Just Days After Passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Senator Charles Sumner Calls for a Break With the Past and a Switch to a New Party – the Republican Party

The relative calm over the slavery issue after the Compromise of 1850 was broken in 1854 in the territory of Kansas. Pressure had been building among northerners to organize the territory west of Missouri and Iowa, the latter of which had been admitted to the Union. This pressure came primarily from northern farmers, who wanted the federal government to survey the land and put it up for sale. Promoters of a transcontinental railroad were also pushing for this westward expansion. Southerners, however, were growing resentful of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which established the 36° 30′ parallel as the geographical boundary of slavery on the north-south axis. Proslavery southerners now contended that popular sovereignty should apply to all territories, and argued they had the right to bring their slave property wherever they chose.

Illinois Democratic senator Stephen Douglas believed he had found a solution that would satisfy northern Democrats and southerners and introduced the Kansas-Nebraska bill in early 1854. The act created two territories: Kansas, directly west of Missouri; and Nebraska, west of Iowa. The act also applied the principle of popular sovereignty, dictating that the people of these and all other territories would decide for themselves whether to adopt slavery. In a concession crucial to many Southerners, the proposed bill repealed the Missouri Compromise with its 36° 30′ boundary between slave and free territory. The threat of this bill caused an immediate uproar in the North, and Abraham Lincoln came out of political retirement to speak publicly against it. Meanwhile, Sen. Charles Sumner led the opposition in the Senate. With the bill pending, in March 1854 a group of antislavery advocates founded the Republican Party, but the time was not quite ripe for it to become a major force.

On May 30, 1854, Congress passed and President Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Northern Democrats shunned the Act, and their representatives had largely voted against it in Congress. They seemed to have no political home. Passage of the bill irrevocably split the Whig Party; every northern Whig had opposed the bill and almost every southern Whig voted for it. Most of the southern Whigs were swept into the Democratic Party, as the party as a national force just disintegrated.

Quickly, northern Whigs along with disaffected northern Democrats and Free Soil Party members reorganized themselves to join the Republican Party. Thus, the Kansas-Nebraska Act led to the birth of the Republican Party and the rise of Abraham Lincoln.

William Allen was an important figure in the history of American higher education. A graduate of Harvard College, he served as regent there from 1804 to 1810. He prepared his American Biographical and Historical Dictionary in 1809, the first work of general biography published in the United States. In 1817 he became president of Dartmouth College, then left Dartmouth for Bowdoin College. Allen became Bowdoin’s third president, serving, with one interruption, from 1820 to 1839. He worked to lead the College through the formation of the new state of Maine in 1820, and to establish the Medical School of Maine. Allen also collected 10,000 words not contained in standard dictionaries, and published them as a supplement to Webster’s Dictionary. Though no longer in academia, Allen remained influential until his death in 1868. In retirement he published the third edition of his American Biographical and Historical Dictionary, Junius Unmasked, a memoir of Eleazar Wheelock, founder and first president of Dartmouth College, and two books of verse.

Autograph letter signed, Washington, June 9, 1854, to Allen, urging him to lead religious leaders to adopt the new party and abandon the old. “I think you will not fail to urge upon the clergy the one thing needful at this time – the breaking away from old parties & a united support of freedom, without regard to former party relations or names.”

This is the only letter of Sumner about the birth of the Republican Party we can recall seeing.