I never finished my series "The Republican Party Stillborn, 1854-56" in soc.history.what-if but in my introduction to the series I did summarize my conclusions:
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During the 1912 election, many of Teddy Roosevelt's supporters hoped that his new Progressive Party would become one of America's two major parties, as the Republicans had become in 1856. At first sight, the fact that TR slightly outpolled Taft in that election might have seemed to vindicate that hope. But TR knew better. As the late William E. Gienapp summarized it (in a book on which this series of posts will largely be based, *The Origins of the Republican Party 1952-1856*, p. 3):
"...Roosevelt dismissed the idea that the two parties' situations were analogous. He observed pointedly that after its first national campaign the Republican party, unlike the Progressive, controlled a number of states, had elected a sizable contingent of congressmen, and most important, was 'overwhelmingly the second party in the nation.' Because a disaffected voter's support for another party was usually only temporary, third parties that did not quickly become the second party had no long-term prospects, the defeated Progressive leader argued. 'When we failed to establish ourselves at the very outset as the second party,' he continued, 'it became overwhelmingly probable that politics would soon sink back...into a two-party system, the Republicans and Democrats alternating in the first and second place.' As Roosevelt well understood, any new party had to confront the reality that the two-party system was a fundamental fact of American politics."
Just *why* the two-party system tends to reassert itself in the US even when people are most dissatisfied with the old parties has been much discussed here and elsewhere. Part of the answer is the first-past-the-post system of election to Congreas; but similar electoral systems have not prevented long-term multi-partyism in other countries. My guess is that the real reason is the American presidential system--presidential races ultimately tend to resolve themselves into two-candidate races, because bargaining for votes in either a divided Electoral College or in Congress (if the race is sent there) has generally not been considered legitimate by popular opinion since 1824. (One can argue that there is nothing wrong with it, either legally or morally, but that is another matter.) Anyway, whatever the reason, the tendency to revert to the two-party system is there. And it means that if the Republicans had not established themselves as *the* major alternative to the Democrats by 1856, it is doubtful that they could ever have done so--they would likely have suffered the same fate as previous anti-slavery parties like the Liberty and Free Soil parties, while some other party (either a Whig party shorn of most of its southern wing or, more likely, the American party) would have become the leading party of opposition to the Democrats. And that the Republicans could so establish themselves was far from inevitable, as I will attempt to demonstrate in forthcoming posts. To summarize my basic conclusions at the beginning:
(1) It is anachronistic to see the Democratic electoral setbacks in 1854 as a "Republican" triumph. (Even excellent reference sources have contributed to this error by listing as "Republican" some 1854-5 candidates who were no such thing yet.) Indeed, the only two states where the anti-Democratic opposition united and took the title "Republican" were Michigan and Wisconsin. In the northeast in particular, the dream of an antislavery fusion party actually seemed to suffer a major setback in 1854, thanks to the stubbornness of some Whigs in resisting fusion and to the sudden emergence of the Know Nothing or "American" movement. (Incidentally, the question of whether to establish a Republican party in New York in 1854 opened up a rift between Thurlow Weed and Horace Greeley which may have been fatal to William Seward's presidential candidacy in 1860, but more about that later...)
(2) It was only the deteriorating situation in Kansas and the disruption of the national American organization in 1855 which breathed new life into the idea of a national Republican party. Yet many Americans believed that the breach in their party could be healed. In any event, in late 1855 about half the northern states did not even have Republican organizations. And in those states where the Republicans did organize and run candidates in 1855 their showing was generally poor--in direct confrontations with Know Nothings in Massachusetts and New York, the Republicans lost; in Maine, a heavily "anti-Nebraska" state, they suffered a stunning defeat as Governor Morrill lost his bid for re-election; in Pennsylvania, Americanism was so strong that the incipient Republican organization was basically taken over by the Know Nothings (and lost to the Democrats). Chase's victory in Ohio was just about the only good news for Republicans in the 1855 elections. On November 30, 1855, Theodore Parker, a committed antislavery man, lamented that there would be two northern anti-Democratic candidates in 1856, "one Republican, one Know Nothing" and that no doubt "the latter will get the most votes." The evidence at the time seemed to support this. (Incidentally, one thing that the 1855 elections show, and which I will discuss in a later post, is that voters were by no means preoccupied solely with slavery or even solely with slavery and nativism. The liquor issue was much more important than most people today realize, and was almost certainly decisive in Maine.)
(3) What saved the Republican party was the great House Speakership contest of December 1855-January 1856 which ended in the election of Nathaniel Banks as Speaker by a very narrow plurality (103-100) over Democrat William Aiken. (I will discuss various ways in which Banks could have been defeated, and how such a defeat would have deprived the Republicans of resources which were to prove invaluable in the 1856 election, such as control of congressional investigating committees.) Yet many of Banks's supporters were Know Nothings who did not yet consider themselves Republicans and might never have done so if not for subsequent events.
(4) Even after the Speakership victory, the Republicans did surprisingly poorly in northern elections in early 1856. In Connecticut, for example, Republican gubernatorial candidate Gideon Welles finished a poor third (with only ten percent of the vote!) behind the Democratic and American candidates.
(5) In short, until Spring 1856 it seemed that the Americans would outpoll the Republicans in the North. Even if one assumes that the breach between antislavery Know Nothings (the so-called North Americans) and the southern and dough-faced "South Americans" was irreparable, the North Americans were strong enough so that they might resist fusion with the Republicans--or in any event insist that the fusion be on "American" terms and include an explicit commitment to nativism.
(6) It was only two startling events on May 19-21 1856 that assured that the Republican party would survive. One of them was in Kansas, the other on the Senate floor in Washington DC. [I was referring of course to the "sack of Lawrence" and the caning of Charles Sumner--DT] And neither of them was inevitable. The unusually severe winter of 1855-6 had largely brought to an end the earlier fighting and marauding in Kansas, and if the pro-slavery party in that territory had shown a bit more sense, this lull could have continued to its advantage, and a famous speech on "The Crime Against Kansas" might never have been delivered...
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