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Updated: June 18, 2025
Lincoln and his party friends still called themselves Whigs, though they could muster only a minority of the total membership of the legislature. The so-called Anti-Nebraska Democrats, opposing Douglas and his followers, were still too full of traditional party prejudice to help elect a pronounced Whig to the United States Senate, though as strongly "Anti-Nebraska" as themselves.
Many of the Northern counties had formed "Republican" organizations in the two previous years; but the name was entirely local, while the opposition, not yet united, but fighting in factions against the Nebraska bill, only acknowledged political affinity under the general term of the "Anti-Nebraska" party.
It was one of the first rallies of the new Republican party which had developed among rebellious northern Whigs, Free-Soilers, and anti-Nebraska Democrats who opposed the extension of slavery.
When, in the opening of the anti-Nebraska contest, the Free-soil leaders undertook the formation of a new party to supersede the old, they had, because of their generally democratic antecedents, with great unanimity proposed that it be called the "Republican" party, thus reviving the distinctive appellation by which the followers of Jefferson were known in the early days of the republic.
On the tenth ballot, Lincoln having withdrawn, the Whig vote concentrated on Trumbull, who, with the aid of his unyielding anti-Nebraska following, received the necessary 51 votes for an election. This result left many heart-burnings among both Whigs and Democrats, for the former felt that Lincoln had been unjustly sacrificed and the latter looked upon Trumbull as little better than a renegade.
In the slave States, the opposition to the Administration dared not raise the anti-Nebraska banner, nor could it have found followers; and it was not only inclined but forced to make its battle either under the old name of Whigs, or, as became more popular, under the new appellation of "Americans," which grew into a more dignified synonym for Know-Nothings.
The anti-Nebraska fusion carried the legislature, defeated Shields and, after a brief contest between Trumball, the anti-Nebraska Democrat, and Lincoln, the anti-slavery Whig, elected the former Senator. Congress had confessed its incompetency to deal with the Kansas problem and referred it to the decision of rude squatters on the frontier.
The events of the spring and summer of 1854 may all be grouped under two heads the formation of an anti-Nebraska party, and the quick rush of sectional patriotism to seize the territory laid open by the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
In the absence of any existing party machinery, some fifteen editors of anti-Nebraska newspapers met for conference at Decatur on the 22d of February and issued a call for a delegate State convention of the "Anti-Nebraska party," to meet at Bloomington on the 29th of May. Prominent leaders, as a rule, hesitated to commit themselves by their presence at Decatur. Not so with Mr. Lincoln.
The Bloomington Convention came together according to call on the 29th of May. By this time the active and observant politicians of the State had become convinced that the anti-Nebraska struggle was not a mere temporary and insignificant "abolition" excitement, but a deep and abiding political issue, involving in the fate of slavery the fate of the nation.
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