Unionist Party (United States)
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Unionist Party
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|---|---|
| Leaders |
John S. Carlile Francis Preston Blair Jr. Claiborne Fox Jackson Thomas Swann John P. Kennedy |
| Founded | 1861 |
| Dissolved | 1866 |
| Ideology |
American Unionism Pro-Compromise (pre-1861) Abolitionism (post-1861) |
A Unionist, later Unconditional Unionist, was a political label, started after Compromise of 1850, to define politicians who supported the Compromise. Members included Southern Democrats who were loyal to the Union, as well as elements of the old Whig Party and other factions opposed to a separate Southern Confederacy.
It was used primarily by Southerners who did not want to affiliate with the Republicans, or wished to win over anti-secession Democrats.
The label first appeared 1850, during the dispute over the Compromise of 1850. Southerners who supported the Compromise (mainly Whigs) adopted the Unionist label to win over pro-Compromise Democrats and defeat anti-Compromise Democrats. The name change emphasized the Compromise issue, and implied that ordinary Whig political issues, such as the tariff, had been set aside.
By 1860, the Whig Party was defunct. A group of former Whigs formed the Constitutional Union Party, with John Bell as candidate for president. Also, as in 1850, ex-Whigs and anti-secession Democrats combined as "Unionists" to oppose secessionists in state elections, especially in Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and Virginia, where the Republican Party label was still toxic. Bell's candidacy was ineffective, but the state strategy proved successful as the American Civil War began in 1861.
Following the splintered presidential election of 1860, it became apparent that much of the South would not abide by the election of Abraham Lincoln. In Missouri, Francis P. Blair, Jr. began consolidating that state's adherents of Lincoln, John Bell, and Stephen A. Douglas into a new political party, the Unconditional Union Party, which would lay aside antebellum partisan interests in favor of a single cause, the preservation of the Union. Blair and his supporters' primary goal was "to resist the intrigues of the Secessionists, by political action preferably, by force if need were."
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