two sections over slavery had always been arranged by mutual concessions. In 1854 this expedient was set aside. Without giving anything in return, Douglas and his supporters took from the free-labor section an invaluable barrier against the extension of slavery; and through the doctrine of "squatter sovereignty" denied to Congress the power to erect such barriers in the future. But this only hastened a crisis that could not have been greatly delayed. Calhoun had already discerned the true source and deadly nature of the growing sectional estrangement, and Lincoln was soon to utter the prophetic words: "This government cannot endure permanently, half slave and half free.”

The immediate result of the agitation over the repeal was to convince a large number which soon became a majority - of the best citizens of the North, irrespective of party, that the restriction of slavery was essential to the well-being both of the North and of the Union as a whole. In order to give effect to this conviction it was necessary to form a new party. The agitation which prepared the way for its rise began in Congress during the debates on the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, and spread thence throughout the North. The West was more quickly responsive than the East. But everywhere large elements of the existing parties came together and agreed to unite in resisting the extension of slavery. Before the discussion of the repeal in Congress had reached its later stages, a mass meeting of Whigs, Democrats and Free-soilers at Ripon, Wisconsin, resolved that if the Kansas-Nebraska Bill should pass: "They would throw old party organizations to the winds and organize a new party on the sole issue of the non-extension of slavery." The name Republican was formally adopted at a state convention of the new party held at Jackson, Michigan, on the 6th of July, 1854, and by other Western state conventions on the 13th of the same month.

The great majority of the new party had been either Whigs or Democrats. In two cardinal points they were agreed, namely, opposition to slavery and belief in the national, as opposed to the federative, nature of the Union. In other points

there was at the beginning much disagreement. Fortunately the issues on which there was agreement overshadowed all others long enough to bring about a fusing of the two elements. It was the union of the Whig who believed in making government strong and its sphere wide, with the Democrat who believed in the people and the people's control of government, that made the Republican party both efficient and popular.

HISTORY

Before its advent to power, from 1854 to 1860, the tasks of the Republican party were three: to propagate the doctrine of slavery restriction by congressional action; to oppose the extension of slavery under the operation of the doctrine of squatter sovereignty; and to obtain control of the federal government. In each it was successful. Throughout the North and under such leaders as Seward, Lincoln, Chase, Sumner, Henry Ward Beecher and Horace Greeley, all the resources of the press, the platform, the pulpit and (an institution then powerful but now forgotten) the lyceum or citizens' debating club, were fully enlisted in the propaganda. Other events that turned to the advantage of the Republicans were the brutal assault upon Charles Sumner in the Senate Chamber in 1856, the Ostend Manifesto, advising in the interest of slavery the acquisition of Cuba by force if Spain should refuse to sell, the enforcement-sometimes brutal and always hateful of the Fugitive Slave Law, and the quarrel of Douglas with the administration and the South over the application of squatter sovereignty to Kansas. On the other hand, the decision of the Supreme Court in the case of Dred Scott, which the Republicans refused to accept as good law, and the raid of John Brown at Harper's Ferry, which they condemned, brought them into serious embarrassment.

In the prosecution of the third task, the attainment of office, the party followed wise counsels and was fortunate. In its first national platform, that of 1856, the party affirmed its adherence to the principles of Washington and Jefferson,

denied the constitutional right of Congress or a Territory to establish slavery, and declared that it was "both the right and duty of Congress to prohibit in the Territories those twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and slavery." At the close of the resolutions there was a demand for government aid to a Pacific railway and for the improvement of rivers and harbors.

The platform of 1860 was more comprehensive. It added to the planks of the first, an arraignment of the administration and the Dred Scott decision, and demands for a protective tariff and a homestead act. Although the popular vote for Abraham Lincoln was more than a half-million greater than that for John C. Frémont, the party's candidate in 1856, nevertheless it was the disruption of the Democratic party that made the Republican triumph possible. On the other hand, the Republican party was the strongest member of the new party system as reorganized on the sectional principle. Moreover, in character and purpose, as well as numerical strength, it was better qualified than its rivals to meet the impending crisis.

