Sumner hoped to make a career out of turning these “puny sectional questions” into a national cause, but as one of just a handful of Free Soilers in Congress he had few allies. Defiant, he claimed that the people were on his side. “The rising public opinion against Slavery cannot flow in the old political channels,” he warned. “If not through the old parties, then over the old parties, this irresistible current shall find its way.”
Certainly there was a widespread sense that realignment was coming. In 1854, The New York Times reported that both parties had lost their hold on the public. “Their machinery of intrigue, their shuffling evasions, the dodges, the chicanery and the deception of their leaders have excited universal disgust, and have created a general readiness in the public mind for any new organization that shall promise to shun their vices.”
Politicians felt the same dissatisfaction, especially the younger ones. “Old parties, old names, old issues, and old organizations are passing away,” wrote the forty-two-year-old Alexander Stephens, a Whig congressman from Georgia (and future vice president of the Confederacy). “A day of new things, new issues, new leaders, and new organizations is at hand.”
But if the old regime was coming apart, it wasn’t at all clear what the new order would look like. In Sumner’s home state, the nativist American Party, better remembered today as the Know Nothings, won the governorship, the whole congressional delegation, the entire state senate, and all but 3 of the 379 state representatives in the 1854 elections. Know Nothings elected governors in seven other states the same year, along with more than fifty members of the House. Mixing animosity toward the country’s rising immigrant population (mostly German and Irish) with a wide-ranging hostility to the political establishment, Know Nothings positioned themselves, in a remarkably short period of time, as a major force in American politics.
In 1856, however, the party split along the same divide over slavery that destroyed the Whigs. Know Nothings received just 21.5 percent of the popular vote in the presidential election, putting them behind the newly formed Republican Party. Emerging from a combination of top-down and grassroots activism—private meetings in Washington and local conventions across the free states—the Republican Party first took shape in 1854. Sumner embraced the Republican label early, even as other antislavery politicians—including Abraham Lincoln— kept their distance, unsure as to whether it was a majority in embryo or another doomed crusade.