4. Political Realignments, 1852-1856

Questions:
1. How do you account for the break up of the Second Party System?
2. What accounts for the rapid rise of the Republican party?

Richard Carwardine, “The Power of Opinion: Lincoln, the Illinois Public, and the New Political Order, 1854-58” from Lincoln (London: Pearson, 2003)
Eric Foner, “Free Labor: Republicans and Northern Society,” from Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970)

William E. Gienapp, “The Collapse of the Second Party System,” from The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Michael F. Holt, “Party dynamics and the coming of the Civil War,” from The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York: Norton, 1978)
William E. Gienapp, “Nativism and the Creation of a Republican Majority in the North Before the Civil War,” Journal of American History 72 (1985) (JSTOR)
Mark Voss-Hubbard, Beyond Party: Cultures of Antipartisanship in Northern Politics Before the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002)

Primary sources:
Abraham Lincoln, Eulogy for Henry Clay, 1851 (extract)
Lincoln, Speech at Peoria, Ill., 16 Oct 1854.