The “Grand Old Party” a/k/a GOP a/k/a The Republican Party a/k/a The Party of Lincoln was finally laid to rest after succumbing to neurodegeneration. It was 146 years old. The Grand Old Party had a long and distinguished life beginning with its fight against extending (but not ending) slavery into the Territories. It’s earliest members were former Whigs, Know-Nothings, and Free Soil Democrats. In 1856, it’s slogan was “Free Labor, Free Soil, Free Men”. However, it wasn’t until the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, that they suddenly became abolitionist rather than simply “containists”. After Lincoln’s assassination, and the election of US Grant, GOP saw rot set in in the form of corruption. Under the stewardship of GOP, America saw the disenfranchisement of Americans in the South, the driving of former slaves off plantations, away from the only work they knew, and, the re-classification of Creoles as “Negro”

Tell me, does American Composer Louis Mareu Gottschalk, a Creole, look “black” to you?

Well,  GOP thought so, simply because his mother was Haitian. and, so legislated him to the ranks of historical error, and thus gave birth to the “tragic mulatto” meme. GOP lost interest in the fate of freedmen, and came to fear the freedmen (blacks) as “potentially dangerous to the economy” by perhaps demanding a fair wage?

GOP used churches from its birth to gather support:

Historians have explored the ethnocultural foundations of the party, along the line that ethnic and religious groups set the moral standards for their members, who then carried those standards into politics. The churches also provided social networks that politicians used to sign up voters. The pietistic churches emphasized the duty of the Christian to purge sin from society. Sin took many forms—alcoholism, polygamy and slavery became special targets for the Republicans. The Yankees, who dominated New England, much of upstate New York, and much of the upper Midwest were the strongest supporters of the new party. This was especially true for the pietistic Congregationalists and Presbyterians among them and (during the war), the Methodists, along with Scandinavian Lutherans. The Quakers were a small tight-knit group that was heavily Republican.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_Republican_Party

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