Political Parties of the Antebellum Era

In the decade before the American Civil War (1861–65), the two established political parties, the Whig Party and the Democratic Party , underwent extreme changes, resulting by 1860 in the end of the Whig Party and the rise of the Republican Party . These rapid changes in the political parties reflected the sharp disagreement between North and South over slavery , but also the fact that the North and the South were becoming two different societies with opposing political goals.

From 1832 to 1850, the Whigs and Democrats had sustained an uneasy peace in issues of slavery. Each party included among its supporters both Northerners and Southerners, and so each party worked out its own compromises on the slavery issue to please all their members. Initially, it was other factors, primarily industrialization and immigration , that were responsible for upsetting the balance.

Know-Nothing Party

In the 1840s, industrialization, the large-scale use of labor-saving machines to produce goods, led to an increasingly urban (city) society in the Northeast. The new industrial society produced wealth for its leaders, but also poverty and filthy living conditions for multitudes in the northeastern cities. Southerners viewed the industrialized North with disgust. Their hope to remain an agricultural society, and to avoid the dirty, crime-ridden conditions of some of the northeastern cities, became tied to the institution of slavery, which provided the labor Southerners felt they needed to sustain their farming economy.

Industry and the promise of jobs drew millions of immigrants from Europe to northeastern cities in the 1840s and 1850s. Northern Democrats generally welcomed immigrants and brought them into their party. The powerful Democratic political machines often supported the newcomers with their unofficial systems of political organization based on the spoils system, in which votes are promised in return for favors and political appointments are used as rewards. Whigs, in contrast, generally feared that the immigrants would be willing to work in menial or unsafe conditions at extremely low wages, lowering the standards for everyone. Ignorance and prejudice against religious and ethnic minorities heightened these fears.

After 1848, the Whigs in the North increasingly abandoned their party for the new American Party, or Know-Nothing Party , which vowed to end the immigrant tide. Part political party and part secret society, it maintained lodges open only to white, native-born citizens and inducted new members with secret initiation rituals. When questioned about these rituals, members answered “I know nothing”—leading many to call the party the Know-Nothings.

By 1848, some northerners had left both the Whigs and the Democrats, forming the Free Soil Party , which worked to stop slavery from expanding into the vast territories won from Mexico during the Mexican-American War (1846–47). By 1850, the Whig Party had been thoroughly shattered by the immigration issue.

Kansas-Nebraska Act

Without a strong Whig opposition to restrain them, Democrats took control of both houses of Congress as well as the White House. Though the Democratic Party was still a mix of Southerners and Northerners, Southerners controlled it. Democratic leaders took advantage of their new strength by reopening slavery issues.

In 1854, the powerful U.S. senator Stephen Douglas (1813–1861) of Illinois proposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act to organize governments for the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska . According to the act, the territories would choose by “popular sovereignty,” or by popular vote within the territory, whether they would be slave states or free states. Though a Northerner, Douglas was pressured by Southerners of his party to lead a successful effort to repeal the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had prohibited the creation of slave states north of Missouri 's southern boundary. With the passage of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, slaveholders were free to settle with their slaves in any territory they chose.

Rise of the Republican Party

Northerners were furious over the Kansas-Nebraska Act. To many, it seemed that the South could not be trusted to abide by any compromise. To halt the expansion of slavery and limit the power of the southern states, Free Soilers and antislavery Whigs and Democrats came together to establish a new party. Their organization took various names— People's Party and Independent Party, for example—but the name Republican became most popular.

In 1854, the Republicans nominated their first presidential candidate, western explorer John C. Frémont (1813–1890). On election day, Frémont and the Know-Nothings’ candidate, former U.S. president Millard Fillmore (1800–1874; served 1850–53), split the Northern vote, and Democratic candidate James Buchanan (1791–1868; served 1857–61) won the votes of an almost-solid South. Despite Buchanan's national victory, Republicans won many congressional seats.

Lincoln, the Republican spokesman

Stephen Douglas was up for reelection to the Senate in 1858. To oppose him, Republicans nominated little-known Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865). Lincoln challenged Douglas to a series of debates as a way of introducing himself to the voters; Douglas accepted. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates , Lincoln went on the offensive, attacking Douglas as a tool of the alleged Southern conspiracy to nationalize slavery. Douglas, in turn, branded Lincoln a proponent of the abolition movement and racial equality.

Douglas won the Senate seat, but Lincoln's strong performance in the debates helped publicize Republican ideas and made him a national figure. He received the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1860.

Democratic Party split

While the Republicans united behind Lincoln in 1860, the Democrats began to split along sectional lines. Southern Democrats demanded more protection for slavery as part of the party platform. Northern Democrats, feeling they had already gone too far to gain the goodwill of the South, refused these demands. Unable to agree, the two sides split. The Southerners nominated Vice President John C. Breckinridge (1821–1875) on a platform promising protection and even promotion of slavery in all the territories; the Northerners nominated Douglas. Dissatisfied with both these alternatives, a group of border-state moderates formed yet another party, the Constitutional Union movement, with a platform that offered little more than a veiled promise to stick to the middle ground on slavery issues.

Republicans worked hard for Lincoln, promoting an image of their candidate as a man of the people and an American success story. Buoyed by a party platform that artfully combined opposition to the “slave power conspiracy” with an appeal to important special interests, Lincoln won every free state in the Union on election day, securing a clear majority and winning the election.

Consequences of Republican triumph

The Republicans had won, but the huge divide between North and South was deepened. Even as Lincoln carried a united North, the proslavery Democrats carried an almost equally united South. Southerners declared that they would never accept Lincoln as president—that he was an outsider imposed on them against their nearunanimous vote at the polls. Feeling unrepresented by the Republican majority, the Southern slaveholders determined to secede from the Union. (See Secession .) This set the stage for the Civil War.