The “common ground” of the Republican Party, its broad appeal, consisted of two distinct elements. It pared the Antislavery Project down to its single most important policy—a ban on slavery in the territories—thus appealing to the broadest coalition of voters. But it embedded that one policy in a robust antislavery constitutionalism, thereby appealing to the more radical base of the party. Throughout the 1850s Lincoln never really deviated from his personal support for most of the policies of the larger Antislavery Project: abolition of slavery in Washington, DC, the suppression of slavery on
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