“Erecting anew the standard of freedom”: Salmon P. Chase's “appeal of the independent democrats” and the rise of the Republican Party

Abstract

In response to the Kansas‐Nebraska Bill proposed in 1854, Salmon P. Chase broadcast the “Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress, to the People of the United States.” Examining the symbolic oppositions that structure the “Appeal,” together with its strategy of crisis taken from Puritan jeremiads, this paper accounts for Chase's success in pulling together disparate forces of the free North. By renewing the Puritan “errand into the wilderness,” the “Appeal” incited antislavery factions, antagonized Southern apologists, and thus laid the ground for the Republican Party and civil war.