The Kansas-Nebraska Act snapped the cords that bound many Northern voters to the two political parties and threw the American political system into months of extreme confusion and turmoil. At hundreds of political meetings around the country, anti-slavery activists abandoned their political bases for new “fusion” tickets. These activists cut a wide swath across the American political spectrum. Some were members of the moribund Free Soil party, which formed in 1848 to oppose the extension of slavery into the western territories. Others were “Conscience Whigs” who were committed to the Whig party’s economic platform but shared the Free Soilers’ distaste for slavery. Still others were “anti-Nebraska” Democrats, who opposed the Whigs on most policy questions but thought slavery was a dangerous social and political system. Finally, to confuse matters even more, there was considerable overlap between the various anti-Nebraska factions and the nativist American Party, commonly remembered as the “Know Nothing Party.” In some states, these fusion tickets were called Anti-Nebraska, Democrat-Republican or Free Soil. In Ripon, Wisconsin, on February 28, 1854, several dozen residents of the surrounding county converged on the town’s simple, one-room, wood-frame schoolhouse to forge a new political party. They called themselves Republicans, and the name eventually stuck.
That fall, anti-Nebraska candidates unseated dozens of Northern Democrats, leaving many political professionals to wonder who would control the next Congress. Douglas and his associates did a preliminary nose count and estimated that even if Democrats coalesced with what remained of the Whig Party’s representation—now mostly concentrated in the Southern and border states—the anti-Nebraska forces would enjoy a majority of at least 10 votes in the House. Seasoned observers understood, however, that the anti-Nebraska forces were a shaky coalition at best. Erstwhile Whigs and Democrats remained bitterly at odds over economic issues like banking, the tariff and funding for internal improvements—questions that had defined the nation’s political fault lines since the early 1820s and which couldn’t easily be papered over. Adding to the confusion, the new, anti-immigrant American Party—popularly called the Know-Nothings—also won scores of state legislative and congressional seats in the fall elections. Most Know-Nothings opposed the extension of slavery and therefore fell under the banner of the anti-Nebraska fusion coalition, but many ex-Whigs and ex-Democrats were loath to consort with nativists and were steadfastly opposed to placing one in the Speaker’s chair.