Is Sharron Angle on a Mission From God?

Back to its roots? The Republicans of the 1860's were liberal and progressive. Where and what exactly to you think these roots are?

Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican President, but few people would call Lincoln a conservative. So how did his party--the GOP--become the party supported by big business, the religious right, and conservatives of all stripes
The Republican Party started in 1854. It was a one-issue party, and that issue was anti-slavery.

Well, to be brutally specific, the issue was the spread of slavery. The infant party knew it couldn't do anything to stop slavery in the South, so its goal was to stop slavery from spreading any further. To new territories in the Midwest, for example.

The two standard parties before that point were the Democrats and the Whigs-but the Whig party was dead or dying. The Democrats were proslavery back then. Immigrants and Catholics were usually Democrats too.

Then as now, a large part of the voting public was anti-immigrant. No matter how they felt about slavery, these people hated Democrats and were likely to join the Republicans. In the first Presidential election after the Republican Party was formed, the party did surprisingly well--in the North. In the slave-holding South, of course, no one voted Republican.

By the next presidential campaign in 1860, when Lincoln captured the majority of electoral votes, horrible, violent events propelled North against South, free states against slave states. There was the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court, which forced free states to recognize the rights of slaveholders. The bloody raid at Harpers Ferry, corruption in the White House, a fatal attack in the Senate between two congressmen, warfare in Kansas over slavery. . . all these set the stage for the Civil War.

So the war was fought from 1860 to 1865, and slavery ended. Where did that leave the Republicans? Their one, unifying issue was gone.

Even in 1860, many men joined the Republicans because they were concerned about their jobs if slavery was allowed to spread. As the Civil War rolled on, the Republicans worked with industry in the North to increase manufacturing. More railroads were built to supply the war effort, and banks were reformed. During the war, if laborers went on strike, the Union army stepped in to end the strike.

A relationship was begun.

After the war, the Republican Congress pushed for railway construction in the South. That didn't score too many points with former slaveholders, however. Most white men of the South remained Democrats; most freed slaves gravitated to the Republican Party.

But black men didn't vote in numbers large enough to have much influence.

People change. Ten years after the war, voters wanted to put the conflict behind them. The Republican Party fought to survive, and most Republicans realized that protecting the interests of minorities was no longer a popular concern. The courts chiseled away at the reforms that were passed right after the Civil War, including voting rights for African Americans. No one did anything; it seems that no one in power really cared.

The Republicans focused on economic issues. This had been their source of strength during the Civil War, and it kept winning elections. Over those first twenty years of its existance, from 1854 to 1874, the Party morphed into the conservative entity we know today, protective of business interests, but with no direct religious goals.