Founded in 1854 as an antislavery party dedicated to stopping the further extension of slavery, the presented an outlook on the chronic crises over slavery in the 1850s that Nabors describes this way:
They presented detailed analyses of Southern political society that complemented and cohered with each other. In their analyses, the oligarchic rulers of the South were the root cause of all the major political difficulties of their national era. The oligarchy was the offspring of domestic slavery, and for that reason they proscribed domestic slavery as a political evil as well as a moral evil.
Since I'm particularly fond of the history of the early American and antebellum periods, it's enjoyable to read his quotes from Republicans of the 1850s describing their approach in a formal way. Older language tends to have an aura of greater seriousness and dignity for contemporary readers. And before loudspeakers, radio, and TV, political speakers had a style of oratory that was intended to project the speaker's voice directly to the entire audience being addressed. So those speeches can come off now as eloquent, grandiose, or bombastic, depending on taste.
Of course, Congressional speeches were only one form of political speech. You can be sure that the language being used in Bleeding Kansas in the early years of the Republican Party's existence was often far from eloquent, dignified, or polite.
In describing the Republican political outlook of that time, Nabors assembles an impressive collection of their indictment of the slave system and how it encroached on democratic rights even in the free states but also deprived non-slaveholding whites of their democratic freedoms. There was the Compromise of 1820, aka, the Missouri Compromise, which admitted Missouri as a new slave state along with Maine as a new free state. The tough debate over that agreement illustrated that the even split of Senators between slave states and free states could be used to block legislation further restricting slavery.
But slave states were also advantaged by the infamous three-fifths clause of the 1789 Constitution, which allowed three-fifths of the slaves to be counted as population for the purposes of allocating the number of House Representatives for each state. But, of course, only free white men - and not even all of them - could vote in the elections. The partially-counted slaves didn't have even a partial vote. So the Constitution itself had built in a "slave bonus" in Congressional representation that free state voters rightly understood as being both unfair and undemocratic.
As time went on, more and more restrictions were placed on free citizens' rights, particularly but not exclusively in the slave states. There was the "gag rule" that began in the 1830s, under which antislavery petitions sent to Congress were permanently tabled (postponed) by the House of Representatives, abridging in practice the Constitutional right to petition the government over popular grievances. Antislavery literature started being seized by postmasters in the South.
The Virginia state legislature famously debated ending slavery in the states during 1831-32. But no further such open debate took place in the future Confederate states after that. And free whites speaking or writing against slavery were persecuted, beaten, and even murdered.
By 1954 when the Republican Party was founded, this process on encroaching on rights had grown drastically. That year also start of the mini-civil war in Kansas Territory, where slaveowners sought to intimidate, expel, or kill settler who opposed slavery. The much stringent Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 had replaced the previous one of 1793. People in free states greatly resented being coerced into supporting a slave system which Northern whites came to despite more and more over time. And then, of course, the Dred Scott decision of 1857 not only required free states to recognize the legal bondage of slave brought into a free states by the owners. It also declared that the Constitution provided no Constitutional protection to even free black people. It also very obviously laid a legal precedent for the Supreme Court to declare later that free states couldn't even ban slavery.
Nabors quotes some ringing endorsement of democratic liberty from the Republicans, denouncing the Southern oligarchy and pointing out how it abridged white Southerners' rights and how slavery damaged them economically. He quotes from Massachusetts Congressman Daniel Gooch in 1861:
Why this difference? The people of the North know and understand everything that pertains to the South. Your newspapers are found in all our villages, and are read by all classes of men. Southern men speak freely their opinions at the North, both in public and private. Freedom of speech and the press, liberty of thought and action, are everywhere protected. We ask no safeguard against error, but truth. Not so in the South. Your people do not understand the feeling, principles, and motives of the people of the North. No northern man, who honestly represents the sentiments of the North, is permitted to speak to your people. No northern newspaper, representing the political sentiments of the North, is permitted to enter or be read in your States. All that your people know of the principles and intentions of the Republican party they have learned from our political opponents.Yes, the Republican Party in those days could defend the liberties of the common people against oligarchs, rail against slavery and its perpetrators, and condemn the exploitation of working people. They even could and did demand democratic land reform! That idea went down in history as "20 acres and a mule," though even at its most radical, Reconstruction land reform never was that egalitarian.
But Republican President Abraham Lincoln in first Message to Congress of 12/03/1861 declared, "Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."
I'm going to have more to say about Nabors' book in coming posts. But this seems like a good place to leave it for know, wondering at what the Republican Party once was.
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