History of the Republican Party (United States)
The Republican Party, also known as the Grand Old Party, is one of the two major political parties in the United States. It is the second-oldest extant political party in the United States after its main political rival, the Democratic Party. In 1854, the Republican Party emerged to combat the expansion of slavery into western territories after the passing of the Kansas–Nebraska Act. The early Republican Party consisted of northern Protestants, factory workers, professionals, businessmen, prosperous farmers, and after the Civil War also of black former slaves. The party had very little support from white Southerners at the time, who predominantly backed the Democratic Party in the Solid South, and from Irish and German Catholics, who made up a major Democratic voting bloc. While both parties adopted pro-business policies in the 19th century, the early GOP was distinguished by its support for the national banking system, the gold standard, railroads, and high tariffs. The party opposed the expansion of slavery before 1861 and led the fight to dismantle the Confederate States of America. While the Republican Party had almost no presence in the Southern United States at its inception, it was very successful in the Northern United States, where by 1858 it had enlisted former Whigs and former Free Soil Democrats to form majorities in nearly every Northern state.
With the election of its first president, Abraham Lincoln, in 1860, the party's success in guiding the Union to victory in the Civil War, and the party's role in the abolition of slavery, the Republican Party largely dominated the national political scene until 1932. In 1912, former Republican president Theodore Roosevelt formed the Progressive Party after being rejected by the GOP and ran unsuccessfully as a third-party presidential candidate calling for social reforms. The GOP lost its congressional majorities during the Great Depression ; under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democrats formed a winning New Deal coalition that was dominant from 1932 through 1964.
After the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Southern strategy, the party's core base shifted with the Southern states becoming more reliably Republican in presidential politics and the Northeastern states becoming more reliably Democratic. White voters increasingly identified with the Republican Party after the 1960s. Following the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, the Republican Party opposed abortion in its party platform and grew its support among evangelicals. The Republican Party won five of the six presidential elections from 1968 to 1988. Two-term President Ronald Reagan, who held office from 1981 to 1989, was a transformative party leader. His conservative policies called for reduced social government spending and regulation, increased military spending, lower taxes, and a strong anti-Soviet Union foreign policy. Reagan's influence upon the party persisted into the 21st century.
In 2016, businessman and media personality Donald Trump became the party's nominee for president, won the presidency, and shifted the party further to the right. Since the 1990s, the party's support has chiefly come from the South, the Great Plains, the Mountain States, and rural areas in the North. It supports free market economics, cultural conservatism, and originalism in constitutional jurisprudence. There have been 19 Republican presidents, the most from any one political party.
Since 1980, Republicans have won seven out of the last twelve presidential elections, winning in the presidential elections of 1980 and 1984, 1988, 2000 and 2004, and 2016 and 2024. However, Republicans have lost the popular vote in 2000 and 2016 but won the Electoral College in both elections. These were two of the four presidential elections in which Republicans lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College, the others being the presidential elections in 1876 and 1888.
Beginnings: 1854–1861
The American party system had been dominated by Whigs and Democrats for decades leading up to the Civil War. But the Whig party's increasing internal divisions had made it a party of strange bedfellows by the 1850s. An ascendant anti-slavery wing clashed with a traditionalist and increasingly pro-slavery Southern wing. These divisions came to a head in the 1852 election, where Democrat Franklin Pierce trounced Whig candidate Winfield Scott. Southern Whigs, who had supported the prior Whig president , had been burned by Taylor and were unwilling to support another Whig. Zachary Taylor, who, despite being a slaveowner, had proved notably anti-slavery after campaigning neutrally on the issue. With the loss of Southern Whig support and the loss of votes in the North to the Free Soil Party, Whigs seemed doomed. So they were, as they would never again contest a presidential election.The primary event leading to the end of the Whig party was the Kansas–Nebraska Act, passed by Democrats in 1854. This also led to the establishment of the Republican Party, which took in both Whigs and Free Soilers and created an anti-slavery party that the Whigs had always resisted becoming. The Act opened Kansas Territory and Nebraska Territory to slavery and future admission as slave states, thus implicitly repealing the prohibition on slavery in territory north of 36° 30′ latitude that had been part of the Missouri Compromise. This change was viewed by anti-slavery Northerners as an aggressive, expansionist maneuver by the slave-owning South. Opponents of the Act were intensely motivated and began forming a new party. The Party began as a coalition of anti-slavery Conscience Whigs such as Zachariah Chandler and Free Soilers such as Salmon P. Chase.
