From the First Parties to the Civil War, 1790s to 1865

May 22, 1856: the Senate chamber

On May 19, 1856, Senator Charles Sumner, a Massachusetts antislavery Republican, gave a speech he called "The Crime Against Kansas." He named two Democratic senators as the men responsible, Stephen Douglas of Illinois and Andrew Butler of South Carolina, and said Butler had taken as his mistress "the harlot, Slavery" senate.gov.

On May 22, after the Senate adjourned, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina, a relative of Butler, walked into the chamber. Sumner was at his desk putting his postal frank on copies of the speech. Brooks hit him on the head with a metal-topped cane, again and again, until Sumner was carried out bleeding. Brooks survived a House censure resolution, resigned, was reelected, and died at 37. Sumner recovered slowly and served 18 more years senate.gov.

The Senate Historical Office writes that both men became heroes in their own regions overnight senate.gov. This chapter is how the country got to that room, and what came after it.

The one thing that changed everything

The Kansas-Nebraska Act. In January 1854, Senator Stephen Douglas, a Democrat from Illinois, introduced a bill to organize two territories west of Missouri and let the settlers decide whether slavery would be legal there. The act passed on May 30, 1854. It repealed the Missouri Compromise, which had outlawed slavery in the Louisiana territories above 36 degrees 30 minutes latitude archives.gov.

The roll calls split by party. In the Senate on March 3, 1854, Democrats voted 28 yes and 5 no, and Whigs 9 yes and 7 no; the bill passed 37 to 14 voteview.com. In the House on May 22, 1854, Democrats voted 100 yes and 44 no, and Whigs 13 yes and 51 no; it passed 113 to 100 voteview.com.

The National Archives lists what followed. Proslavery and antislavery settlers rushed into Kansas to win the first election, and the fighting there was called "Bleeding Kansas." Opponents of the act helped found the Republican Party, which opposed the spread of slavery into the territories archives.gov. The Senate Historical Office adds that the Whig Party dissolved over slavery in the 1850s and was replaced by the new Republican Party, and that the Democratic Party also split over slavery senate.gov. Six years after the act, a Republican was elected president.

The first split: how strong should the national government be?

The first American parties grew out of one question in 1791: could Congress charter a national bank when the Constitution does not say "bank"? Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton wrote opposite answers. Jefferson led the Republicans (later called Democratic-Republicans) and Hamilton the Federalists. The longer story is in How the Democratic-Republican Party formed.

"To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition." avalon.law.yale.edu

Thomas Jefferson, secretary of state (Democratic-Republican), opinion on the constitutionality of a national bank, 1791

"Every power vested in a government is in its nature sovereign, and includes, by force of the term, a right to employ all the means requisite and fairly applicable to the attainment of the ends of such power, and which are not precluded by restrictions and exceptions specified in the Constitution." avalon.law.yale.edu

Alexander Hamilton, secretary of the treasury (Federalist), opinion on the constitutionality of the Bank of the United States, 1791

Democrats and Whigs: the bank, tariffs and roads

After the four-way election of 1824 (see 1824 and after), the old Republican coalition split. When Andrew Jackson won in 1828, he was backed by a new coalition with a base in states and towns: the Democratic Party. In the Senate, Henry Clay of Kentucky led the anti-Jackson forces, who called themselves Whigs senate.gov.

In the 1830s the two parties began sitting on opposite sides of the Senate chamber, Democrats to the right of the presiding officer and Whigs to the left. They fought over the Bank of the United States, import tariffs, and federal money for roads, canals and bridges senate.gov.

The bank was the biggest fight. Congress voted to renew the charter of the Second Bank of the United States, and on July 10, 1832, Jackson vetoed it avalon.law.yale.edu. The Miller Center records that Attorney General Roger Taney and adviser Amos Kendall wrote most of the message millercenter.org. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts answered it in the Senate the next day gutenberg.org.

