How the Kansas-Nebraska Act Killed the Whigs and Gave Birth to a New Party

A party can put two Presidents in the White House, produce Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, fight national elections for twenty years, and then fall apart in about two, with no scandal and no depression to blame. That is what happened to the Whigs. Their end is the best proof I know that a party is not a monument. A party is a coalition, and a coalition lasts only as long as its members can live in the same house.

The Republican Party was born in the wreckage. So if you want to understand why our party exists, and what keeps any party alive, start with a bill that most Americans have never read.

The line that held for thirty-four years

Go back to 1820. Congress was tearing itself apart over whether Missouri could enter the Union as a slave state. The answer was a deal, the Missouri Compromise. Missouri came in as a slave state, Maine came in as a free state so the Senate stayed balanced, and slavery was barred from the rest of the Louisiana Purchase north of the line at 36 degrees 30 minutes of latitude.

Nobody called it perfect. It left slavery in place where it already stood, and that is a moral stain that no honest person should excuse. But as a political settlement, it held. For about three decades it kept the question of slavery in the western territories off the table, and it did so by a simple device: a bright line on a map that everyone could see.

Hold that thought, because the whole story turns on it. A bright line is valuable precisely because nobody has to re-argue it. Erase the line, and the argument comes back, all of it, all at once.

Stephen Douglas and his big idea

Enter Stephen Douglas, the Democratic senator from Illinois, who chaired the Senate Committee on Territories. Douglas was a builder. He wanted a railroad running west from Chicago, and a railroad needs organized territory around it. That meant organizing the land west of Missouri and Iowa, which was still unorganized, into Kansas and Nebraska. There was one catch: all that land lay north of the old Missouri Compromise line, so it would come in closed to slavery, and Southern senators had the votes to stall any bill that said so.

Douglas's answer was popular sovereignty. Let the settlers of each territory decide the slavery question for themselves. It sounded fair. It sounded democratic. It sounded like the American way of settling an argument: put it to a vote of the people on the ground.

His first draft did not say what would happen to the old line. Pressure from Southern senators changed that. Senator Archibald Dixon of Kentucky, a Whig, offered an amendment to repeal the Missouri Compromise restriction outright, and Douglas, after talking it over, folded the repeal into the bill. The bill was also split into two territories, Kansas and Nebraska. When it was done, the text declared the old restriction "inoperative and void." President Franklin Pierce, a Northern Democrat, signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act into law on May 30, 1854.

The Appeal of the Independent Democrats

The reaction in the North was swift, and it came first from within Congress itself. In January 1854, as the bill moved, a small band of anti-slavery members published what they called the Appeal of the Independent Democrats. Its authors included Salmon Chase of Ohio and Charles Sumner of Massachusetts in the Senate, and Joshua Giddings in the House. They argued that repeal broke a solemn compact, and that it threatened to turn free soil into slave soil.

Whatever you think of their politics, the argument was shrewd. They did not just say slavery was wrong, though they believed it. They said the process was wrong. A settled agreement was being overturned for the convenience of a railroad promoter and his Southern allies. That is an argument that appeals to a farmer in Ohio who has never met an abolitionist. It says: the rules you relied on were just changed on you.

I'll give Douglas his fair due. He was sincerely committed to the principle that local people should govern themselves, and he believed the slavery question would sort itself out with settlers on the ground. The trouble was that the principle was applied to a question where one answer involved holding other human beings as property, and where outside groups would flood the territory to tip the vote. In Kansas, within two years, the result was open violence, which people called Bleeding Kansas. Popular sovereignty, whatever its virtues, did not bring peace.

How a major party breaks in half

Now the part about the Whigs. The Whig Party had been founded in the 1830s in opposition to Andrew Jackson. It stood for what Henry Clay called the American System: a protective tariff, a national bank, and federal money for roads, canals and other internal improvements. It won the presidency in 1840 and 1848, both times with a war hero at the top of the ticket. Clay and Webster, its two great names, died in 1852, the very year the Whigs ran Winfield Scott for President and lost badly to Franklin Pierce.

The Whigs had a structural weakness. They were a national party that had Northern and Southern wings, and the two wings agreed about banks and tariffs and disagreed about slavery. As long as the slavery question stayed quiet, the party held. Kansas-Nebraska made it impossible to keep quiet. Northern Whigs in Congress mostly voted against the bill. Southern Whigs mostly supported it. A party whose members vote in opposite directions on the biggest question of the day has no reason to exist as a party.

Let me put it as a rule you can use anywhere:

1. A party is held together by the issues its members agree on, not by the ones they don't mention.
2. When one issue becomes the issue, the party has to be able to answer it with one voice.
3. If it can't, voters leave for whoever can.

The Whigs failed the test. Within a couple of years the party was effectively gone as a national force, with a remnant hanging on to back Millard Fillmore in 1856.

The detour: Free Soilers and Know-Nothings

Where did the Whigs' voters go? Not all to one place, and that is the part of the story that tidy accounts leave out.

First, there were the Free Soilers. The Free Soil Party had been organized in 1848 around a single idea, keeping slavery out of the western territories, and it had nominated former President Martin Van Buren that year. By 1854 it was small, but it had a clear message and a network of activists, and those activists were ready to join anyone who would fight Kansas-Nebraska.

