'The Republican Party of 1860 bore little resemblance to the Republican Party of 1900'. Discuss.

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The Republican Party was born in 1854 out of opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and by 1856 had replaced the Whigs as the second major political party, alongside the Democrats. Between 1860 and 1900, the Republicans enjoyed enormous success, dominating the presidency as well as controlling Congress for the majority of this period. By 1900, however, it was debatable whether the Grand Old Party (GOP) still resembled the party which had elected Abraham Lincoln president in 1860. This essay will argue that by 1900, the Republican Party no longer resembled the ‘Party of Lincoln’, especially in terms of its structure and the views espoused by its members.

‘By 1860, the Republican Party had clearly become the dominant force in Northern Politics’.  However, this dominance was balanced by the huge absence of support for the Republicans in the South. This made the party incredibly sectionalist in nature. For example, the Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election of 1860 with 180 electoral votes, all of which came from the North and the West-Coast. Out of the 11 southern states which would later form the Confederacy, he only featured on the ballot in Virginia, where he won 1.1% of the vote. This lack of support was also evident within the legislative branch, as there was not a single Republican Representative or Senator from these southern states in the 36th Congress (1859-1861). 

        In contrast, the Republican Party of 1900 enjoyed far greater national success. Although the Republican candidate for president in 1900, William McKinley, failed to win any of the ex-confederate states on his way to victory, he did manage to obtain an average of 29% of the vote in these eleven states with as much as 45% in North Carolina and Tennessee.  Republicans also made significant advances in the legislature, given that in the 56th Congress (1899-1901) there was one Republican Senator from North Carolina and in the House, Republicans held eight seats in districts within the former confederate states. The fact that Republicans in 1900 were able to win congressional seats in states which, forty years prior, had actually seceded from the Union in opposition to Republican ideology shows how far the party had come in shedding its sectionalist origins. According to Wayne Morgan, this transformation was one of President William McKinley’s primary goals; ‘his chief personal satisfaction lay in having come to the threshold of his ancient dream of nationalism. He had lived to see sectionalism blur and almost disappear’.  Therefore, in terms of the party’s structure, it appears evident that the Republican Party of 1900 bore little resemblance to the Republican Party of 1860.

        The Republican Party of 1860 was celebrated as the anti-slavery party, with members such as William H. Seward and Salmon P. Chase who were staunch opponents of the institution. The Republicans still believed in white supremacy. However, unlike the Democrats they believed that African-Americans were endowed with certain fundamental rights. For instance, in an 1858 debate with Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, Abraham Lincoln declared that a black man ‘is not my equal in many respects – certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral and endowment. But in the right to eat bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of every living man’.  

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The late 1890s represented a time of great strife for African-Americans with the prominence of lynching in the South and the passage of the Jim Crow laws which legalised segregation. ‘In the 1890s an average of 187 lynchings occurred every year, mostly in the South’. By 1900, it seemed that the GOP had ‘sacrificed a portion of its original purpose’  given its lack of support for these African-Americans and Republican President McKinley (1897-1901) in particular did little to resist the oppression of blacks, with his policies looking ‘more toward reconciliation with the white South’. Therefore, in terms of their policy towards African-Americans ...

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