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The Whig Party became badly split between pro-Compromise Whigs like Fillmore and Webster and anti-Compromise Whigs like William Seward, who demanded the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act. [113] Though Fillmore's enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act made him unpopular among many in the North, he retained considerable support in the South.
John Quincy Adams, the 6th president, became a Whig congressman later in his career. During the 1790s, the first major U.S. parties arose in the form of the Federalist Party, led by Alexander Hamilton, and the Democratic-Republican Party, led by Thomas Jefferson.
Out of the Whig Party came the Republican Party, which was the party of Abraham Lincoln and took a stand against slavery. The Southern Confederacy's loss in the Civil War weakened the Democrats.
The modern Republican Party was formed in 1854 to oppose the expansion of slavery, and many former Whig Party leaders joined the newly formed anti-slavery party. [159] The Republican Party sought to combine Jefferson and Jackson's ideals of liberty and equality with Clay's program of using an active government to modernize the economy. [160]
During Jackson's second term, opponents of the president including Clay, Webster, and William Henry Harrison created the Whig Party, and through the years, Clay became a leading congressional Whig. Clay sought the presidency in the 1840 election but was passed over at the Whig National Convention in favor of Harrison.
As the 1856 elections approached, Lincoln abandoned the defunct Whig Party in favor of the Republicans. He attended the May 1856 Bloomington Convention, which formally established the Illinois Republican Party. The convention platform asserted that Congress had the right to regulate slavery in the territories and called for the immediate ...
[16] [17] As a result, the Democratic-Republican Party split into a Jacksonian faction that was regionally and ideologically identical to the original party, which became the modern Democratic Party in the 1830s, and a Henry Clay faction that regionally and ideologically resembled the old Federalist Party, which was absorbed by Clay's Whig Party.
[117] The new Republican Party was formed as a northern party dedicated to antislavery, drawing from the antislavery wing of the Whig Party and combining Free Soil, Liberty, and antislavery Democratic Party members, [118] Lincoln resisted early Republican entreaties, fearing that the new party would become a platform for extreme abolitionists ...