Introduction: The Republican party

In December 1859, in response to a request for some autobiographical information, Abraham Lincoln recorded that in the early 1850s he had been “losing interest in politics.” But then in 1854 came an event which, he recalled, “aroused me again.” The event was “the repeal of the Missouri Compromise,” brought about, of course, by the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. It was this which renewed Lincoln's interest in politics, and which propelled him on a course that would lead to the White House within a mere seven years.

Lincoln was not alone in reacting so decisively to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Indeed others had been far more virulent in their opposition. One of the most dramatic and effective of all the attempts to combat it was launched by a manifesto signed by six antislavery Senators and Representatives but written primarily by Salmon P. Chase of Ohio which appeared as early as January 1854. The Appeal of the Independent Democrats went further than Lincoln would ever go in denouncing the measure. “We arraign this bill,” Chase wrote, “as a gross violation of a sacred pledge; as a criminal betrayal of precious rights; as part and parcel of an atrocious plot to exclude from a vast unoccupied region, immigrants from the Old World and free labourers from our own States, and convert it into a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.”