"When the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society-the farmers, mechanics, and laborers-who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government." avalon.law.yale.edu

Andrew Jackson, president (Democrat), veto message on the bank bill, July 10, 1832

"I tell him the attempt is to play off his passions against his interests, and to prevail on him, in the name of liberty, to destroy all the fruits of liberty; in the name of patriotism, to injure and afflict his country; and in the name of his own independence, to destroy that very independence, and make him a beggar and a slave." gutenberg.org

Daniel Webster, senator from Massachusetts (Jackson opponent), Senate speech on the veto, July 11, 1832

That November, Jackson beat the National Republican Henry Clay, 219 electoral votes to 49 archives.gov.

Indian removal

On May 28, 1830, Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act. It let the president trade land west of the Mississippi for Indian lands inside existing states guides.loc.gov. Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, who would run for vice president on the Whig ticket in 1844 archives.gov, spoke against the bill in the Senate on April 6, 1830 archive.org. Jackson reported on removal to Congress that December.

"What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization and religion?" archives.gov

Andrew Jackson, president (Democrat), annual message to Congress, December 6, 1830

"Do the obligations of justice change with the color of the skin? Is it one of the prerogatives of the white man, that he may disregard the dictates of moral principles, when an Indian shall be concerned?" archive.org

Theodore Frelinghuysen, senator from New Jersey (Whig candidate for vice president in 1844), Senate speech on the removal bill, April 6, 1830

By the end of Jackson's presidency his administration had negotiated almost 70 removal treaties. They moved nearly 50,000 eastern Indians to Indian Territory, later eastern Oklahoma, and opened 25 million acres to white settlement, most of it in the South and open to slavery archives.gov. Many Cherokees opposed the Treaty of New Echota, ratified in 1836. In the fall and winter of 1838 and 1839, the Army forced them west, some walking as far as 1,000 miles over four months. About 4,000 of 16,000 Cherokees died on the way archives.gov.

Slavery comes to the floor

On February 1, 1836, Representative James Henry Hammond of South Carolina moved that antislavery petitions "be not received" by the House. The House History Office calls his speech the first defense of slavery in Congress history.house.gov.

"I believe [slavery] to be the greatest of all the great blessings which a kind Providence has bestowed upon our glorious region." history.house.gov

James Henry Hammond, representative from South Carolina, House floor, February 1, 1836

In May 1836 the House adopted the "gag rule," which barred debate over slavery. It stayed in effect until December 1844 history.house.gov.

The Democratic Party wrote its position into its national platform in 1840 and repeated it, nearly word for word, in 1856: Congress had no power to interfere with "the domestic institutions of the several states," and "all efforts by abolitionists or others, made to induce congress to interfere with questions of slavery" would "lead to the most alarming and dangerous consequences" presidency.ucsb.edupresidency.ucsb.edu.

The Whigs held the White House when the next law came. The Compromise of 1850 was five statutes passed in September 1850: California admitted as a free state, territorial governments for Utah and New Mexico, a Texas boundary, an end to the slave trade in Washington, D.C., and a stricter fugitive slave law archives.gov. On September 18, 1850, President Millard Fillmore, a Whig from New York, signed the Fugitive Slave Act millercenter.org. It required law enforcement in every state, free or slave, to arrest people suspected of escaping slavery, and it made anyone who helped them subject to prison and a fine archives.gov.

The parties break, and a new one forms

The Whigs won the presidency in 1848, with Zachary Taylor at 163 electoral votes to 127 for the Democrat Lewis Cass archives.gov. In 1852 the Whig Winfield Scott won 42 electoral votes to 254 for the Democrat Franklin Pierce archives.gov. In 1856 Millard Fillmore ran as the Whig-American candidate and won 8 electoral votes, all from Maryland archives.gov.

The Republican Party started in small rooms. On March 20, 1854, two months before the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed, 54 voters, mostly Whigs, Free Soilers and Democrats, met in a schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin, and agreed that a new party should be formed and called "Republican" wisconsinhistory.org. The name had been used before, by Jefferson's party; the reason the same word means two different parties is explained in Names and symbols.

A second new party grew at the same time. The Know-Nothings, officially the American Party, held secret meetings, "railed against the Catholic faith and sought to restrict Catholic immigration," won several governorships and legislative seats, and in 1856 took more than 20 percent of the presidential vote with Fillmore as their candidate millercenter.org.

