Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

by Kate Masur

On one side were Douglas and the Democrats, who insisted that nature had made Black people subservient to whites and that the egalitarian promises of the Declaration of Independence were intended for white people only. On the other was Lincoln and a new political party, the Republican Party, and they stood for something rather different. Building a coalition after the collapse of the Whig Party, the Republicans drew in people with a wide array of prior affiliations: radical abolitionists and advocates of racial equality who had joined the Liberty Party and other antislavery third parties; former Whigs, some of whom were colonizationists; and former Democrats, some of whom were avowed white supremacists. By the end of the 1850s, however, Republican partisans stood firmly opposed to Democrats’ brand of white supremacy and their vision for the nation. Republicans largely agreed that free African Americans were entitled to the same civil rights and perquisites of citizenship as white people were. No major political party had ever before embraced those ideals.