What the 1860 Republican Platform Promised Compared With What Democrats Offered

Ask a hundred Americans what the Republican Party stood for in 1860 and ninety-nine will give you one word. Slavery. They are not wrong, but they are not finished either. A party that only said "no more slavery in the territories" could have carried a few abolitionist wards in Boston. It could not have carried Pennsylvania, Indiana and Illinois, and those three states are what put Abraham Lincoln in the White House.

What carried them was a program. Think of a menu at a diner with an old, honest rule: if you want the crowd, you have to serve more than one dish. The Republican platform adopted at Chicago in May 1860 had a plank for the Western farmer, a plank for the ironworker, a plank for the German immigrant, a plank for the Great Lakes shipper, and a plank for the family that wanted to move to Kansas. Put it next to what the divided Democrats put on the table that summer, and you can see exactly why one side won.

How to read the table

Three documents are compared below, and the Republican immigrant plank, which I cannot set beside a clean Democratic counterpart, gets its own mention later. The first is the Republican platform adopted at Chicago, which I'll call the Chicago platform. The second is the platform of the Northern Democrats, who nominated Stephen Douglas at Baltimore in June 1860. The third is the platform of the Southern Democrats, who walked out of the Baltimore meeting and nominated John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky. A fourth party, the Constitutional Union Party, ran John Bell on a one-line pledge to uphold the Constitution and the Union, and I'm leaving it out of the table because it had no program to compare.

One caution. I am paraphrasing, and in a couple of cells I describe what a party's record showed rather than quoting its platform. Platform wording is a good place to check the primary text, and I note below where you should.

Everything in that table that is a platform plank can be checked against the platform text on the American Presidency Project or in the Library of Congress collections. I'd encourage you to do it, because a primary source beats my summary every time.

Plank by plank: slavery in the territories

Start with the plank that everyone remembers. The Chicago platform said freedom was the normal condition of the territories. It denied that Congress or a territorial legislature could give slavery legal existence in any federal territory. It did not say a word about abolishing slavery in the states where it already existed, and in a separate plank it affirmed that each state controlled its own domestic institutions.

The Douglas Democrats offered popular sovereignty. The theory was elegant: let the people of each territory decide. The practice, after Kansas, was a mess, and in 1857 the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case muddied it further by holding that Congress had no power to bar slavery in the territories at all. Douglas tried to square the two ideas, and it cost him the support of the South. The Breckinridge Democrats took the Dred Scott logic to its end: the federal government had a duty to protect slavery in the territories.

Three positions. One said no slavery in the territories. One said let them vote. One said slavery must be protected. If you want the full story of how that fight tore the old parties apart, read How the Kansas-Nebraska Act Killed the Whigs and Gave Birth to a New Party.

Plank by plank: the homestead law

Now the plank for the family. The Republican platform demanded a homestead law. The idea, simple and popular, was that the federal government owned vast tracts of western land, and that an ordinary family willing to live on it and work it should be able to own it, either free or at very low cost. The platform protested any view that treated settlers as paupers asking for a handout, and it called on Congress to pass a homestead bill that had already cleared the House.

The Democratic record was different. In June 1860, a Democratic President, James Buchanan, vetoed a homestead bill. Many Southern Democrats were suspicious of homesteading for a plain reason: free land in the West would fill with free farmers from the North, and that would tilt the balance of the territories against slavery. The Democrats were not uniformly against homesteads. Northern Democrats in particular often favored them. But the party was split, and the veto told voters which half had the President's ear.

That is why this plank mattered. A farm family in Iowa or Illinois, or a young man in Pennsylvania who wanted to go west, had a reason to care. Land is the most conservative of all assets. A man who owns his own ground has a stake in order, in property rights and in the law. The Homestead Act, signed in 1862, was the payoff, and you can read about it in Six Laws Passed in 1862 by a Republican Congress That Still Shape America.

Plank by plank: the Pacific railroad and the river and harbor plank

The Pacific railroad plank was a bet on the West. It declared that a railroad to the Pacific was imperatively demanded by the interests of the whole country, and it said the federal government ought to give immediate and efficient aid. California and Oregon were already states, the gold fields had drawn tens of thousands of people west, and the only fast way to get there was by sea around South America or across the Isthmus of Panama. A railroad would bind the coasts.

The Democrats were not against the idea of a railroad. As I read the record, both wings spoke in favor of one. What divided them was the route. A Southern route and a central route would put the benefits in different places, and so the debate became sectional. Stephen Douglas, who wanted a Chicago terminus, found himself at odds with Southern Democrats who wanted a line through the South. When your own party cannot decide where the track goes, you can't promise to build it.

The river and harbor plank was just as practical. It said that appropriations for river and harbor improvements of national character, needed for the safety of existing commerce, were authorized by the Constitution. The Democratic tradition, going back to Andrew Jackson, was suspicious of federal spending on what were called internal improvements. The 1856 Democratic platform, which the Douglas wing readopted in 1860, denied that Congress had the power to carry on a general system of internal improvements. Democratic Presidents James Polk and Franklin Pierce had each vetoed river and harbor bills. That mattered in Chicago, a lake port, and it mattered in every town on the Great Lakes and the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.

