Q: Why Did The Republican Party Choose Lincoln As Its Candidate
A: Republican leaders met in Chicago in May 1860 to choose a presidential nominee. Attention focused above all on Senator William H Seward, the former governor of New York, who was widely expected to carry the day. But his reputation for radicalism, recently heightened by a speech depicting the struggle between slave and free societies as an irrepressible conflict, put doubts in the minds of Republican managers. Could he win the support of essential conservative voters in those states of the lower North who had previously blocked the partys route to power?
Sewards supporters took comfort from the handicaps under which most of his rivals laboured. Edward Bates of Missouri was too conservative, Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania too corrupt, Supreme Court justice John McLean too old, Salmon P Chase of Ohio too radical. But Seward had not reckoned on the dark horse, Abraham Lincoln.
Lincolns seven open-air debates with Stephen Douglas across Illinois in 1858, in pursuit of election to the United States senate, had won him national attention
Listen: Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch discuss a little-known attempt to kill Abraham Lincoln in 1861, just prior to his inauguration as president, on this episode of the HistoryExtra podcast:
Osawatomie John Brown And The Raid On Harpers Ferry
When the abolitionist John Brown arrived in Kansas Territory in 1855, he joined a growing band of settlers from the North who hoped to keep slavery and slaveholders out. Yet unlike most antislavery partisans, who wielded words, petitions, and moral suasion to attack the Souths peculiar institution, Brown arrived with weapons and a willingness to use violence to keep Kansas free. Before Browns appearance on the scene, proslavery settlers and neighboring Missourians made successful use of intimidation and fraud to win territorial elections.
For the next four years, Brown worked to make the territory bleed with deadly attacks on proslavery settlers at Pottawatomie Creek and in clashes with armed militiamen and their deputies at the battles of Black Jack and Osawatomie. He left the territory in early 1859, intending to take his war against slavery into Virginia, where he planned to incite a slave rebellion in the Appalachian Mountains.
Several of Browns comrades in his raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry had ridden with him in Kansas, and it was under the guise of carrying out additional violence in Kansas that Brown raised funds from New Englanders for the raid. While the raid itself turned out to be an unmitigated disaster, Browns foray into Virginia had far-reaching political implications for the entire nation already in the midst of the 1860 presidential campaign.
Q: What Part Did The Election Outcome Play In The Coming Of Civil War
A: War followed upon southern secession because Lincoln, supported by a majority of northerners, refused to concede that any of his fellow countrymen had a constitutional right of withdrawal from a perpetual Union, and certainly not in response to a democratic election fairly contested and legitimately won. When in early April 1861 Lincoln sent an unarmed vessel to resupply a federal fort in Charleston harbour, the Confederate batteries opened fire. As Lincoln later put it: Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish.
The war, then, was about the survival of the nation and, in its early stages at least, not about the survival or death of slavery. But the election of 1860 revealed the huge fissure between North and South over their incompatible understandings of the peculiar institutions future in the republic. That fissure had grown more profound since the annexation of Texas and the Mexican cession had raised fundamental questions about the status of slavery in the new acquisitions. The political contention reached its climax in the election of 1860.
Whatever the later claims of Confederates and their modern successors, the crisis of the Union of 186165 was not about states rights in the abstract. It was about the apparent threat to the power of the slave states to regulate their domestic institutions.
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On This Day The Republican Party Names Its First Candidates
On July 6, 1854, disgruntled voters in a new political party named its first candidates to contest the Democrats over the issue of slavery. Within six and one-half years, the newly christened Republican Party would control the White House and Congress as the Civil War began.
For a brief time in the decade before the Civil War, the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson and his descendants enjoyed a period of one-party rule. The Democrats had battled the Whigs for power since 1836 and lost the presidency in 1848 to the Whig candidate, Zachary Taylor. After Taylor died in office in 1850, it took only a few short years for the Whig Party to collapse dramatically.
There are at least three dates recognized in the formation of the Republican Party in 1854, built from the ruins of the Whigs. The first is February 24, 1854, when a small group met in Ripon, Wisconsin, to discuss its opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The group called themselves Republicans in reference to Thomas Jeffersons Republican faction in the American republics early days. Another meeting was held on March 20, 1854, also in Ripon, where 53 people formally recognized the movement within Wisconsin.
On July 6, 1854, a much-bigger meeting in Jackson, Michigan was attended by about 10,000 people and is considered by many as the official start of the organized Republican Party. By the end of the gathering, the Republicans had compiled a full slate of candidates to run in Michigans elections.
The 1858 Midterm Election
There is always a lull after a tempest, and so the political world has subsided into an unwonted calm since the election, commented a reporter for The New York Times. The Republicans are naturally . . . exultant over their sweeping victories. Such a commentary might apply to any number of elections, but this reporter described the outcome of a particularly historic electionthe midterm election of 1858. The Republican success that year was especially remarkable because the Republican Party was only four years old.
Almost by spontaneous combustion, the Republican Party burst forth in 1854 in response to the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act. For decades, Americas political battles had been fought between the Democrats and the Whigs. By the early 1850s, however, the issue of slavery had splintered the Whigs into warring factions and divided Democrats between north and south. When Democratic senator Stephen Douglas pushed his Kansas-Nebraska bill to passage, including its proposal to settle the issue of slavery by popular sovereignty, the uproar among northern abolitionists and anti-slavery activists was too fierce to be contained by the ailing Whig Party. As one person commented, The Whigs were simply not angry enough.
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Who Was Our 19th President
As the 19th President of the United States , Rutherford B. Hayes oversaw the end of Reconstruction, began the efforts that led to civil service reform, and attempted to reconcile the divisions left over from the Civil War. Beneficiary of the most fiercely disputed election in American history, Rutherford B.
Why Did Lincoln Think Secession Was Unconstitutional
He gave several reasons, among them his belief that secession was unlawful, the fact that states were physically unable to separate, his fears that secession would cause the weakened government to descend into anarchy, and his steadfast conviction that all Americans should be friends towards one another, rather than
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The Rival Candidates In 1860
In the 1860 election, the Democratic Party split into two factions. The northern Democrats nominated Lincolns perennial rival, Senator Stephen A. Douglas. The southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckenridge, the incumbent vice president, a pro-enslavement man from Kentucky.
Those who felt they could support neither party, mainly disaffected former Whigs and members of the Know-Nothing Party, formed the Constitutional Union Party and nominated John Bell of Tennessee.
Who Were The Candidates In The United States Presidential Election Of 1860
Abraham Lincoln of Illinois was the candidate of the generally antislavery Republican Party. The Democratic Party split in two. Sen. Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, the champion of popular sovereignty policy, was the Northern Democrats candidate, and Vice Pres. John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky was the candidate of the Southern Democrats, whose campaign was based on the demand for federal legislation and intervention to protect slaveholding. Sen. John Bell of Tennessee was the candidate of the new Constitutional Union Party, the political home for former Whigs and other moderates who rallied to support the Union and the Constitution without regard to slavery.
United States presidential election of 1860, American presidential election held on November 6, 1860, in which RepublicanAbraham Lincoln defeated Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge, DemocratStephen A. Douglas, and Constitutional Union candidate John Bell. The electoral split between Northern and Southern Democrats was emblematic of the severe sectional split, particularly over slavery, and in the months following Lincolns election seven Southern states, led by South Carolina on December 20, 1860, seceded, setting the stage for the American Civil War .
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Constitutional Union Party Nomination
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Former SenatorWilliam C. Rives from Virginia
The Constitutional Union Party was formed by remnants of both the defunct Know Nothing and Whig Parties who were unwilling to join either the Republicans or the Democrats. The new party’s members hoped to stave off Southern secession by avoiding the slavery issue. They met in the Eastside District Courthouse of Baltimore and nominated John Bell from Tennessee for president over GovernorSam Houston of Texas on the second ballot. Edward Everett was nominated for vice-president at the convention on May 9, 1860, one week before Lincoln.
John Bell was a former Whig who had opposed the KansasNebraska Act and the Lecompton Constitution. Edward Everett had been president of Harvard University and Secretary of State in the Millard Fillmore administration. The party platform advocated compromise to save the Union with the slogan “The Union as it is, and the Constitution as it is.”
What Were The Key Issues In The Election Of 1800
1800 Presidential Election
Central issues included opposition to the tax imposed by Congress to pay for the mobilization of the new army and the navy in the Quasi-War against France in 1798, and the Alien and Sedition acts, by which Federalists were trying to stifle dissent, especially by Republican newspaper editors.
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Q: Who Were The Republicans
A: Like all political parties, the new Republican organisation was a coalition. Its constituent elements emerged from the fractured politics of the mid-1850s that created a political vacuum by destroying the Whig party and weakening their rivals, the Democrats. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, the work of US senator Stephen A Douglas, an Illinois Democrat, opened up to slave-holding settlers a vast trans-Mississippi region previously deemed the preserve of free labour. The immediate explosion of anger in the North prompted state-level anti-Nebraska coalitions of disaffected Democrats, antislavery Whigs, independent free-soilers, and out-and-out abolitionists. At the same time an influx of immigrants, many of them Catholic, prompted a native-born backlash that further strained political loyalties.
