![]() ![]() In the 1860 election, a split between Southern and Northern Democrats over slavery propelled the Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln to victory, though he won only around 40 percent of the popular vote.Įven before Lincoln could be inaugurated, seven Southern states seceded from the Union, beginning the process that would lead to the Civil War. The Republican goal was not to abolish slavery in the South right away, but rather to prevent its westward expansion, which they feared would lead to the domination of slaveholding interests in national politics. Two months later, a larger group met in Jackson, Michigan, to choose the party’s first candidates for statewide office. territories by popular referendum, drove an antislavery coalition of Whigs, Free-Soilers, Americans and disgruntled Democrats to found the new Republican Party, which held its first meeting in Ripon, Wisconsin that May. In 1854, opposition to the Kansas- Nebraska Act, which would permit slavery in new U.S. During this volatile period, new political parties briefly surfaced, including the Free Soil and the American (Know-Nothing) parties. ![]() In the 1850s, the issue of slavery-and its extension into new territories and states joining the Union-ripped apart these political coalitions. Opponents of Jackson’s policies formed their own party, the Whig Party, and by the 1840s Democrats and Whigs were the country’s two main political coalitions. The Federalist Party dissolved after the War of 1812, and by the 1830s the Democratic-Republicans had evolved into the Democratic Party (now the main rival to today’s Republicans), which initially rallied around President Andrew Jackson. His supporters called themselves Republicans, or Jeffersonian Republicans, but later became known as Democratic-Republicans. Supporters of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, who favored a strong central government and a national financial system, became known as Federalists.īy contrast, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson favored a more limited government. Though America’s Founding Fathers distrusted political parties, it wasn’t long before divisions developed among them. ![]()
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