Plank by plank: the tariff

The tariff plank is where the Republicans were most careful, and it shows the craft of a platform writer. The plank said revenue should be raised by duties on imports, and that sound policy required adjusting those duties to encourage the development of the industrial interests of the whole country. Notice what it did not say. It did not promise a particular rate. It did not use the word "protection." It could be read by an ironworker in Pennsylvania as a promise of help, and by a New England merchant as a promise of moderation.

The Democrats were firmly on the other side, at least in the South, where low tariffs meant cheap imported goods and fewer retaliatory barriers against cotton exports. Their platforms stood in the Democratic tradition against using duties to favor one industry over another. A tariff bill sponsored by Representative Justin Morrill of Vermont passed the House in May 1860 and stalled in the Senate. It was enacted in the last days of Buchanan's term, in March 1861, after the senators from the seceding states had left Washington. That's a nice irony: the tariff Southern senators had blocked went through the moment they walked out.

Conservatives today argue about the tariff, and not everyone on the right agrees. For the arguments, see Republicans were the tariff party first, from Lincoln to McKinley and who really pays a tariff, following the dollar from dock to shelf. For this post, the point is plainer. In 1860, the tariff plank was designed to hold the Pennsylvania vote.

Who each plank was written to win

A platform is a shopping list for voters. Here is who was meant to read each line and say "that's for me."

1. The free-soil plank: farmers and workers across the North who objected to slave territory on economic grounds, plus the moral abolitionists.
2. The homestead plank: Western farm families and the young men and immigrants who wanted a farm of their own, especially in Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota.
3. The Pacific railroad plank: California and Oregon, and every Midwestern town that hoped the line would run through it.
4. The river and harbor plank: Great Lakes shippers and the river towns of the Ohio Valley, who wanted safe channels.
5. The tariff plank: Pennsylvania ironmasters and the workers they employed, and manufacturers across the Northeast.
6. The immigrant plank: German-American voters in the Midwest, who had seen the Know-Nothing movement of the 1850s try to restrict their rights and who wanted assurance that the Republican Party would not.

You could not win a national election in 1860 with only one of those groups. The party needed all of them, and the platform was how it asked.

The Democrats' best argument

I don't want to set up a straw man, so here is the case for the other side at its strongest. A Douglas Democrat in 1860 would say: we are the party of constitutional restraint. Federal aid to railroads, federal spending on harbors, federal land giveaways and a protective tariff are all expansions of Washington's power, and the Constitution is a document of limited powers. A free-standing federal government that picks winners and losers among industries is going to be captured by whoever has the best lobbyists. The Republican program, he would say, is the road to a bigger and more corrupt government.

That argument has real force, and conservatives today have good reason to take it seriously. But here is my answer, in three parts.

1. The land policy was a transfer to individuals. The homestead plank did not build a federal bureaucracy. It moved land from the government to private families, which is closer to privatization than to a new program.
2. The Democratic position on the territories was not neutral. Defending a limited federal government while asking Washington to protect slavery in the territories, as the Southern wing did, was not consistency. It was a limited-government argument applied selectively.
3. The tension is real and worth admitting. The 1860 Republican program, with its railroad aid and harbors and tariff, was a program of public investment, rooted in the old Whig tradition. It is not the same as the limited-government conservatism we argue for now, and an honest reader should not pretend it was.

That last point is a value claim and I'll own it as one. I think the party was right on the territories and mostly right on land. On the tariff, the debate continues, and good conservatives disagree. If you want the thinking behind the Lincoln-era vision of free labor and opportunity, Abraham Lincoln ran a party of free soil, free labor and free men lays it out.

What a platform is for

One last thing, and it brings the story forward. A platform is not a law. It binds no one. It is a promise made in public and a test of whether a party means what it says. The 1860 platform was unusual because the party that wrote it did what it said. Within three years of taking power, with the Southern members gone, Republicans passed the homestead law, the land-grant college law, the Pacific railroad law and a protective tariff. To understand what platforms can and cannot do, What a Party Platform Is, Who Writes It and What It Actually Binds is the place to start.

The 1860 lesson for any family, in any year, is simple. When a party hands you a program, ask what is on the list, who it is written for, and whether the people who wrote it will do what they say.

The bottom line

• The 1860 Republican platform was a full program: free territories, a homestead law, a Pacific railroad, river and harbor improvements and a tariff that encouraged industry. It was built to win Pennsylvania, Indiana and Illinois.
• The Democrats split in two in 1860, and their platforms could not agree on the territories, on homesteads or on federal aid, so they had no common program to offer.
• Read the primary text yourself. The platforms of both parties are public, and your own reading will beat anyone's summary, including this one.
• Be honest about the tension. The Republican program of 1860 favored active public investment. Admire what it accomplished, and debate which parts a limited-government conservative would repeat today.
• When you judge a platform in any year, ask who each plank is written for and whether the party has a record of keeping its word.