GOP the "Party of Lincoln?" Not So Fast There...

During his poorly attended, virus-ridden June campaign event in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Donald Trump once again pulled out the GOP’s favorite meme, that the Republican Party was the “party of Lincoln.” Republicans love this claim because it fits so nicely into the grade school lessons most people remember—that is Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860 on the GOP ticket and reelected again in 1864 on behalf of the Grand Old Party.

Republican Lincoln ran for
reelection with Democrat Johnson 
as his running mate.

The problem is Lincoln did not actually run for reelection on the Republican Party ticket. And if you remember back to your high history lessons, you'll remember Lincoln's running mate in 1864—Andrew Johnson—was a Democrat. A Democrat running on a Republican Party ticket? How could that be?

When confronted with that fact today, the GOP simply claims they temporary changed the party’s name for that one election. It wasn’t that simple. The National Union Party was comprised of both Republicans and Democrats.

Party Schisms

This bizarre fact of history came about because by 1864 a political schism slashed through the Republican Party. First, Lincoln was a dark horse candidate that no one in the party ever expected to rise to be their presidential nominee. Even after his election, Lincoln never really received the full support of his party.

One reason for that was a faction of the party called the Radical Republicans who were strong proponents of abolition, the enfranchisement of blacks, and—after secession—ensuring the South paid dearly for its treason. They disliked Lincoln and his call for a gentle reintegration of the South after the war. And in a political case of you can't win for losing, many Republicans were outraged by Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, especially since four Union states— Maryland, Missouri, Delaware, and Kentucky—were still slave states. Those who opposed Lincoln's policies demanded he step down after his first term.

On the other side of the aisle, the Democratic Party was experiencing its own policy split. Before the war, the Democrats were the party of the South and of slavery. After the Southern secession, those Democrats who remained loyal to the Union were split into two categories—the War Democrats who supported Lincoln’s war to force the South’s return into the Union, and the Copperheads, or Peace Democrats, who opposed the war and demanded a peace settlement with the South.

For the 1864 presidential election, both parties experienced so much division it was impossible for the traditional two-party balloting to take place. The Radical Republicans formed a separate party, the Radical Democracy Party, and nominated John C. Frémont, famed explorer and the Republican presidential nominee in the 1856 election. War Democrat John Cochrane, a former Union Army general, was his running mate.

 Other War Democrats joined Republicans in forming the National Union Party, which nominated Lincoln for president with War Democrat Johnson as his running mate.

The Democratic Party, now largely a Copperhead party, nominated former Major General George McClelland, whom Lincoln had fired as head of the Union Army, as its presidential nominee.

National Union
campaign poster

Couldn't Win as a Republican

As much as today’s GOP likes to describe itself as “the party of Lincoln,” the truth is Lincoln faced losing reelection if he ran solely on a Republican Party platform. Many of the National Unionists would not vote for a Republican candidate. Robert Jefferson Breckinridge, chairman of the National Union Party’s convention, declared to Lincoln, “As a Union party I will follow you to the ends of the earth, and to the gates of death. But as an Abolition party, as a Republican party, as a Whig party, as a Democratic party, as an American [Know-Nothing] party, I will not follow you one foot.”

The Radical Republican’s attempt to win the presidency did not last long. Realizing that his third-party candidacy might hand the White House over to McClelland and the Democrats, Frémont withdrew from the race. McClelland himself did not agree with the Copperheads’ platform demanding a peace settlement with the Confederacy, but the National Unionists used that platform to discredit the one-time hero of the Union.

Lincoln won reelection by a landslide. The Republicans and the Democrats of the National Union Party returned to their former entities, as did the Radical Republicans and the Copperheads. By the end of April 1865, Lincoln would be dead, assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. But, for the few remaining months of his presidency, Lincoln was not a Republican president or a Democratic president, but a National Union president supported openly by members from both traditional national parties.

So, when today’s GOP claims to be “the party of Lincoln,” they are simply wrong. Lincoln transcended any one party. Unlike Trump, Lincoln was a president for the nation.