The National Union Party, commonly known as the Union Party, and sometimes as the Republican–Union coalition, was a coalition of Republicans, War Democrats, and Unconditional Unionists that supported the Lincoln administration during the American Civil War. It held the 1864 National Union Convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln for president and Andrew Johnson for vice president in the 1864 United States presidential election. Following Lincoln's assassination, Johnson tried and failed to sustain the Union Party as a vehicle for his presidential ambitions. The coalition did not contest the 1868 elections, but the Republican Party continued to use the "Union" label in subsequent elections.

Lincoln won the 1860 United States presidential election, polling 180 electoral votes and 53 percent of the popular vote in the free states; opposition to Lincoln was divided, with most Northern Democrats voting for the senior U.S. senator from Illinois, Stephen Douglas. Following his inauguration, Lincoln sought support from Douglas Democrats and Southern Unionists for his efforts to preserve the Union. He encouraged the formation of bipartisan Union coalitions in the loyal states that replaced the Republican Party throughout much of the Lower North. Besides allowing voters of diverse pre-war partisan allegiances to act collectively, the Union label served a valuable propaganda purpose by implying the coalition's opponents were dis-unionists.

The preeminent policy of the Union Party was the preservation of the Union by the prosecution of the war to its ultimate conclusion. They rejected proposals for a negotiated peace as humiliating and ultimately ruinous to the authority of the national government. The party's 1864 platform called for the abolition of slavery by constitutional amendment, a "liberal and just" immigration policy, completion of the transcontinental railroad, and condemned the French intervention in Mexico as dangerous to republicanism.

Background

Antebellum, 1850–59

Calls for a national "Union Party" occurred frequently after 1850. Daniel Webster and others envisioned the Union Party as a vehicle for politicians to support the Compromise of 1850. The Union Party failed to displace the Second Party System, but some state parties remained active into the 1850s. The collapse of the Whig Party after 1854 followed a national political realignment in which opponents of the Kansas-Nebraska Act organized the Republican Party on an antislavery platform. Republican John C. Fremont lost the 1856 United States presidential election but won the popular vote in the free states, making the Republicans the largest party in the North. However, a significant number of ex-Whigs remained outside the Republican Party, in part because of the party's ties to abolitionism. Many of these conservatives joined the Constitutional Union Party in the 1860 presidential election. The Constitutional Union candidates carried Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia, ran second in the remaining slave states, and claimed 14% of the popular vote in Massachusetts, but the Republicans won the votes of most former Whigs and thus the election.

Antiparty ideology was widespread in Antebellum America, even as political parties played a central role in the nation's political culture. During the 1850s, observers attributed rising sectionalism and radicalization to partisanship that had brought the nation to the brink of destruction. "Ignorant, vicious, and corrupt" individuals sowed divisions amongst the electorate and substituted appeals to self-interest for concern for the common good. Simultaneously, the belief that one party's success was necessary for the nation's survival led to the conclusion that rival parties were a threat to union and republicanism. Calls for a "Union Party" appealed to both ideals by dissolving old party allegiances in favor of a coalition of loyal citizens while identifying its opposition as disloyal and disunionist.

Secession Crisis, 1860–61

Lincoln's election precipitated the secession of 11 slave states between December 1860 and June 1861, plunging the nation into an unprecedented political crisis. Lincoln owed his election to conservative ex-Whigs in Indiana, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, who maintained a strained relationship with the Republican Party's radical wing. He received few votes in the border states and none in 10 states that later joined the Confederacy, where Douglas made a late appeal for unionist votes. Any attempt to restore national authority and mobilize support for the war effort would therefore require Lincoln to unite with those who shared his unionist orientation but could not be easily integrated within existing Republican organizations.

