Print
Email
Look It Up
AT A GLANCE
Republican Party
6 articles on Republican Party
Republican Party
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 2273 Includes: Republican Party and the Civil War | Republican Party after 1868 | BibliographyThe Republican Party was formed in the summer of 1854 as an antislavery and free-soil reaction to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Within six years the Republicans' nominee, Abraham Lincoln, was elected president, and the party became a major force in American politics. Although the party's principles have changed drastically since its founding, it has remained one of the two major political parties in America for a century and a half. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, under a theory known as popular sovereignty, established two territories in which residents could vote whether to allow or prohibit slavery. The possibility of a free territory west of the Mississippi River infuriated advocates of slavery. The act also negated the Missouri Compromise, which prohibited slavery north of latitude 36°30′, thus angering antislavery forces as well. Throughout the North, “Anti-Nebraska” organizations developed almost overnight, appealing to Free-Soilers, Whigs, and antislavery ...
Read full articleRepublican Party
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
Word Count: 5321 Includes: The Antislavery Party. | The Progressive Era and the 1920s. | The Great Depression. | World War II and the Cold War. | The Modern Republican Party. | BibliographyThe Republican Party was formed in 1854 by Americans opposed to the expansion of slavery and was for eighty years the dominant political party among African Americans. However, the Great Depression proved to be a watershed event: blacks increasingly turned to the Democratic Party at the national level because of support for New Deal programs and in response to the purging of southern blacks from the party structure during the Herbert Hoover administration. The erosion of African American support for the Grand Old Party (GOP) continued through the twentieth century, despite commonalities between the African American community and the party on a range of issues and despite the national stature of influential black Republicans.The Republican Party emerged first in Wisconsin and Michigan ...
Read full articleRepublican Party
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 1308 Includes: BibliographyOne of the two major political parties in the United States; formed in part to oppose slavery, it has since lost the support of most black Americans. The Republican Party was formed in 1854 to oppose the westward expansion of Slavery in the United States. Earlier that year, Midwesterners had organized en masse to protest the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed slavery in those territories, and within months the new antislavery party was formed.By the time of the 1860 election of President Abraham Lincoln, the Republican Party had toned down its rhetoric concerning the slavery issue. However, the American Civil Warestablished the party as the liberator of slaves and won it the allegiance of the overwhelming majority of black Americans. Lincoln, who issued the Emancipation Proclamation as a war measure and who said that he would ...
Read full articleRepublican Party
Source: The Oxford Companion to United States History
Word Count: 2111 Includes: From the Gilded Age through the 1930s. | The 1980s and Beyond. | Republican Divisions over Foreign Policy.The Republican party emerged in the 1850s from a party system torn by political pressures it could not contain. The organizers of the new party brought together formerly hostile groups, including Northern Whigs, antislavery Free Soil Party members, and dissident Democrats—all affected by worsening North-South tensions unleashed by the struggle for control of the Kansas territory—along with nativist Know-Nothings reacting against the flood of Irish Catholic immigrants. Republicans portrayed the Democratic party as controlled by an expansionist Southern “slavocracy” abetted in the urban North by immigrant votes, and the new party grew rapidly as sectional conflict intensified in the late 1850s. Its opposition to the expansion of slavery and its backing of free labor and federal support for economic ...
Read full articleRepublican Party Platform (1860)
Word Count: 1717The issue of slavery cast a long shadow over the presidential election of 1860. The Republicans gathered for their national convention in Chicago, Illinois, in May. In contrast to the wildly contentious, multifarious, and ultimately unsuccessful attempts by the Democratic Party to nominate a single candidate (the party, after much labor, nominated two: Stephen A. Douglas to represent the more moderate northern forces, and John C. Breckinridge for the vociferously proslavery elements of the South), the Republican effort was remarkably free of controversy. After only three ballots Abraham Lincoln of Illinois became the party's candidate for the presidency of the United States, defeating the favored William H. Seward of New York (whose radical antislavery views the party considered a weakness) as well as Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania and Salmon Chase of Ohio. Lincoln, it was thought, would perform better in the lower-northern regions of the country than would a more explicitly antislavery candidate. ...
Read full articleThe Republican Party's “Contract with America” (1994)
Word Count: 1371By the midterm Congressional elections of 1994, much of the country had come to see the longstanding Democratic majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives as hidebound, bloated by a power too long held, out-of-touch with the interests of ordinary Americans, and plagued by graft and corruption. Many of these accusations were at least based in fact; others were the consequence of several decades of one-party rule in the House of Representatives. Republicans, on the other hand, had failed to win majorities in both houses of Congress since 1954. A masterful campaign prop as well as a handy guide to the general principles of Reagan-era conservatism, the “Contract with America” was, at least ostensibly, a promise of a return to responsible, common sense government and a “national renewal.” While the document does contain a number of provisions meant to restore the faith of the public in the legislative branch, such as a ...
Read full article