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In August 2000, the Republican party gathered in Philadelphia for its national convention, and nominated George W. Bush for president. Few delegates realized that the party’s first national nominating convention, in 1856, also took place in the City of Brotherly Love. But that party was a far different institution from its counterpart today. The sight of a Republican presidential candidate from Texas and a Republican leader of the Senate from Mississippi would certainly have surprised the party’s founders. So too would the sight of the party that saved the Union and emancipated the slaves embracing the Old South’s doctrine of state sovereignty and expressing deep hostility to civil rights enforcement, to affirmative action—indeed, to any measures that seek to redress the enduring consequences of slavery and segregation. Nonetheless, in some ways we still live in a world shaped by the achievements of the early Republican party—the destruction of slavery, preservation of the Union, and establishment of a national principle of equal rights for all Americans. In my first book, I argued that the key unifying principle of the Republican party before the Civil War was opposition to the expansion of slavery.1 Few Republicans, to be sure, should be classified as abolitionists —critics of slavery who called for immediate emancipation and equal rights for black Americans. The abolitionists never commanded more than a small fraction of the northern public. But they helped create a public opinion hostile to slavery and especially to its further expansion. When Congress in 1854 approved the Kansas-Nebraska Act, repealing the Missouri Compromise and opening a vast new area in the nation’s heartland to slavery, party lines shattered and a new organization, the CHAPTER ONE The Ideology of the Republican Party Eric Foner Republican party, rose to prominence on a platform of stopping slavery’s expansion once and for all. In the new party, belief in the superiority of the “free labor” system of the North and the incompatibility of “free society ” and “slave society” coalesced into a comprehensive world view or ideology. The distinctive quality of northern society, Republicans insisted, was the opportunity it offered wage earners to rise to property-owning independence. Slavery, by contrast, was an obstacle to progress, opportunity , and democracy. No one expressed this vision more eloquently than Abraham Lincoln. Having served a number of terms in the Illinois legislature and two years in Congress in the 1840s, Lincoln had retired from active political involvement in 1849. He was swept back into politics by the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Lincoln once remarked that he “hated slavery, I think as much as any abolitionist.”Yet he was not an advocate of immediate emancipation. He revered the Union and the Constitution and was willing to compromise with the South, including the much-despised Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, to preserve them. Moreover, he shared many of the era’s racial prejudices , affirming in 1858 that he did not favor blacks’ voting or holding office in Illinois, and frequently speaking of colonizing African Americans outside the country. In this he represented the mainstream of white northern opinion, by now convinced that slavery posed a threat to “free society,” but still convinced of the inherent inferiority of African Americans . But Lincoln also believed that the nation could not survive forever “half slave and half free,” and he insisted that the founders had intended to place the peculiar institution on the road to “ultimate extinction.” Like the abolitionists, Lincoln maintained that slavery violated the essential premises of American life—personal liberty, political democracy, and the opportunity to rise in the social scale. “I want every man to have the chance,” he proclaimed, “and I believe a black man is entitled to it, in which he can better his condition.” And, like the abolitionists, Lincoln insisted that America’s professed creed was broad enough to encompass all mankind. When his opponent in the celebrated 1858 Illinois Senate race, Stephen A. Douglas, proclaimed that the United States government was created “by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity for ever,” Lincoln responded that the rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence applied to “all men, in all lands, everywhere,” not merely Europeans and their descendants. Blacks, he added, might not be equal to whites in all respects, but in their “natural right” to the fruits The Ideology of the Republican Party 9 [18.191.239.123] Project MUSE (2024-04-25...

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