CHAPTER I.

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY—THE PARTY OF PATRIOTIC PRINCIPLES, NOT HYSTERICAL IMPULSES

The Republican party is to-day as it has been for forty years the party of sturdy American principles, progressive and conservative, accomplishing what it advocated and advocating what it believed to be the best ideals of government for a great people loving liberty and restrained by a national conscience. It has not been influenced by hysterical impulse, but has for years resisted that tendency in its own ranks and withstood it in the assaults of its opponents. It has triumphed over other parties since its organization because of its courage to fight for the principles which were formulated by the conscience of the people without regard to party affiliations, and at the same time it has been governed by a conservatism which checked revolutionary tendencies.

The Republican party had its origin not in revolutionary doctrine, but in the sober judgment of the people of the North that compromise with slavery was no longer possible in the development of the great territory of the West which was soon to be organized into States and have an equal part in the Union. It was in accord with the scriptural truth that a house divided against itself could not stand-that the nation could not live part slave and part free.

The first Republican President was a man of the people coming from the West where the strains of the Puritan and the cavalier met to form the best type of American independence. All the Republican Presidents have come from that same great section of the country, the Mississippi Valley, the newer New England, which has become the center of political thought as well as the center of population.

The record of the Republican party is written in the amendments of the Constitution, and in the Statutes, but it is also written in the most remarkable period of development of the United States. This record is also written in the position this government now holds among the great powers of the world. Its record is one of sturdy Americanism, good business management and wise diplomacy. What more can be asked of a political party inviting the support of the voters of the country?

The Republican party was organized at a time when the slavery question as applying to the new territories had been reopened by the practical hullification of the Missouri Compromise, which had been accepted as having made free soil forever of the territory west of the Mississippi river except in that portion which was to constitute the State of Arkansas. The effort of the Democrats in Congress to nullify the Missouri Compromise and leave Kansas and Nebraska open to slavery brought about a new alignment in politics and a new political party. There was a free soil movement all over the North. It was divided and without force until a delegate convention met in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, in February, 1856, and organized the Republican party. All free soil parties were invited to join the new national party, and the name was adopted, as Horace Greeley said, "almost spontaneously." The Pittsburg convention set forth a long and able exposition of the principles and purposes of the Republican party and called a national convention to meet in Philadelphia, June 18 of the same year, to nominate candidates for President and Vice-President. All who deprecated the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and favored Congressional control of the Territories were invited to send delegates, but only Delaware, Maryland and Kentucky of the slave States were represented in this new convention.

Into the Republican party went the body of free soilers, among whose leaders were Charles Sumner, Salmon P. Chase, Frank P. Blair and Charles Francis Adams; the anti-slavery whigs among whom were Horace Greeley, Thaddeus Stevens, Abraham Lincoln, William F. Seward and Fessenden. Many of the know-nothings, like Banks, Colfax and Henry Winter Davis, won, as time passed by, the anti-slavery people of the party policy; some of the original abolitionists, like Giddings, Garrison and Wendell Philipps, though these were not nominally of the party and only active with it to spur it on to new aggression against slavery. Others came directly from the Democratic party and did much to win popularity for the new organization. Among these were Gideon Welles of Connecticut, Cameron of Pennsylvania, Hamlin of Maine, Trumbull of Illinois, Montgomery Blair of Missouri, and William C. Bryan of New York. Only earnestness of conviction and true devotion to principle could have united in one effective organization so many divers elements.

The platform of the Philadelphia convention declared the party

opposed to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, to slavery extension and to the rejection of the appeal of Kansas for admission as a free State; while it favored internal improvement, ignored the tariff and called upon Congress to exercise its sovereign power over national territory by prohibiting in the Territories "those twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and slavery." John C. Fremont and William L. Dayton were nominated for President and Vice-President, and the party cry for the campaign was: "Free soil, free speech, free men and Fremont."

Although the Republican party was not successful in that first year of its organization in electing its candidates, it was successful in spreading broadcast throughout the land the new principles of government which were to be put into practice four years later. It was but the beginning of the building of the country advancing its civilization, the introduction of new industries and protection to the wage-earner. At that election over 4,000,000 votes were cast, being an increase of about 30 per cent over the election in 1852. For the first time in many years a Democratic President was elected by a minority of the total popular vote. While James Buchanan, the Democratic candidate, received 1,838,160 votes, the opposition vote represented 2,215,768. The Republican party cast 1,341,234 votes and gave to Fremont 114 electoral votes. Of the sixteen free States, only California, Illinois, Indiana, New Jersey and Pennsylvania remained Democratic, and of these the combined opposition was greater than the Democratic vote in California in Illinois and in New Jersey.

In the next four years the Republican party gathered strength, and in 1860 elected Abraham Lincoln President of the United States. The history of the party from March 4, 1861, until the present time is the history of the country. There is not a line of affirmative legislation on the statute books to-day on which has not been placed the stamp of the Republican party. Old laws have been remodeled and revised to suit the new order of development, and new legislation has been enacted to give force and practicability to the principles of government laid down by this party. For forty years it has had control of the government except for four years during the last Cleveland administration, when the Democratic party again came into full power and succeeded in enacting the Wilson tariff law and repealing the Federal election law. These two acts constitute the national work of the Democratic party in that short period of power and in the last half century. The Wilson law

was so destructive to the business interests of this country that its repeal was demanded in the overwhelming majorities given to President McKinley, and it was soon succeeded by the Dingley law after the McKinley administration began. The repeal of the Federal election law is therefore the only act of the Democratic party in the last forty years that has not been undone.

The first platform of the Republican party favored internal improvements, the prohibition of slavery and polygamy in the Territories and free Kansas. The second platform adopted in 1860 reversed the policy of the Democrats not only as to the slavery question, but as to the policy it had generally maintained on the constitutional right to make internal improvements at the expense of the National Treasury. It laid down in that second platform principles of government which have guided it ever since, and assisted it in fostering and encouraging the most wonderful development that this country has ever known in the same period of time. It demanded not only that the support of the government should be largely from duties upon imports, but also that these duties should be so imposed as to encourage the development of the industrial interests of the whole country. It took up the cause of labor and demanded a policy of national exchanges which secured to the workingman liberal wages, to agriculture remunerative prices, to mechanic and manufacturer an adequate reward for their skill, labor and enterprise, and to the Nation commercial prosperity and independence. It also protested against the sale or alienation of public land except to actual settlers, and demanded the passage by Congress of a complete and satisfactory homestead measure. It insisted that river and harbor improvements of a national character were required for the accommodation and security of commerce, and were authorized by the constitution. It demanded that a railroad to the Pacific ocean should be built for the interests of the whole country, and that the Federal government should render immediate and efficient aid in its construction. In that platform the Republican party mapped out a stupendous program changing the whole character of legislation and in fact nationalizing the government for the first time in its history. It was a new party without experience in national affairs and its platform was regarded as one of mere theories, but that party has carried out to the letter every principle laid down in the platform on which Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States. The Republican party found labor in the