"I am a Republican, a black, dyed in the wool Republican, and I never intend to belong to any other party than the party of freedom and progress". ~ Frederick Douglass
In 1856 the Republicans ran a war hero and civil rights proponent from the Mexican War, John C. Fremont. The Democrats ran James Buchanan who eventually won the election. This was at the beginning of the Republican party.
Fremont and the Republican's platform consisted of Nine planks. Six of those planks directly targeted equality and liberation of enslaved black Americans. Buchanan and the Democrats launched a verbal hit campaign smearing Fremont. Some of the verbiage they used was that the Republicans would unleash a horde of freed blacks who would rob white workers of their job's and ruin the neighborhoods while marrying your daughters.
In 1857 you had a slave named Dred Scott who sued for his freedom, but the Democrat appointed Supreme Court ruled against him stating that blacks, enslaved or free, were not considered human, but property and thus they did not deserve the right to vote or sue as in this case. This decision is an example of the uphill struggle that slave and former slaves faced leading up to the mid 1800's. The Democrat Party was dominant in just about all aspects of government. This started to change in the three key election years ; 1856, 1858, and 1860.
The tide started to turn against the Democrats in these six years. They went from holding a majority in Congress to becoming the minority party. Much of this is due to the increasing support of the abolition movement in the North. The Abolition movement has deep roots in the North going as far back as the late 1600's when in 1688 Dutch Quakers from Germantown, Pennsylvania sent an anti-slavery petition to the monthly meetings of the Quakers. Nothing developed from this petition, but it was earliest rumblings of things to come. As the Colonies expanded in the early 1700's with the founding of Georgia, the first Southern anti-slavery petition was presented. In 1739 eighteen Scotsman in Darien, Georgia attempting to keep the colony one free of slavery as the primary source of labor was rejected. As little as sixteen years later Georgia followed the rest of the southern colonies and instituted the slave code. The abolition movement in the north in this time started to gain strength. In Philadelphia a Quaker named Anthony Benezet started to write anti slavery pamphlets and started to teach slave children from his home. He later opened up the Negro school teaching both slave children and free children. With his leadership and the leadership of many other Quakers it set the ground work for the abolition of slavery in the northern states following the American Revolutionary War.
History today does not accurately depict the early efforts to abolish slavery in the founding of this nation. We have all heard the argument that the founding fathers failed to address this issue. Today we have even heard the argument that the founding fathers were a bunch of racists that cared not for the freedom of blacks in the new Republic. This argument is the farthest from the truth and has been a twisting of the truth that one should wonder why this has occurred. We should all question why this has been taught to our children and why we have excluded much of the actual history of the period to not be presented in a fair manner.
Many if not most of the founding fathers were in favor of abolishing slavery, it is said that up to 75% of all the signers of the Declaration of Independence were abolitionists and that even Thomas Jefferson who owned nearly six hundred slaves himself, proposed the abolition of slavery in Virginia in 1778 and again in 1796. Benjamin Franklin who at one time owned two slaves later went on to become the president of the abolitionist group founded by the Quakers. It has been cited that the Declaration of Independence failed to address freedoms for all and that the slavery issue was excluded, but those that do fail to recognize that in its original draft that it did denounce slavery! To secure an unanimous vote needed for approval this paragraph was excluded to ensure that Georgia and South Carolina would vote for the passage of the Declaration:
"...he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. [determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold,] he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them, thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another..." - Source
Following the American Revolution the founders worked fervently to limit and battle the spread of slavery. After the Constitution was in place they helped pass the Northwest Ordinance that outlawed the institution of slavery in the new states. Even the 3/5th clause in the Constitution was a blow against the southern states and the institution of slavery, Fredrick Douglass later recognized this and went around speaking about it. Even though the Constitution did not directly outlaw slavery, it did set in place the means for the states to address it and in their lifetimes the founding fathers started the wheels in motion so that it eventually would be abolished and should deserve credit for doing so. Without its passage Congress would not have been able to outlaw slavery in the new states, and stop the importation of slaves within the first twenty years of this country. We all have to remember that the Constitution would never have been signed and ratified without the cooperation of the southern delegates, and the divide over slavery would have led to two separate nations as it did later.
The early 1800's were years of divide and years of progress. In congress the issue over slavery became so heated that the Democrats enacted a "Gag" rule in response to John Quincy Adams petitioning the Congress to abolish slavery repeatedly. In the North the abolition movement continued to gain strength and support, while in the South the division over the issue started to tear at the very fabric of the Union. The Democrat Party was the leading party during this time period with the Whig Party being in the minority.
