Republican Party (United States)

The Republican Party is one of the two major political parties in the United States, alongside the Democratic Party, founded in 1854 by antislavery activists, including former members of the Democratic, Whig, and Free Soil parties, who organized in opposition to the extension of slavery into Kansas and Nebraska Territory. Organizing meetings were held in Ripon, Wisconsin, and Jackson, Michigan, in 1854, with the new party formally established at the Jackson convention. Its first successful presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln, took office in 1861 and led the Union through the Civil War, during which the party secured the abolition of slavery through the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment. During Reconstruction, the Radical Republican controlled Congress imposed a punitive program on the former Confederacy over President Andrew Johnson's vetoes and impeached Johnson in the House, though the Senate fell one vote short of removing him, a program that made the party deeply unpopular across the former Confederate states for generations. During the twentieth and twenty first centuries the party became associated with laissez faire economic policy, lower taxes, and conservative social positions.