The Democratic Party began its convention in Charleston, South Carolina, on April 23, 1860. The incumbent president, James Buchanan, was a Democrat from Pennsylvania who had Southern sympathies but opposed secession. Due to a largely disastrous administration, he had no interest in reelection; still, the Democrats, and Stephen A. Douglas in particular, were favored to win the election. Douglas was a moderate who advocated “popular sovereignty,” or the right of territories and newly admitted states to decide for themselves the question of slavery. His challenge at the convention was to placate the so-called fire-eaters of the party’s Deep South wing who pressed for a strong proslavery platform and threatened secession if they did not get it while avoiding the appearance that these radicals held him hostage, which would have hurt his support among Northerners. Despite fractious debate, Douglas’s supporters had nearly passed their platform by the third day.
by Tim Lynch
Tim Lynch has taught for thirty years at Mount Saint Joseph University in Cincinnati, where he is a professor of History. He has published extensively in the area of American labor history and protest music, including Strike Songs of the Depression (2001). Most recently, Tim published To Build a Home: Reflections on Construction (2021) about his experience of building his own home.
The Republican Party may soon live up to its moniker, “The Party of Lincoln,” though not in a way that bodes well for the GOP. Abraham Lincoln, of course, was the first Republican president. While he is heralded today as one of our greatest chief executives, he was never very popular in his own day. Nor was his party.
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As Donald Trump s impeachment trial begins, are Republicans headed for a split? The party s roots in Ripon could point the way forward
Sharon Roznik, Fond du Lac Reporter
Published
3:15 pm UTC Feb. 8, 2021
RIPON – The newly formed Republican Party spread like a prairie fire through rural Wisconsin in the 1800s.
Fueling the movement was the unique character of people who settled in and around Ripon, a community whose first citizens were idealists who lived in a commune.
Most of these settlers came from western New York, considered at the time to be a hotbed of political turbulence, according to William Woolley, a retired Ripon College history professor who studied the party s origins in Wisconsin.
Senate Republicans have the opportunity to not only convict Donald Trump of “incitement of insurrection,” but also punish him with a ban on ever running for political office again, so he could never again be president or the standard-bearer of the Republican Party. If you are a Republican who believes Trump is a figurative cancer on the GOP, then this is your best chance to remove the tumor.
The problem, as with any operation, is that the procedure comes with risk. For one thing, the surgeon might not remove all of the cancerous growth. What if Trump and Trumpism have already spread too widely inside the party? Even if he can’t run again, he can still function as a de facto party boss, installing loyalists in the party hierarchy, endorsing candidates, encouraging primary challenges, and running family members for office up to and including the presidency.