But as the war dragged on, strategic imperatives inexorably pulled Lincoln and the Republicans further toward abolition, as they sought to undermine their Southern opponents.Įventually, with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, Lincoln announced that all slaves in the Confederacy - but not the four slave states that didn’t rebel - would be free. And when Northerners concluded that they could not stand for secession, the Civil War began.Īt first, the North’s stated aim was merely to restore the South to the Union - not to free slaves. So in 1861, 11 states seceded to form a new nation, the Confederate States of America. Now, Lincoln wasn’t the Great Emancipator yet in fact, he continually promised that he wouldn’t interfere with slavery where it existed.īut white slaveholders in the South still didn’t want to abide by the rule of the entirely Northern Republican Party. Throughout all this, the Republican Party gradually gained strength in the North - and in 1860, the party's victories throughout the region were to win its little-known nominee, Abraham Lincoln, the presidency. Free-Soilers fought pro-slavery settlers in Kansas, the Supreme Court ruled in the Dred Scott case that black Americans couldn’t be citizens, and abolitionist activist John Brown tried to start an armed insurrection against slaveholders. In the Republican Party’s first six years of existence, slavery-related controversies pitting the North against the South grew more and more heated. Ward, Prothero, and Leathes, The Cambridge Modern History Atlas ![]() 2) The Civil War drives Republicans to end slavery A map of when states (in green) seceded from the Union. Its supporters and sympathizers won an impressive share of seats in Congress, and it became known as the Republican Party. While not calling for abolishing slavery where it already existed, and certainly not calling for racial equality, this new party would be resolutely opposed to expanding slavery any further. And remarkably quickly, a new, entirely Northern party sprang up to take its place. īy 1854, in the face of intense controversy over whether Kansas and Nebraska would enter the Union as free or slave states, the Whig Party, which had been divided on the issue, collapsed. The real concern was that Northerners feared the "Slave Power" - the South - would become a cabal that would utterly dominate US politics, instituting slavery wherever they could and cutting off opportunity for free white laborers, as historian Heather Cox Richardson writes in her book To Make Men Free. ![]() Now, the issue here wasn’t that Northern politicians were desperate to abolish slavery in the South immediately, apart from a few radical crusaders. And this was an enormously consequential question, because the more slave states there were, the easier it would be for the slaveholding states to get their way in the Senate and the Electoral College. The American South based its economy on the enslavement of millions, and the two major parties - which by the 1850s were the Democrats and the Whigs - were willing to let the Southern states be.īut when the US started admitting more and more Western states to the Union, the country had to decide whether those new states should allow slavery or not. PBS: American Experienceįor the first half-century after the United States’ founding, slavery was only one of many issues in the country’s politics, and usually a relatively minor issue at that. From an anti-slavery party to a pro-business party 1) The Republican Party was founded to oppose the "Slave Power" Northerners feared the Kansas-Nebraska Act would let the "Slave Power" dominate the US.
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