Michigan Republican Party history

Read the Republican Platform of 1856

Though popularized in a Thomas Nast cartoon, the GOP’s elephant symbol originated during the 1860 campaign, as a symbol of Republican strength.

The party’s first elected United States president was Abraham Lincoln, who took office in 1861.

In 1863 Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared slaves in rebelling states to be “forever free” and welcomed them to join the Union’s armed forces.

The 1864 Republican National Convention called for the abolition of slavery, and Congressional Republicans passed the 13th Amendment unanimously, with only a few Democrat votes.

The abolition of slavery would, in 1865, be formally entrenched in the Constitution of the United States with the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment.

Stymied for a time by Johnson’s vetoes, the Radical Republicans won overwhelming control of Congress in the 1866 elections and engineered Johnson’s impeachment in the House of Representatives.

In the country’s second critical election, in 1896, the Republicans won the presidency and control of both houses of Congress, and the Republican Party became the majority party in most states outside the South.

With the Republican vote divided, Wilson won the presidency, and he was reelected in 1916.

Republican Congressman James Mann introduced the bill in the House in 1919, winning its passage with a Republican majority.

The following year, 36 states ratified the Amendment (26 of them Republican). In the first election allowing women the vote, staunch suffrage supporter, Republican Warren G. Harding, was elected in 1920 in a landslide 26-point victory.

By 1968 the party’s moderate faction regained control and again nominated Nixon, who narrowly won the popular vote over Hubert H. Humphrey, Johnson’s vice president.

In the wake of the Watergate scandal, Nixon resigned the presidency in August 1974 and was succeeded in office by Gerald R. Ford, the first appointed vice president to become president.

In 1991 Bush led an international coalition that drove Iraqi armies out of Kuwait in the Persian Gulf War.

Congress continued to be controlled by the Democrats, however, and Bush lost his bid for reelection in 1992 to another Southern Democrat, Bill Clinton.

Clinton was reelected in 1996, though the Republicans retained control of Congress.

In 2004 Bush was narrowly reelected, winning both the popular and electoral vote, and the Republicans kept control of both houses of Congress.

In the 2012 general election, the Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney was unable to unseat Obama.