Founding The Republican Party

Jim Klag

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March 20, 1854 - In Ripon, Wisconsin a group of citizens led by attorney Alvan E. Bovay met in a schoolhouse in support of the abolition of slavery. They adopted the name "Republicans."
 

Jim Klag

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5fish

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How they got there name...

Republican Party (United States) - Wikipedia

The first public meeting of the general anti-Nebraska movement, at which the name Republican was proposed, was held on March 20, 1854 at the Little White Schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin. The name was partly chosen to pay homage to Thomas Jefferson's Republican Party.
 

5fish

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The founding of the Republican Party was to fight against the democratic solution of popular sovereignty to slavery issue in the territories. The party was founded on anti democratic ideals...
 

Jim Klag

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The founding of the Republican Party was to fight against the democratic solution of popular sovereignty to slavery issue in the territories. The party was founded on anti democratic ideals...
Bullshit. Popular sovereignty was a Democratic ploy to keep the issue of slavery out of the democratically elected Congress which was turning over to Republican control. The Republican party was founded on the principle of not allowing the growth of slavery in the territories. They rested their principles on the idea that slavery was evil and, while protected where it already existed, should be lopped off where it existed and not be allowed further extension. They were also a bunch of old Whigs and adhered to most of the principles of that party.
 

5fish

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Bullshit. Popular sovereignty was a Democratic ploy to keep the issue of slavery out of the democratically elected Congress which was turning over to Republican control.

snip...

Popular sovereignty is thus a basic tenet of most republics, and in some monarchies.

No, Popular sovereignty was offered before the Republican party existed. It was the Democratic solution to the issue of slavery in the territories.

In the 1850s, in the run-up to the Civil War, Northern Democrats led by Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan and Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois promoted popular sovereignty as a middle position on the slavery issue. It said that actual residents of territories should be able to decide by voting whether or not slavery would be allowed in the territory.

It seems you do not realize our Republic is founded on popular sovereignty.

Popular sovereignty is the principle that the authority of a state and its government are created and sustained by the consent of its people, through their elected representatives (rule by the people), who are the source of all political power. It is closely associated with social contract philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Popular sovereignty expresses a concept, and does not necessarily reflect or describe a political reality.[a] Benjamin Franklin expressed the concept when he wrote, "In free governments, the rulers are the servants and the people their superiors and sovereigns".[1]

If you believe in Democracy you believe in popular sovereignty

To speak of popular sovereignty is to place ultimate authority in the people. There are a variety of ways in which sovereignty may be expressed. It may be immediate in the sense that the people make the law themselves, or mediated through representatives who are subject to election and recall; it may be ultimate in the sense that the people have a negative or veto over legislation, or it may be something much less dramatic. In short, popular sovereignty covers a multitude of institutional possibilities. In each case, however, popular sovereignty assumes the existence of some form of popular consent, and it is for this reason that every definition of republican government implies a theory of consent.— Donald S. Lutz

The question is do you believe in democracy? Its oblivious the Republican party was found against popular sovereignty( or against Democracy). It was not founded against slavery but against the people will to chose slavery or not.
 

Matt McKeon

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The Republicans were determined to keep slavery out of the territories. Slavery isn't based on consent and it rather anti-democratic as well.

During the spectacular failure of popular sovereignty the flaw in its basic premise was: it was an attempt to make a national issue, slavery, into a local issue. It was a dodge.

While the majority of settlers in Kansas were pro free soil, both the Pierce and Buchanan administrations supported the pro slavery side, while proslavery border ruffians rode into Kansas to disrupt and intimidate the actual people settling in the territory.
 

5fish

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See what Lincoln said about democracy...

