[Footnote 1:  Rhodes’s History of the United States, Vol.  II., pp. 51-58; McMaster’s With the Fathers, pp. 87-106.]

For a time the party flourished greatly and secured six members of the House of Representatives, then it declined in power; but the immense increase in immigration between 1846 and 1850 again revived it, and. somewhere in New York city in 1852 a secret, oath-bound organization, with signs, grips, and passwords, was founded, and spread with such rapidity that in 1854 it carried the elections in Massachusetts, New York, and Delaware.  Next year (1855) it elected the governors and legislatures of eight states, and nearly carried six more.  Encouraged by these successes, the leaders determined to enter the campaign of 1856, and called a party convention which nominated Millard Fillmore and Andrew Jackson Donelson.  Delegates from seven states left the convention because it would not stand by the Missouri Compromise, and taking the name North Americans nominated N. P. Banks.  He would not accept, and the bolters then joined the Republicans.

%394.  Beginning of the Republican Party.%—­As early as 1854, when the Kansas-Nebraska Bill was before Congress, the question was widely discussed all over the North and West, whether the time had not come to form a new party out of the wreck of the old.  With this in view a meeting of citizens of all parties was held at Ripon, Wisconsin, at which the formation of a new party on the slavery issue was recommended, and the name Republican suggested.  This was before the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill.

After its passage a thousand citizens of Michigan signed a call for a state mass meeting at Jackson, where a state party was formed, named Republican, and a state ticket nominated, on which were Free-soilers, Whigs, and Anti-Nebraska Democrats.  Similar “fusion tickets” were adopted in Wisconsin and Vermont, where the name Republican was used, and in Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, New Hampshire, and Connecticut.

The success of the new party in Wisconsin and Michigan in 1854, and its yet greater success in 1855, led the chairmen of the Republican state committees of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Wisconsin to issue a call for an informal convention at Pittsburg on February 22, 1856.  At this meeting the National Republican party was formed, and from it went a call for a national nominating convention to meet (June 17, 1856) at Philadelphia, where John C. Fremont and William L. Dayton were nominated.

The Free-soilers had joined the Republicans and so disappeared from politics as a party.

The Whigs, or “Silver Grays,” met and endorsed Fillmore.

The Democrats nominated James Buchanan and John C. Breckinridge and carried the election.  The Whigs and the Know-nothings then disappeared from national politics.

[Illustration:  James Buchanan]

%395.  James Buchanan, Fifteenth President; the “Bred Scott Decision."%—­When Buchanan and Breckinridge were inaugurated, March 4, 1857, certain matters regarding slavery were considered as legally settled forever, as follows: