignty, the Whigs disintegrated. By February 1854, anti-slavery Whigs had begun meeting in the upper midwestern states to discuss the formation of a new party. One such meeting, in Wisconsin on March 20, 1854, is generally remembered as the founding meeting of the Republican Party.
The Republicans rapidly gained supporters in the North, and in 1856 their first presidential candidate, John C. Fremont, won 11 of the 16 Northern states. By 1860, the majority of the Southern slave states were publicly threatening secession if the Republicans won the presidency. In November 1860, Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected president over a divided Democratic Party, and six weeks later South Carolina formally seceded from the Union. Within six more weeks, five other Southern states had followed South Carolina's lead, and in April 1861 the Civil War began when Confederate shore batteries under General P.G.T. Beauregard opened fire on Fort Sumter in South Carolina's Charleston Bay.
The Civil War firmly identified the Republican Party as the party of the victorious North, and after the war the Republican-dominated Congress forced a "Radical Reconstruction" policy on the South, which saw the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution and the granting of equal rights to all Southern citizens. By 1876, the Republican Party had lost control of the South, but it continued to dominate the presidency until the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933.
Some people want to believe that if the Republicans made mistakes or fell short it vindicates the decidedly proslavery or prosegregation Democrats, but that's hardly fair or true, rather it's an indication of how hard it is to get everything "right" in politics.
Efforts to advance the cause of liberty or justice shouldn't simply be dismissed if they don't satisfy our own presumed standards. We respect the founders for going as far as they did in the right direction, in spite of their shortfalls, and the same is true of subsequent generations.
Just picture those guys in an TV debate. The 5 o'clock shadow would look good, in relation to some of those schlubs back in 1860.
I have serious problems with the present day GOP.
Runaway pork barrel spending(waste, fraud & abuse), deficits(balance the budget), taxes(income taxes and the IRS should be eliminated) and illegal immigration(secure the borders, fine employers who hire illegals and deport illegals) just to name a few.
I always looked forward to the day that the GOP had control of Congress and the White House with great expectations...only to be verrrrrry disappointed!
God bless the GOP! The abolitionist party of Lincoln!
Thanks for posting that information about the history of the Republican Party. I wrote it!
For more information, see http://www.republicanbasics.com and http://www.lincolnreaganfoundation.org
Cheers,
Mike
Thanks for the links.
Being that you are from the old high tariff wing of the party, I was wondering if we can have your perspective on how the GOP has evolved.
"I'm printing this out and will hand it out to my classes on American Government and my Sociology classes next week when we're back from Spring Break. I can't wait to see the reactions!"
Excellent!
Which pieces are you printing out and what kind of reactions do you expect to get?
"I teach in an inner city high school."
Thank you for your service.
You're a better person than I.
My sister, God bless her soul, was a teacher.
I wouldn't last five minutes in a classroom teaching. LOL
Probably we shouldn't trust parties as much as people do. Parties are more like committees organized to achieve specific purposes than churches that lay claim to the whole truth and only way to salvation. It's enough for now that one is better than the other, and it's up to us to take the next step to get them to deal with the important questions.
The more things change, though, the more they stay the same. When we see how hard it is to get things done now, and how easy it is to for parties and governments to get derailed by those who want power or favors, we can understand how hard it was for America to address slavery and other divisive questions in the past.
Good things do happen, Happy Bday GOP. Aside from that, after reading the article I had a sense that History may soon repeat itself, in that the demorats seem to be doing all they can to divide America.
ROTFLMAO
And you base that claim on what?
Seems like it was a lot better back then.
Just the main body of the article (not the FR post responses) and I expect them to be quite amazed but not surprised. They know by now how badly they've been lied to by the public school AGENDA run on them by teachers, parents, clergy you name it all in the name of party entitlements.
I had one kid who told her mom she was going to vote Republican and the parent said if she did not only would she be thrown out of the home, she'd be totally cut off from family forever. So my student just agreed with mom, apologized and voted her conscience anyway. At least that's what she told ME. Heck, I don't know if it was the truth, but I know she was pretty angry at the family.
well let us know what kind of responses you get.
should be verrrrrry interesting. LOL
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