The first Republican national platform and the Democratic platform of the same year set the two positions side by side.

"The American Democracy recognize and adopt the principles contained in the organic laws establishing the Territories of Kansas and Nebraska as embodying the only sound and safe solution of the 'slavery question' upon which the great national idea of the people of this whole country can repose in its determined conservatism of the Union." presidency.ucsb.edu

Democratic Party national platform, June 2, 1856

"It is both the right and the imperative duty of Congress to prohibit in the Territories those twin relics of barbarism--Polygamy, and Slavery." presidency.ucsb.edu

Republican Party national platform, June 18, 1856

The Democrat James Buchanan won, 174 electoral votes to 114 for the Republican John C. Frémont archives.gov.

Dred Scott

On March 6, 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney read the Supreme Court's majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford. The Court held that enslaved people were not citizens and could not expect protection from the federal government or the courts, and that Congress had no authority to ban slavery from a federal territory archives.gov. Describing how Black people had been regarded for more than a century before the Constitution, Taney wrote that they had been held "so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect" archives.gov. The 13th and 14th Amendments later overturned the decision archives.gov.

Douglas and Lincoln

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln challenged Stephen Douglas for his Senate seat. On June 16, accepting the Republican nomination in Springfield, Lincoln said: "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free" nps.gov. The two men then debated seven times. At the first debate, in Ottawa, Illinois, on August 21, between 10,000 and 12,000 people stood in the dust with no seats nps.gov.

"If we will only act conscientiously and rigidly upon this great principle of popular sovereignty, which guaranties to each State and Territory the right to do as it pleases on all things, local and domestic, instead of Congress interfering, we will continue at peace one with another. Why should Illinois be at war with Missouri, or Kentucky with Ohio, or Virginia with New York, merely because their institutions differ?" nps.gov

Stephen A. Douglas, senator from Illinois (Democrat), first debate, Ottawa, Illinois, August 21, 1858

"In the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man." nps.gov

Abraham Lincoln, Republican candidate for the Senate, first debate, Ottawa, Illinois, August 21, 1858

Both men also said things in those debates that are part of the record. At Ottawa, Douglas said: "I believe this Government was made on the white basis... and I am in favor of confining citizenship to white men" nps.gov. At the fourth debate, in Charleston, Illinois, on September 18, Lincoln said: "I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races," and that he was "in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race" nps.gov.

Two years later the two men ran against each other for president.

1860

The Republican platform of May 17, 1860, stated "that the normal condition of all the territory of the United States is that of freedom" presidency.ucsb.edu. The Democrats split, and the Senate Historical Office records that Southern Democrats chose to leave the Senate in support of secession senate.gov. Four men won electoral votes in November: the Republican Lincoln 180, John C. Breckinridge 72, John Bell 39 and the Democrat Douglas 12 archives.gov.

Southern states began to leave. On December 24, 1860, South Carolina's convention adopted its declaration of causes avalon.law.yale.edu. Mississippi's convention published its own avalon.law.yale.edu. Lincoln answered in his inaugural address on March 4, 1861 avalon.law.yale.edu.

"A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery." avalon.law.yale.edu

South Carolina secession convention, Declaration of the Immediate Causes, December 24, 1860

"Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world." avalon.law.yale.edu

Mississippi secession convention, declaration of the immediate causes of secession

"In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors... We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies." avalon.law.yale.edu

Abraham Lincoln, president (Republican), first inaugural address, March 4, 1861

In the same address Lincoln repeated: "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists" avalon.law.yale.edu.

On March 21, 1861, in Savannah, Georgia, Alexander H. Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, said of the new Confederate government: "its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man" battlefields.org. This was a Confederate government speech, not a party platform.

War

The Union was 18.5 million people. The Confederacy listed 5.5 million free people and 3.5 million enslaved people nps.gov. On January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring free all enslaved people in areas still in rebellion. It did not apply to the loyal border states, and its promise depended on Union victory. It opened the Army and Navy to Black men, and almost 200,000 Black soldiers and sailors fought for the Union by the end of the war archives.gov.