File:Republican Schoolhouse, Second and Elm Streets, Ripon, Fond du Lac County.tif|thumb|Birthplace of the Republican Party at a schoolhouse, in Ripon, Wisconsin
The first anti-Nebraska local meeting where "Republican" was suggested as a name for a new anti-slavery party was held in a Ripon, Wisconsin schoolhouse on March 20, 1854. The first statewide convention that formed a platform and nominated candidates under the Republican name was held near Jackson, Michigan, on July 6, 1854. At that convention, the party opposed the expansion of slavery into new territories and selected a statewide slate of candidates. The Midwest took the lead in forming state Republican Party tickets; apart from St. Louis and areas adjacent to free states, there were no efforts to organize the Party in the southern states.
On September 20, 1854, a "People's Convention" was held in Aurora, Illinois, at the First Congregational Church to discuss slavery. L.D. Brady was elected chairman of that first Republican convention.
It was a representative gathering of 208 delegates who had been selected to form an anti-slavery party. The name "Republican" was adopted at this convention, together with a platform that formed the basis of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
The new Republican Party envisioned modernizing the United States, emphasizing expanded banking, more railroads and factories, and giving free western land to farmers as opposed to letting slave owners buy up the best properties. It vigorously argued that free market labor was superior to slavery and was the very foundation of civic virtue and true republicanism; this was the "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men" ideology. Without using the term "containment", the Republican Party in the mid-1850s proposed a system of containing slavery. Historian James Oakes explains the strategy:
The federal government would surround the south with free states, free territories, and free waters, building what they called a 'cordon of freedom' around slavery, hemming it in until the system's internal weaknesses forced the slave states one by one to abandon slavery.
File: Musical Fund Hall Philly.jpg|thumb|Musical Fund Hall at 808 Locust Street in Center City Philadelphia, where the first Republican nominating convention for president and vice president was held from June 17 to 19, 1856
The Republican Party launched its first national organizing convention in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on February 22, 1856. This gathering elected a governing National Executive Committee and passed resolutions calling for the repeal of laws enabling slaveholding in free territories and "resistance by Constitutional means of Slavery in any Territory", defense of anti-slavery individuals in Kansas who were coming under physical attack, and a call to "resist and overthrow the present National Administration" of Franklin Pierce, "as it is identified with the progress of the Slave power to national supremacy". Its first national nominating convention was held in June 1856 in Philadelphia. John C. Frémont ran as the first Republican nominee for President in 1856 behind the slogan "Free soil, free silver, free men, Frémont and victory!" Although Frémont's bid was unsuccessful, the party showed a strong base. It dominated in New England, New York, and the northern Midwest and had a strong presence in the rest of the North. It had almost no support in the South, where it was roundly denounced in 1856–1860 as a divisive force that threatened civil war.
The Republican Party absorbed many of the previous traditions of its members, who had come from an array of political factions, including Working Men, Locofoco Democrats, Free Soil Democrats, Free Soil Whigs, anti-slavery Know Nothings, Conscience Whigs, and Temperance Reformers of both parties. Many Democrats who joined were rewarded with governorships, or seats in the U.S. Senate, or House of Representatives.
During the presidential campaign in 1860, at a time of escalating tension between the North and South, Abraham Lincoln addressed the harsh treatment of Republicans in the South in his famous Cooper Union speech:
hen you speak of us Republicans, you do so only to denounce us as reptiles, or, at the best, as no better than outlaws. You will grant a hearing to pirates or murderers, but nothing like it to "Black Republicans." ... But you will not abide by the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear and mutters through his teeth, "Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!"