THE WAR PERIOD, 1861-1865

Between the election of Mr. Lincoln in November, 1860, and his inauguration on the following 4th of March, seven of the slave-holding states seceded, formed a Confederacy and withdrew their representatives from the national legislature. All attempts to arrange a compromise failed. The vacillation of President Buchanan, and the position taken in his annual message that the national government had no right to coerce a seceding State, gave strong support to the disunion movement, These events forced upon the Republican party a change of policy. Hitherto its efforts had been directed chiefly to excluding slavery from the Territories. Now the first duty was to save the Union from disruption. In order to do this it was necessary to unite the North, and to bring to the support of the Union a large proportion of those border slave States, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Missouri, in which there was considerable Union sentiment. Hence the

party accepted as the sole issue of the hour the maintenance of the Union. Indeed, in order to secure more easily the cooperation of loyal Democrats, it even gave up its own name for a time and called itself the Union party.

During the early period of the war the President checked all efforts on the part of zealous subordinates, civil and military, to make the war for the Union even incidentally a war upon slavery. In his efforts to unionize the border States, Mr. Lincoln in March, 1862, urged that Congress should coöperate with any state in providing for a voluntary, gradual and compensated emancipation. Congress acceded, but not one of the border States would undertake emancipation. Many of the Republican leaders rejected the border state policy of the President and urged a more radical course towards slavery. In replying to Horace Greeley, who voiced the discontent in a public letter, to which he gave the title The Prayer of Twenty Millions of People, Mr. Lincoln in August, 1862, wrote: "My paramount object is to save the Union and not either to save or to destroy slavery."

But as evidence accumulated that slavery was a strong military support of the Confederacy the policy of destroying slavery as a means of saving the Union grew in favor. To this policy Mr. Lincoln, on the 22nd of September, 1862, committed himself, the Republican party, and the cause of the Union. The first response was distinctly unfavorable. The immediate effect was "to unite the South and divide the North." A considerable element of the Democratic party became disloyal, while the party as a whole opposed all measures looking to the destruction of slavery. The autumn elections greatly reduced the Republican majority in Congress. But the new policy steadily gained ground until the Republican party in its third national convention, which met on the 7th of June, 1864, resolved: "That as slavery was the cause and now constitutes the strength of this rebellion, justice and national safety demand its utter and complete extirpation from the soil of the republic." In the following year slavery was finally abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment.

On the Republican party, since it had an effective majority in each house of Congress, rests the responsibility for the legislation of the war period. The theory of loose construction of the Constitution was accepted. Throughout the Civil War, Congress, proceeding upon this theory, made prompt provision for the prosecution of the war. It passed legal tender acts; it established a system of national banks; greatly raised the tariff rates; and in order to hasten the settlement of the far West and to make that section an integral part of the Union, it passed a homestead act, and an act providing for a railway to the Pacific. For a time, while disloyalty was most rife in the North, there was a sharp curtailment of the rights of the individual citizen through the suspension, initiated by the President and approved by Congress, of the writ of habeas corpus. Most of the acts, which their opponents held to be violations of the Constitution, were in general acts of questionable utility. The results of the war, which came to a close early in 1865, vindicated in a signal way the principles, policies and leadership of the Republican party. It had saved the Union; it had established the national character of the Union so firmly as to bring to an end the doctrine of the right of secession; and it had destroyed slavery.

The party had been singularly fortunate in its founders and leaders. Of these three were pre-eminent: Horace Greeley, William H. Seward and Abraham Lincoln - Greeley in the field of journalism, Seward in the two realms of idealistic and practical politics, and, greatest of all, Abraham Lincoln, who won and held the people.

RECONSTRUCTION

The larger tasks of the period from the close of the Civil War in 1865 to the inauguration of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877 were three: first, to accomplish with the least possible disturbance the transition from war to peace; second, to settle certain matters of dispute with France and England that had arisen during the progress of the war; and third, to recon