HISTORY OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY. BY CHARLES M. HARVEY. CHAPTER I. ORIGIN OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY. [COPYRIGHT, 1896, BY CHARLES M. HARVEY.] S OCIAL forces are commonly in operation long before they begin When, to the bill appropriating $2,000,000 for the purchase of territory from Mexico outside of Texas, David Wilmot, a Pennsylvania Democrat, proposed an amendment providing that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory. except for crime, whereof the party shall first be duly convicted," the basic principle of the Republican party of a later day was laid down. This amendment, which was proposed August 8, 1846, demanded the restriction of slavery to the States in which it then existed, and came to be known in the politics of the time as the Wilmot Proviso. This was eight years before the foundation of the Republican party. The Wilmot Mexico. War with Mexico was under way three months when Wilmot intro- The War with duced his amendment. The war was forced by the South, through the annexation of Texas in 1845, in order to increase the area of the slave territory, and to preserve the balance in the Senate between the free and slave States. As a consequence of the war the region now known as California, Nevada and a large part of Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico, was obtained from Mexico, for which the United States Compromise. paid Mexico $15,000,000, and assumed debts of $3,250,000 due by Mexico to United States citizens. Most of this territory is south of the parallel of 36 degrees and 30 minutes, in which slavery was permitted by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, while north of that line slavery was specifically prohibited by that compact. The Missouri The Ostend Manifesto. The Free Soil Need for a New The Compromise of 1850. Death of the Endeavors, inspired in the South, to gain possession of Cuba, as a means of adding one or two more slave States to the Union, began to take shape immediately after the Mexican war, and they culminated in the meeting, in 1854, of James Buchanan, John Y. Mason and Pierre Soule, the United States Ministers to England, France and Spain respectively, at Ostend, Belgium, from which consultation resulted a memorable letter to the Administration of President Pierce, urging the Government to buy Cuba, and to seize it if Spain refused to sell. This proposition figured in the history of the time as the Ostend manifesto. The North was opposed to the increase of territory in the slave region for the same reason that the South favored it. This is what prompted the Wilmot slavery restriction. A sectional division on the question was immediately created, most of the Northern members of Congress favoring the proviso, and most of the Southern members opposing it. It passed the House, in which the free States were preponderant through representation by population, but it failed in the Senate through the balance between slave and free States which the South had contrived to preserve until the admission of California as a free State in 1850. The proviso created the Free Soil party, which appeared in the presidential canvasses of 1848 and 1852, was a rallying point for the friends of freedom in all parties, who were necessarily confined almost wholly to the North and the border States, and consolidated these elements-anti-slavery Whigs, anti-slavery Democrats and Free Soilers-when Stephen A. Douglas' Kansas - Nebraska act of May 30, 1854, placed slavery on an equal footing with freedom in territory north of latitude 36 degrees and 30 minutes, and struck down the Missouri barrier erected by the compromise of 1820. This combination, at first vaguely known as Anti-Nebraska men, eventually became the Republican party. The necessity for the creation of a new party, on the single basis of opposition to the encroachment of the slave element, became plain to the friends of freedom of both the great organizations when the Southern end of the Democracy forced, and the Whig party adopted, the fugitive slave law of 1850 as compensation for the permission allowed to the citizens of California to form a free State. The admission of California, the fugitive slave law and the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia, were the most important of the measures constituting the compromise of 1850. Each organization, the Whig and the Democratic, was dominated by its Southern end, which was much the smaller end as regards the Whig party. As a consequence of the Whigs' surrender in 1850, and their platform indorsement of that surrender in 1852, they lost ground in the presidential canvass of the latter year, carrying only four StatesVermont, Massachusetts, Kentucky and Tennessee-out of the thirtyone. The Whig wreck became complete when, in 1854, the KansasNebraska act made slavery extension the Democratic programme, and |