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Updated: May 3, 2025
Now Smooth, I think they call you, says he if I be not much mistaken the General will create a Babylon of parties, the result of which will render it difficult to define his own position. If the General would but get up a cross between southern secessionists and northern free-soilers, how happily it would illustrate his policy. Clasping his hand, 'Major Sykes, said I, 'I pity you.
Not only did it show a brilliant array of eminent names, but a remarkable contrast of former antagonisms: Whigs, Democrats, Free-Soilers, Know-Nothings, Abolitionists; Norman B. Judd, Richard Yates, Ebenezer Peck, Leonard Swett, Lyman Trumbull, David Davis, Owen Lovejoy, Orville H. Browning, Ichabod Godding, Archibald Williams, and many more.
Some four months afterward, in Philadelphia, the Republicans held their first national convention. Only a few years previous its members had called themselves by various names Democrats, Free-Soilers, Know-Nothings, Whigs. The old hostilities of these different groups had not yet died out.
Middle parties and friends of compromise are soon left behind; and if the writers who so severely criticize the present moderation of the Free-soilers are desirous to see the war become an abolition war, it is probable that if the war lasts long enough they will be gratified.
The Southerners, aided by colonized voters from Missouri, got control of the territorial legislature and passed a slave code. The Free-Soilers, ignoring the government thus established, gathered in convention at Topeka, formed a free state constitution, and demanded to be admitted into the Union as a State.
Up to this time, while bad blood existed between the Free-soilers and the pro-slavery men, it had not become a killing game. The pro-slavery Missourians were in the great majority. They harassed the Free-soilers considerably and committed many petty persecutions, but no blood was shed.
Van Buren, the candidate of the Free-Soilers, received a vote of 15,774, concentrated in the northeastern counties, but reaching formidable proportions in the counties of the northwest and west. Of the older organizations, the Whig party seemed less affected, Taylor having received 53,047 votes, an increase of 7,519 over the Whig vote of 1844.
The Republicans, or as they were then called, Free-soilers, attempted to organize the House by recognizing the clerk of the previous House, who was a Free-soiler, it then being the custom to have the clerk call the House to order and preside until a temporary organization was perfected. The Democrats refused to recognize the clerk whom the opposition recognized.
At that moment he could have parted with the Whigs and put himself at the head of the constitutional anti-slavery party. The Free-Soilers had taken the very ground against the extension of slavery which he had so long occupied.
The party was henceforth known as the "Free-soilers," the name coming from its insistence that the territory conquered from Mexico should forever remain free. Its platform denounced slavery as a sin against God and a crime against man, and repudiated the compromise of 1850. It also laid special emphasis upon the wickedness of the new fugitive slave law, of which it demanded the repeal.
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