How a Wisconsin schoolhouse launched the GOP in 1854

Political Director

RIPON, Wis. —

As Americans prepare to celebrate the country’s 250th birthday, the birthplace of the Republican Party is traced back to small roots in Ripon, Wisconsin, and a little white schoolhouse that still stands today.

It was 1854, and just as the Kansas-Nebraska Act was set to pass, which created the two territories and allowed settlers there to decide whether to legalize slavery, meetings popped up all over the North, including in Ripon.

“It happened to be a very blizzardy day, and so the numbers were less,” Ellen Sorensen said, the interim director of the Little White Schoolhouse. “The number I’ve seen most recently is about 30 people. The 20th of March, 1854.”

The Wisconsin meeting brought together Whigs, Democrats and Free Soilers. They were farmers, lawyers and merchants who emerged that day as Republicans opposed to slavery.

“I think partly the little white schoolhouse,” said Alison Clark Efford, a history professor at Marquette University, on why this meeting has been held in time.

Video below: America 250: Birthplace of Republican Party traced back to Ripon, Wisconsin

“One of the interesting things about the Republican Party in the 1850s is it isn’t abolitionists,” Clark Efford said. “The party platform doesn’t say we are going to wipe out slavery from the United States. The party platform says we are opposed to the expansion of slavery westward, but there were radicals. There were radical Republicans in the party, people who said, ‘No, slavery is evil, it needs to end right now,’ and the Ripon folks were more radical in those terms.”

Sorensen said other locations oftentimes also claim to be the birthplace of the Republican Party.

“All the time, all the time,” Sorensen said. “Jackson, Michigan, because they had the first state convention. We say, ‘You had to have Republicans to have a state convention of the Republicans.'”

“There’s a few places like in Iowa or New Hampshire that also claim to be the birthplace,” Sorensen added. “And why we are recognized as the birthplace? We have primary resource material. We have the ads or notices in the paper. We have the building.”

The schoolhouse has previously been designated a national landmark, a title officials are working to retain after the schoolhouse was recently moved to a more commercial location in Ripon.