The Republican Party was founded in the northern states in 1854 by forces opposed to the

expansion of slavery, ex-Whigs and ex-Free Soilers. The Republican Party quickly became the
principal opposition to the dominant Democratic Party and the briefly popular Know
Nothing Party. The party grew out of opposition to the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which repealed
the Missouri Compromise and opened Kansas Territory and Nebraska Territory to slavery and
future admission as slave states.[27][28] The Republicans called for economic and
social modernization. They denounced the expansion of slavery as a great evil, but did not call
for ending it in the southern states. The first public meeting of the general anti-Nebraska
movement, at which the name Republican was proposed, was held on March 20, 1854, at
the Little White Schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin.[29] The name was partly chosen to pay
homage to Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party.[30] The first official party
convention was held on July 6, 1854, in Jackson, Michigan.[31]

Charles R. Jennison, an anti-slavery militia leader associated with the Jayhawkers from Kansas and an

early Republican politician in the region

The party emerged from the great political realignment of the mid-1850s. Historian William
Gienapp argues that the great realignment of the 1850s began before the Whigs' collapse, and
was caused not by politicians but by voters at the local level. The central forces were ethno-
cultural, involving tensions between pietistic Protestants versus
liturgical Catholics, Lutherans and Episcopalians regarding
Catholicism, prohibition and nativism. The Know Nothing Party embodied the social forces at
work, but its weak leadership was unable to solidify its organization, and the Republicans
picked it apart. Nativism was so powerful that the Republicans could not avoid it, but they did
minimize it and turn voter wrath against the threat that slave owners would buy up the good
farm lands wherever slavery was allowed. The realignment was powerful because it forced
voters to switch parties, as typified by the rise and fall of the Know Nothings, the rise of the
Republican Party and the splits in the Democratic Party.[32][33]
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