The Republican Party, often called the GOP (short for “Grand Old Party”) is one of two major political parties in the United States. Founded in 1854 as a coalition opposing the extension of slavery into Western territories, the Republican Party fought to protect the rights of African Americans after the Civil War. Today’s GOP is generally socially conservative, and favors smaller government, less regulation, lower taxes and less federal intervention in the economy.
Early Political Parties
Though America’s Founding Fathers distrusted political parties, it wasn’t long before divisions developed among them. Supporters of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, who favored a strong central government and a national financial system, became known as Federalists.
By contrast, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson favored a more limited government. His supporters called themselves Republicans, or Jeffersonian Republicans, but later became known as Democratic-Republicans.The Federalist Party dissolved after the War of 1812, and by the 1830s the Democratic-Republicans had evolved into the Democratic Party (now the main rival to today’s Republicans), which initially rallied around President Andrew Jackson.
Opponents of Jackson’s policies formed their own party, the Whig Party, and by the 1840s Democrats and Whigs were the country’s two main political coalitions.
Slavery and the Republicans
In the 1850s, the issue of slavery—and its extension into new territories and states joining the Union—ripped apart these political coalitions. During this volatile period, new political parties briefly surfaced, including the Free Soil and the American (Know-Nothing) parties.
In 1854, opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which would permit slavery in new U.S. territories by popular referendum, drove an antislavery coalition of Whigs, Free-Soilers, Americans and disgruntled Democrats to found the new Republican Party, which held its first meeting in Ripon, Wisconsin that May. Two months later, a larger group met in Jackson, Michigan, to choose the party’s first candidates for statewide office.
The Republican goal was not to abolish slavery in the South right away, but rather to prevent its westward expansion, which they feared would lead to the domination of slaveholding interests in national politics.Southern and Northern Democrats over slavery propelled the Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln to victory, though he won only around 40 percent of the popular vote.
Even before Lincoln could be inaugurated, seven Southern states seceded from the Union, beginning the process that would lead to the Civil War.
Reconstruction
Over the course of the Civil War, Lincoln and other Republicans began to see the abolition of slavery as a strategic move to help them win the war. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and by war’s end, the Republican majority in Congress would spearhead the passage of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery.
Frustrated by the inaction of Lincoln’s Democratic successor, Andrew Johnson, as well as the treatment of freed blacks in former Confederate states during the Reconstruction era, Radical Republicans in Congress passed legislation protecting the rights of blacks, including civil rights and voting rights (for black men).
These Republican Reconstruction policies would solidify white Southerners’ loyalty to t he Democratic Party for many decades to come.
During Reconstruction, Republicans would become increasingly associated with big business and financial interests in the more industrialized North. The federal government had expanded during the war (including passage of the first income tax) and Northern financiers and industrialists had greatly benefited from its increased spending.
As white resistance to Reconstruction solidified, these interests, rather than those of blacks in the South, became the main Republican focus, and by the mid-1870s Democratic Southern state legislatures had wiped out most of Reconstruction’s changes.
Progressive Era and The Great Depression
Emergence of New Conservatism
Republicans From Reagan to Trump
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