Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The Free Soil Party, also called the Free Democratic Party or the Free Democracy, [3] was a political party in the United States from 1848 to 1854, when it merged into the Republican Party. The party was focused on opposing the expansion of slavery into the western territories of the United States .
At the 1848 presidential election, the Barnburners left the Democratic Party, refusing to support presidential nominee Lewis Cass. They joined with other anti-slavery groups, predominantly the abolitionist Liberty Party and some anti-slavery Conscience Whigs from New England and the Midwest, to form the Free Soil Party. This group nominated ...
The National Liberty Party attracted sparse support; Smith received votes in only four states, including his native New York, where he polled 2,454 votes (0.56%). [27] The Free Soil platform of 1848 provided the policy basis for the antislavery coalition that would come to power in the election of 1860 as the Republican Party. [28]
The Third Party System was marked by a realignment of the Free Soil Party movement of New England and the Great Lakes Region into the Republican Party after the 1856 election, and a realignment of the more northern portion of Whigs, Constitutional Union voters and Know Nothing voters along the Coastal Midatlantic into the Democratic Party after ...
The result was the so-called "Free Soil Movement." Free-soilers believed that slavery was dangerous because of what it did to whites. The "peculiar institution" ensured that elites controlled most of the land, property, and capital in the South. The Southern United States was, by this definition, undemocratic.
Nathaniel Banks, a member of the American Party and the Free Soil Party, won election as Speaker of the House after a protracted battle, defeating Democrat William Aiken. [4] In the Senate , Democrats retained a strong majority, while the Opposition replaced the Whigs as the second largest party in the chamber.
The Free Soil Party of 1848–52, and the new Republican Party after 1854, demanded that the new lands opening up in the west be made available to independent farmers, rather than wealthy planters who would develop it with the use of slaves forcing the yeomen farmers onto marginal lands. [20]
Democrats were even less unified than the Whigs, as former Democratic President Martin Van Buren broke from the party and led the anti-slavery Free Soil Party's ticket. Van Buren won the support of many Democrats and Whigs who opposed the extension of slavery into the territories, but he took more votes from Democratic nominee Lewis Cass in the ...