Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln helped establish the Republican Party with a speech denouncing an 1854 law, written by a Democrat Senator, that allowed slavery to expand into the western territories.  Two years later, he co-founded the Illinois GOP.  Lincoln was runner-up for the 1856 Republican vice presidential nomination and then became a Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate.

More than two years before becoming the first Republican president, Lincoln spoke for the ages: “The Republican Party, on the contrary [to the Democrats], holds that this government was instituted to secure the blessings of freedom, and that slavery is an unqualified evil... [Republicans] will oppose in all its length and breadth the modern Democratic idea that slavery is as good as freedom.”

Back to Heroes