9. The Little White Schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin was the birthplace of the Republican Party
In the 1850s the Democratic Party was the largest of the American political parties, followed by the declining Whig Party, the Free Soil party, and several smaller regional parties. The dominant political issue of 1854 was the Kansas-Nebraska bill, which was supported by the Democrats and fervently opposed by the Whigs and Free Soil Party. At issue was whether the territories of Kansas and Nebraska were to allow slavery, with the supporters of popular sovereignty arguing that the voters of the territories themselves were to be allowed to decide. Opponents wanted slavery to be kept out of the territories. In Ripon, Wisconsin, a local politician named Alvan Bovay led the opposition to the bill.
Bovay found opponents to the allowing of the territories to decide the issue of slavery themselves within several contending political groups and called them together at a meeting in the small schoolhouse which he had himself led the effort to have built. At the meeting it was decided that the local Whig and Free Soil parties were united in a new party, which they named the Republican Party, and welcomed also local Democrats and others who agreed with their view. Bovay used his New York connections (he was a transplanted New Yorker) to garner publicity from New York newspapers, particularly the New York Tribune, and other local chapters developed around the country. By 1856 it was a national party, and four years later it won control of both houses of Congress and the White House when Abraham Lincoln was elected as President of the United States.