In fact, President Lincoln put his full political weight behind the passage and ratification of the 13th amendment. It was one of his very highest priorities in his second term - even personally signed it even though that is not a requirement. That amendment abolished slavery in the entire United States, including the slave states that had not joined the Confederacy.
Whigs were the party from which the Republicans arose. John Tyler, 10th US President and member of the Confederate Congress, had been a Whig. As had John C Calhoun, maybe the most significant Antebellum statesman in the country.
Uh, no, that is not even close to being true. The Republican Party did not arise from the Whig Party - completely distinct organizations. Former Whigs were just one of many groups that joined to form the new Republican Party - another major group was also the former Free Soil party members. The party was indeed founded primarily on the abolitionist movement despite your comments to the contrary.
John Tyler was a party hopper - a long time Democrat that was hardly ever a loyal Whig and certainly never, ever a Republican...his worst political battles as President were with other Whigs who even tried to impeach him - in fact he was expelled from the Whig Party and he endorsed a Democrat to succeed him as President. John C. Calhoun died before the Republican Party was ever formed and was in fact a Democrat and only briefly associated with the Whig Party when his former Nullifiers associated with it. There is nothing that even remotely links either of these men to the Republican Party.
I appreciate the ping to your corrections.
Even if his history had been accurate, the employment of several minor players as examples of political sway in favor of slavery interposed as being a rebuke of the statement that Democrats were the defenders of the institution amount to nothing more than a straw man argument.
It’s like saying “you can’t put all the blame on the bear for wrecking the beehive because there were some ants, a skunk and a couple of squirrels grabbing pieces of honeycomb too.”
"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."
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/republican-party-founded
"The Republican Party began as a coalition of anti-slavery Conscience Whigs such as Zachariah Chandler and Free Soil Democrats such as Salmon P. Chase"
"The Republicans absorbed the previous traditions of its members, most of whom had been Whigs"
"Most Whig Party leaders eventually quit politics (as Abraham Lincoln did temporarily) or changed parties. The Northern voter base mostly gravitated to the new Republican Party."
"During the Lincoln Administration (1861–1865), ex Whigs dominated the Republican Party and enacted much of their American System. "
"Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Rutherford B. Hayes, Chester A. Arthur and Benjamin Harrison were Whigs before switching to the Republican Party, from which they were elected to office"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_Republican_Party#cite_ref-3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_Party_(United_States)#Legacy
“There is nothing that even remotely links either of these men to the Republican Party.”
I never said that there was. I said that there had been Whigs in the South. Reading comprehension. Thanks for playing.