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The Party of Freedom and Progress A President Frémont TL
Created by fjihr
“I am a Republican, a black, dyed in the wool Republican, and I never intend to belong to any other party than the party of freedom and progress.” – Frederick Douglass, African-American abolitionist and former slave
Part I: The Rebirth of the Union
Background
In 1848, the Whig Party had won the presidential elections, despite their electoral campaign having been based on calling President Polk a warmonger, which was proven to be wrong. The Whig presidential candidate, war hero Zachary Taylor, became President. Yet, only eight years later, the party had virtually collapsed. How did the Whigs fall from power so quickly? The answer is the great issue of slavery.
Having been an issue even during the era of the Founding Fathers, it became a major divisive issue in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War. With the American annexation of quite a few slave-owning regions, there were disputes over whether the new regions that were should enter as slave or free states. Ultimately, California entered as free state and Texas entered as a slave state but with less territory than it originally wanted in exchange for the American government relieving it of its debt, with all other Mexican land having joined as territories with unsure legal status and the buying and selling, but not owning, of slaves having been outlawed in Washington, DC.
Due to the issue of slavery having been opened up, the Whig Party, a party that had both pro-slavery and abolitionist members, had been divided somewhat. The abolitionists had blocked the re-nomination of incumbent Millard Fillmore to candidacy due to his blocking of the Wilmot Proviso, a law that would have outlawed slavery in all of the annexed regions save for Texas. In Fillmore’s place, a popular but politically inexperienced war hero, General Winfield Scott, became the Whig candidate, who would lose in a landslide to Democrat candidate Franklin Pierce.
The nails were truly set into the coffin of the Whig Party when the Kansas–Nebraska Act was passed in 1854, in which the legality of slavery would be decided upon popular sovereignty, or by the voting of citizens. Its passing divided Whigs further, to the point that the northern Whigs had left the party to form the staunchly abolitionist Republican Party. The Whigs were permanently reduced to minor party status when the majority of its members left to join the anti-Catholic and anti-immigration American Party.
With this, the stage was set for the 1856 election, an election that permanently shifted American politics, in which the party that was second-largest eight years ago had become a minor party and three parties –two of which were only founded recently – would compete for the presidency.