The Republican Party of Wisconsin is a conservative political party in Wisconsin and is the Wisconsin affiliate of the United States Republican Party (GOP). The state party chair is Brian Schimming. The state party is divided into 72 county parties for each of the state's counties, as well as organizations for the state's eight congressional districts.
History
After the introduction in Congress of the Kansas–Nebraska bill in January 1854, many meetings were held in protest across the country. The meeting held in Ripon, Wisconsin on March 20, 1854, is commonly cited as the birth of the Republican Party in the United States due to it being the first publicized anti-slavery meeting to propose a new party with its name being Republican.
Origins of the Republican Party in Wisconsin
Before the meeting in Ripon, an alliance existed between state Whigs, whose national party had weakened, and members of the Free Soil Party, with whom they formed a "people's ticket" as early as 1842. The coalition succeeded in electing the chief justice of the state supreme court, a Milwaukee mayor and aldermen. Many Wisconsin Democrats were also opposed to the Kansas–Nebraska bill, which not only would leave the question of slavery in the territories up to popular sovereignty, but as originally amended would also deny immigrants the right to vote or hold public office. The bill was roundly condemned in the Wisconsin press, as editors such as Horace Rublee (Wisconsin State Journal), Rufus King (Milwaukee Sentinel) and Sherman Booth (Waukesha Free Democrat) encouraged the formation of a new party by calling for an anti-Nebraska convention at the state capitol in Madison. At a large meeting in Milwaukee on February 13, Booth led a committee that drafted many of the resolutions that would later be the basis for other anti-Nebraska meetings in the state, including the famous meeting in Ripon.
Birth of the Republican Party
The organizer of the meeting that gave birth to America's Republican Party was New York state native Alvan Earle Bovay, a lawyer and mathematics teacher at Ripon College. In 1852 Bovay traveled to New York City during the national Whig Party convention and met with old friend and New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley. Bovay suggested the name "Republican" for a new anti-slavery party that would replace the fading Whigs. He favored it because it was a simple word rather than a compound name like Free Soil or Free Democrat, that it could be used as either a noun or an adjective, that it would remind people of Thomas Jefferson's affiliation, and that it symbolized what he believed the new party should represent: "Res Publica," synonymous with commonwealth. Bovay also believed that the name would attract immigrant voters that had recently fled monarchies.
On February 26, 1854, Bovay sent a letter to Greeley urging him to editorialize about a new Republican party, without result. In the meantime he organized a public meeting at the Congregational Church in Ripon on March 1, where resolutions were passed condemning the Nebraska bill and promising a new party if it became law. The Senate passed the bill two days later, which prompted Bovay to organize another meeting in Ripon at Schoolhouse Dist. No. 2 on March 20, 1854, at 6:30 p.m. Composed of Whigs, Democrats and Free Soilers, 54 of Ripon's 100 voters filled the schoolhouse to capacity and were nearly unanimous in their support of a new party with Bovay's suggested name Republican. Bovay wrote Greeley on June 4 urging him to publicize the name before Michigan and Wisconsin held their state anti-Nebraska conventions, which Greeley did in a Tribune editorial on June 24.
Organizing the Republican Party of Wisconsin
On June 9 Sherman Booth repeated the call for a mass convention in Madison, and suggested July 13, the anniversary of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 that had banned slavery in the Northwest Territory. Other Wisconsin editors concurred and publicized the convention.