The emergent Republican Partys opposition to the extension of slavery provided the policy glue that bound its elements together: radical emancipationists driven by moral purpose, racists determined to found lily-white western settlements, social progressives who deemed the South archaic and stagnant, and opponents of the political influence of southern planters the so-called Slave Power that had allegedly hijacked the federal government.
How Did Abraham Lincolns Election Caused The Civil War
A former Whig, Lincoln ran on a political platform opposed to the expansion of slavery in the territories. His election served as the immediate impetus for the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1865, Lincoln was instrumental in the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which made slavery unconstitutional.
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National Republican Platform Adopted By The National Republican Convention Held In Chicago May 17 1860 Chicago Press And Tribune Office Chicago Illinois 1860 Library Of Congress Rare Book And Special Collections Division Alfred Whital Stern Collection Of Lincolniana Https: //googl/lcbfpa
Resolved, that we, the delegated representatives of the Republican electors of the United States in Convention assembled, in discharge of the duty we owe to our constituents and our country, unite in the following declarations:
. . .
Republican Platform Of 1860. A reprint of the original broadside containing the Republican Platform of 1860, adopted by the National Republican Convention held in Chicago, 1860. Library of Congress, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.rbc/rbpe.0180010b.
Study Questions
What Were The 3 Main Parts Of The Dred Scott Decision
Chief Justice Roger Taney, writing for a 7-2 majority, articulated three major conclusions: 1) the decision held that free blacks in the North could never be considered citizens of the United States, and thus were barred from the federal courts; 2) the decision declared that the ban in slavery in territories considered
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Abraham Lincoln’s Wartime Run
Lincoln and Johnson’s 1864 campaign banner.
When Lincoln first ran for president in 1860, it was his Republican Party that had a stronghold in the north, and the Democratic Party that had found popularity in the south. When 11 southern states seceded to join the Confederacy, the Republican Party became the Unions dominant political party. Even so, for the 1864 election, the Republican Party decided to join forces with some Democrats to form the National Union Party.
Despite concerns about Lincolns electability, the National Union backed him as its presidential candidate. Yet notably, Lincoln ditched his current Republican vice president to run with Andrew Johnson, a Democrat who had previously supported slavery, in an attempt to balance the ticket.
Q: Why Did The Democratic Party Split
A: Enthusiastic expansionists, the Democrats as a national party had to fashion a policy for the western territories that would minister to the incompatible ambitions of free-soil and pro-slavery settlers. For a time Stephen Douglass formula of popular sovereignty leaving the settlers themselves to resolve the issue by a local vote kept northern and southern Democrats happy. But the doctrine was inherently ambiguous: as a unifying principle it could not survive the civil war between pro-slavery and free-soil settlers in bleeding Kansas or President Buchanans feeble yielding to supporters of a pro-slavery constitution there. Douglass political survival in Illinois and the wider North forced him to turn against the national administration.
Even so, as the countrys leading Democrat he expected to win his partys presidential nomination in 1860. By then, however, influential southerners had jettisoned popular sovereignty and, emboldened by the Supreme Courts landmark decision in the Dred Scott case , had begun to call for federal legal protection of slavery in the territories. The partys fraught national conventions saw it split over the issue of a federal slave code, leaving Douglas to fight the election as the candidate of the regular Democrats, and the Kentucky slave-owner, John C Breckinridge, to stand as the representative of southern radicals who stood ready to countenance quitting the Union if they did not get their way.
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Who Caused The Civil War
What led to the outbreak of the bloodiest conflict in the history of North America? A common explanation is that the Civil War was fought over the moral issue of slavery. In fact, it was the economics of slavery and political control of that system that was central to the conflict. A key issue was states rights.
Background To The Election Of 1860
The central issue of the presidential election of 1860 was destined to be enslavement. Battles over the spread of enslavement to new territories and states had gripped the United States since the late 1840s, when the United States obtained vast tracts of land following the Mexican War.
In the 1850s the enslavement issue became extremely heated. The passage of the Fugitive Slave act as part of the Compromise of 1850 inflamed northerners. And the 1852 publication of an extraordinarily popular novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, brought the political debates over enslavement into American living rooms.
And the passage of the of the;Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854;became a turning point in Lincoln’s life.
Following the passage of the controversial legislation,;Abraham Lincoln, who had essentially given up on politics after one unhappy term in Congress in the late 1840s, felt compelled to return to the political arena. In his home state of Illinois, Lincoln began speaking out against the Kansas-Nebraska Act and particularly its author, Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois.
When Douglas ran for reelection in 1858, Lincoln opposed him in Illinois. Douglas won that election. But the seven Lincoln-Douglas Debates they held across Illinois were mentioned in newspapers around the country, raising Lincolns political profile.
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