"The Vital Element of the Republican Party": Antislavery, Nativism, and Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln's election to the presidency urgently posed a series of questions about both the man and his young party. Just who was Abraham Lincoln politically? Precisely what did he and his allies truly stand for? What could be expected from the new administration? And, since elections not only decide the identity of the future government but also take the electorate's political temperature, what did Lincoln's election reveal about the values and priorities of the majority of northern voters who had just given him their support?

These were and are simple, straightforward questions, but the answers to some of them have long been hotly contested.

To many, what spawned and sustained Lincoln's party seemed obvious: a preoccupation with slavery and its future. Lincoln had forcefully said as much on innumerable occasions, as in his high-profile 1858 debates with Stephen A. Douglas. "The sentiment that contemplates the institution of slavery in this country as a wrong is the sentiment of the Republican party," Lincoln emphasized in Alton, Illinois. And it was that sentiment, he added, "around which all their actions, all their arguments, circle, from which all their propositions radiate. They look upon it as being a moral, social, and political wrong."¹

The abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who could be very critical of Lincoln's party, nonetheless agreed with Lincoln both about the focus of that party's argument with the Democrats and about how rank-and-file Republicans viewed that clash. "Slavery," Douglass observed in August 1860, "is the real issue—the single bone of contention between all parties and sections," and "the anti-slavery sentiment in the Northern States is the vital element of the Republican party."²

Many observers more hostile to the Republicans bitterly agreed. "The great point upon which the political parties of the country are at variance, is that of slavery," declared the Democratic Illinois State Register.³ The New York Herald denounced the Republicans in 1860 exactly because they "were founded on and animated by the antislavery idea."⁴ The Charleston Mercury warned a few months earlier that in the North now "a party predominates whose vital principle is hostility to African slavery in the South."⁵ One secession advocate after another made the same point in 1860-61.⁶ Over the years, many scholars have seen things similarly, and today this constitutes a broadly based consensus among historians of the subject.

At the time, however, some steadfastly denied that the desire to contain and ultimately destroy bondage was the essence of the Republican creed or appeal. During the mid-1850s, Stephen Douglas asserted that the Republicans were a party of ethnic hatred and cultural tyranny. Much of the Republicans' support came, according to Douglas and many of his party colleagues in the North, from anti-immigrant bigots. In making that case, such opponents depicted the Republican Party as the virtual clone of another organization that emerged during that decade—the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic American party, better known as the Know-Nothings, which notoriously aimed to exclude the foreign born from political life in the United States. "Abolitionism, Know Nothingism, and all other isms are akin to each other and are in alliance," declared Douglas. The Republicans, critics charged, have "no objection to Know-Nothingism and its distinctive and proscriptive doctrines."⁷ Both of those parties "combine against the political rights and religious freedom" of those "who were born on European soil." The growth of Republicanism, these northern Democrats concluded, thus reflected "the powerful influence" of sheer "bigotry" in much of the northern electorate.⁸

During the past few decades, some scholars have revived the notion that Republicans secured much of their support by endorsing nativist sentiments and measures. In 1856, they point out, the Know-Nothing presidential candidate, Millard Fillmore, received 22 percent of the popular vote, in the process depriving the Republicans of the crucial electoral votes of Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey . . . and, thereby, of the White House. Four years later, however, Lincoln obtained nearly all the electoral votes of those same states, in no small...