Second, there were anti-slavery Democrats, the people who signed the Appeal and others like them, who felt their own party had been captured by its Southern wing.

Third, and this is the detour, there was the Know-Nothing movement, formally the American Party. It rose fast in 1854 by appealing to voters who were worried about the surge of immigration, particularly Irish and German Catholic immigration, and it called for longer waiting periods before naturalization and limits on immigrants holding office. I have no sympathy for that platform, and a modern conservative shouldn't either: it was a movement that told one group of Americans they didn't belong. But it was real and it was big. In the 1854 elections it won seats in many states, and for a moment it looked as if the Know-Nothings, not the Republicans, would take the Whigs' place.

What stopped them was the same issue that had killed the Whigs. The American Party was itself divided over slavery. By 1855 and 1856, its Northern members were splitting away. Its 1856 presidential candidate was Fillmore, and he carried only one state, Maryland. The Know-Nothings faded. Many of their Northern voters, who cared more about stopping slavery's spread than about immigration, moved into the new Republican organization.

Putting the pieces together

So the Republican Party, in its first years, was a merger of at least four groups: Northern Whigs, Free Soilers, anti-slavery Democrats and a share of the Know-Nothing rank and file. The story of how that merger began in a schoolhouse in Ripon and an oak grove in Jackson is told in The Little Schoolhouse in Ripon and the Oak Grove in Jackson, 1854. The key point here is what held it together: one clear, narrow, answerable idea. No more slave territory.

That narrowness was a strength, not a weakness. The new party could say to a Whig, a Free Soiler and a Democrat all at once: you disagree about the tariff and about banks, but you agree about this, and this is the issue that decides everything else. It also meant the party could be built quickly. By 1856 it had a national organization and a presidential nominee in John C. Frémont, who carried most of the free states. By 1860 it had a winning candidate, a story told in Three Ballots in the Wigwam and How Lincoln Beat the Favorite in 1860.

The strongest objection: it was only a sectional party

Now let me give the other side its best shot. Critics said then, and some say now, that the Republican Party was nothing but a sectional party: a party of the Northern states, aimed at the Southern states, with no voters in the South and no plan for the South. A sectional party, they said, forces the country to choose sides. When its candidate won in 1860, Southern states walked out of the Union, and the critics said: you see, they did it to themselves.

Here is why that argument fails, and I'll use the party's own words.

1. The party asked for a limit on expansion, not an attack on the existing states. The 1860 platform said that the right of each state to control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment was essential to the balance of power. That was a promise not to interfere with slavery where the Constitution protected it. What it refused was the spread of slavery into the territories, which Congress governs.
2. The platform condemned violent invasions of any state. The same platform condemned armed raids on the soil of a state as among the gravest of crimes. That was aimed at the attack on Harpers Ferry the year before, and it put the party on record against anyone who tried to settle the slavery question by force.
3. The party's position on the territories was stated in plain words. The 1856 platform called slavery and polygamy "twin relics of barbarism" and said Congress had the duty to prohibit both in the territories. The 1860 platform said freedom was the normal condition of the territories. You can disagree with that position, but you cannot call it a secret. The voters had it in writing.
4. The sectional split was already there. A party is sectional when the country is. The question that divided the sections was not created by those who organized to oppose Kansas-Nebraska. It was reopened by a law passed in Washington.

Is the claim that the party "caused" the split a factual claim or a value claim? Mostly a value claim wrapped in a factual one. The fact is that the Southern states left after Lincoln's election. The value judgment is whether a lawful victory at the ballot box can ever justify leaving. I don't think it can, and neither did the voters who elected him.

What a family can take from this

You don't have to care about the 1850s to care about this story. Every party you will ever vote for is a coalition, and every coalition has a fault line. The Whigs show what happens when the fault line becomes the whole map. The early Republicans show what a party can do when it finds one issue that both unifies it and moves voters.

You can see the modern version of this in how Republicans in Congress vote together and when they don't. The party's own page on party unity tracks it, and it is worth a visit before you decide that your party is either more or less united than the cable shows make it seem. And if you want the history of the fights inside the family, Seventy Years of GOP Insurgents Versus the Establishment, in Order tells it.

One more lesson, and it is a conservative one. A bright line that works is worth keeping. The Missouri Compromise was imperfect, and it held for thirty-four years. When it was torn up for a railroad and a clever theory, the cost came due in blood. Be careful about throwing away settlements that work just because you have a clever argument for why you can.

The bottom line

• The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 repealed the Missouri Compromise line, and that one decision split the Whig Party between Northerners and Southerners and ended it as a national force.
• The Republican Party was built from Northern Whigs, Free Soilers, anti-slavery Democrats and a share of the Know-Nothing rank and file, united by a single clear idea: no more slave territory.
• The charge that the early party was merely sectional fails against its own platforms, which promised not to touch slavery in the states, condemned armed raids, and asked Congress to keep the territories free.
• A party that cannot answer the biggest question of its day with one voice loses its voters. Remember that when you hear someone say unity doesn't matter.
• When you talk about this history, give credit where it is due and be honest about the ugly parts, including the Know-Nothing detour. The party is strong enough to bear the truth.