In 1864 the two parties wrote opposite answers about the war itself.

"After four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war, during which, under the pretense of a military necessity of war-power higher than the Constitution, the Constitution itself has been disregarded in every part, and public liberty and private right alike trodden down... justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities." presidency.ucsb.edu

Democratic Party national platform, August 29, 1864

"As slavery was the cause, and now constitutes the strength of this Rebellion, and as it must be, always and everywhere, hostile to the principles of Republican Government, justice and the National safety demand its utter and complete extirpation from the soil of the Republic." presidency.ucsb.edu

Republican Party national platform, June 7, 1864

Lincoln won 212 electoral votes to 21 for the Democrat George B. McClellan. The Confederate states did not take part archives.gov.

The amendment

On April 8, 1864, the Senate passed an amendment abolishing slavery, 38 to 6. The yes votes were 30 Republicans, four border-state Democrats and four Union Democrats senate.gov. The House did not pass it that year. Lincoln insisted it be added to the Republican platform, and on January 31, 1865, the House passed it, 119 to 56 archives.gov.

On March 4, 1865, Lincoln gave his second inaugural address.

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds." avalon.law.yale.edu

Abraham Lincoln, president (Republican), second inaugural address, March 4, 1865

He was shot on the night of April 14, 1865, and died the next morning. Vice President Andrew Johnson took the oath on April 15 archives.gov. The National Park Service counts 110,100 Union soldiers killed in battle and 224,580 dead of disease, and 94,000 Confederate soldiers killed in battle and 164,000 dead of disease nps.gov. The 13th Amendment was ratified on December 6, 1865 archives.gov.

Religion in this era

Black churches. In 1787, Richard Allen and his colleagues in Philadelphia broke away from the Methodist Church, and in 1815 they founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church. It began with 8 clergy and 5 churches; by 1846 it had 176 clergy, 296 churches and 17,375 members loc.gov.

Islam. Omar ibn Said, a Muslim scholar from West Africa, was captured in 1807 and brought to Charleston, South Carolina, as a slave. In 1831, still enslaved in North Carolina, he wrote his autobiography in Arabic. The Library of Congress, which acquired it in 2017, says it is the only known one of its kind still in existence blogs.loc.gov.

Methodists split. At the 1844 General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, the dispute centered on Bishop James O. Andrew, who had acquired slaves through marriage. The conference voted to suspend him from his office as long as he could not or would not free them. Southern delegates drafted a Plan of Separation and met in Louisville, Kentucky, in May 1845 to organize the Methodist Episcopal Church, South umc.org.

Baptists split. The Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845. In 1995 it resolved that its relationship with African Americans had been hindered "by the role that slavery played in the formation of the Southern Baptist Convention," and that "Many of our Southern Baptist forbears defended the right to own slaves" sbc.net.

Catholics. The Know-Nothings campaigned against the Catholic faith and Catholic immigration millercenter.org. The two major parties answered in different ways. The 1856 Democratic platform condemned a "political crusade" against "Catholic and foreign-born" presidency.ucsb.edu. Lincoln, a Republican, wrote privately on August 24, 1855: "I am not a Know-Nothing... When the know-nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics'" papersofabrahamlincoln.org.

Latter-day Saints. Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was murdered in 1844, and church members moved to Utah senate.gov. The first Republican platform, in 1856, named polygamy, then practiced by the church, alongside slavery as one of the "twin relics of barbarism" presidency.ucsb.edu.

Jews. On December 17, 1862, Major General Ulysses S. Grant issued General Orders No. 11: "The Jews, as a class, violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department, and also Department orders, are hereby expelled from the Department." At least thirty Jewish families in Paducah, Kentucky, were forced from their homes. Lincoln had General Henry Halleck order Grant to rescind it nps.gov.

The full account of religion and the parties, including the Philadelphia riots of 1844, is in Religion and the parties.

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Last checked against its sources on October 30, 2026. Report a correction.