While debating Senator Stephen A. Douglas in the fall of 1858, Abraham Lincoln declared the principle of popular sovereignty, as applied to the Kansas Territory, to be "nothing but a living, creeping lie from the time of its introduction till today."1 While Lincoln conceded the right of majorities to rule and to shape policy, he maintained that there were moral limits to this right-a line beyond which democratic majorities could not govern. This view contrasted sharply with that of Douglas, who argued that the ultimate source of authority was the will of the people, and that this authority was unlimited. The morality of democracy, according to Douglas, lay not in any particular result but in the process of decision making itself.2
 

5fish

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The link below is a good discussion about popular sovereignty , Lincoln and the Republican party. It worth a read to see the true argument over popular sovereignty...


snip...

One result of the furor over Kansas-Nebraska was the emergence of the Republican party—a coalition of old Whigs, anti-immigrant Know Nothings, and Democrats disaffected from their party by the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Lincoln, as a long-time Whig, was relatively slow to join the new party in Illinois. In August 1855 he wrote to his old friend Speed that his party affiliation was "a disputed point. I think I am a whig; but others say there are no whigs, and that I am an abolitionist." Reluctant to be "unwhig[ged]," Lincoln concluded, "I now do no more than oppose the extension of slavery." Not until 1856 would that position make him officially a Republican.

snip...

Lincoln made the challenge because he was genuinely horrified at popular sovereignty. He wrote to Illinois politician John M. Palmer, "You know how anxious I am that this Nebraska measure shall be rebuked and condemned every where." [10] The irony of Lincoln's opposition to popular sovereignty is that his arguments against Douglas's doctrine seemed to accept Douglas's premise that popular sovereignty spoke to the central nature of republican self-government. In that, Lincoln's opposition to popular sovereignty differed from the anti-popular-sovereignty arguments of other Republicans that emphasized the practical workings of popular sovereignty, specifically the events of Bleeding Kansas. By concentrating on popular sovereignty's practical effects, however, these Republicans seemingly accepted the doctrine as legitimate republicanism. By attacking Douglas on popular sovereignty's own ground of principle, however, Lincoln challenged Douglas's assertion that popular sovereignty was merely self-government at work.
 

O' Be Joyful

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“As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”-- Abraham Lincoln


History does not repeat, but it SURE as HELL rhymes.
 

Joshism

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No, Popular sovereignty was offered before the Republican party existed. It was the Democratic solution to the issue of slavery in the territories
Slavery in the territories had been settled in 1820 and 1850. Southern Democrats wanted to unsettle it. Then they themselves turned on Popular Sovereignty because allowing a territory to chose slavery also allowed it to chose to prohibit slavery.

In any case, Kansas proved Popular Sovereignty in practice was a recipe for civil war.
 

5fish

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Slavery in the territories had been settled in 1820 and 1850. Southern Democrats wanted to unsettle it. Then they themselves turned on Popular Sovereignty because allowing a territory to chose slavery also allowed it to chose to prohibit slavery.

In any case, Kansas proved Popular Sovereignty in practice was a recipe for civil war.
Here the first person to promote the idea and north of the Mason-Dixson line but a Democrat... It is a good short read at the link about the time of Popular sovereignty...


In an effort to prevent future prohibitive measures against slavery in the West, Democratic Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan, offered up the idea of popular sovereignty. In theory, as Cass and his supporters reasoned, in a democratic society free citizens determined the future.

snip...

Popular sovereignty in 19th century America emerged as a compromise strategy for determining whether a Western territory would permit or prohibit slavery. First promoted in the 1840s in response to debates over western expansion, popular sovereignty argued that in a democracy, residents of a territory, and not the federal government, should be allowed to decide on slavery within their borders.

snip... how did it pass if both sides did not like it...

In 1854, Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas, of Illinois, hoped to once again employ the principles of popular sovereignty in order to address the slavery debate, this time in the Kansas and Nebraska territories. To Douglas’s dismay, dissatisfaction came from all sides. Northern critics of the proposal decried the apparent dismissal of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 that had banned slavery above the 36° 30' latitude line, while southerners believed that slaveholders were in the minority and therefore stood no chance of extending slavery to the West.
 
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