In the months between Lincoln's election and inauguration, conservatives implored the incoming administration to break with the Republican Party in order to facilitate an alliance with Southern moderates that could restore the Union and avert a civil war. They claimed that most white Southerners still opposed secession, but that the suspicion of abolitionism prevented them from cooperating with the Republican Party. A new conservative party would remove this obstacle by making preservation of the Union the only test of loyalty to the administration. At a dinner in honor of the French ambassador to the United States, William H. Seward, soon to be secretary of state in Lincoln's cabinet, charged attendees to renounce "all parties, all platforms of previous committals and whatever else will stand in the way of a restoration of the American Union." Seward and the conservatives believed that any attempt to restore the Union by force would alienate unionists in the slave states. Instead, they hoped to use the proposed Union Party as a vehicle to mobilize opposition to secession and secure reunion peacefully and on the basis of sectional compromise.

Lincoln, however, was unwilling for the Republican Party to follow the fate of the Whigs and alienate its supporters in the free states in pursuit of an alliance with Southern conservatives. During the winter of 1860–61, he intervened decisively to defeat the Crittenden Compromise, a set of proposed constitutional amendments that would have guaranteed the existence of slavery in perpetuity south of the 36°30′ line. This would have constituted an abandonment of the Republican platform pledge to oppose the extension of slavery into the U.S. territories, a reversal that Lincoln predicted would damn the Republican Party to be a "mere sucked egg, all shell and no principle in it." Rather than court conditional unionists, as Whig president Millard Fillmore had done in 1850, Lincoln sought to recruit unconditional unionists from the border states for positions in his administration. In his first inaugural address, the new president endorsed the proposed Corwin Amendment, which would have guaranteed slavery in the slave states, but not in the territories—an offer the secessionists had already rejected. While Lincoln and his advisors knew this compromise proposal could not be accepted, it allowed them to shift the onus for war to the secessionists and "meet Disunion as patriots rather than as partizans." In this way, Lincoln went about laying the foundation for a future Union Party that gave cover to border state unionists to affiliate with the administration without compromising his 1860 campaign pledge to oppose the admission of new slave states.

History Creation, 1861–62

The commencement of hostilities in April 1861 dispelled the possibility of an alliance between administration supporters and conditional unionists. In short order, the Confederate bombardment and capture of Fort Sumter, Lincoln's call for 75,000 volunteers to put down the rebellion, the secession of the four Upper South states, and military mobilization in the Union and the Confederacy remade the political landscape in both sections. These events had different implications for administration supporters in the free states and the loyal border states. In the latter, the immediate aim of the unionist movement was to prevent secession and install loyal governments that would cooperate with the administration. In Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and Western Virginia, unionists organized across party lines to defeat secession during the spring and summer of 1861. Montgomery Blair and Francis Preston Blair Jr. were among those who hoped for a national realignment in which the Union Party would replace the Republicans as the main opposition to the Democrats.

In the free states, the Union Party was a grassroots movement that called on citizens to set aside partisanship in the interest of national unity. Patriotic meetings of citizens vowed to "know no party but the Union party until the question is settled whether we have a government or not." In the first weeks of the crisis, public opinion was virtually unanimous in favor of the suspension of party politics. The rise of the peace movement following the disastrous Union defeat at the First Battle of Bull Run prompted administration supporters to organize Union state tickets to contest the 1861 and 1862 United States elections. These developments were encouraged by Lincoln, who envisioned a new party composed of Republicans, War Democrats, and Southern unionists as a vehicle for his own re-election in 1864. Such a coalition would provide the basis for national reconstruction following the end of the war, which Lincoln foresaw as "preeminently a political process" that would be guided by loyal residents of the seceded states.

From the outset, the movement for a Union Party encountered significant Republican resistance. Michael Holt argues that Republican opposition to the Union Party "was the chief source of the disagreements between Lincoln and Congress during the war." Congressional Republicans from safe districts saw little benefit to courting Democratic and Whig voters; to the contrary, they feared efforts to conciliate conservatives would dilute the strong anti-Slave Power message on which the party had won in 1860. In Illinois, Ohio, Massachusetts, and California, the move to abandon the Republican label provoked outrage among the party faithful. Radical Republicans in particular feared losing influence to conservatives who continued to stridently oppose the radical stance on slavery and favored a restrained, conciliatory policy toward white Southerners. Radical opposition to merger with ex-Whigs and Democrats in the Union Party preserved the Republican Party as a separate organization in antislavery strongholds in the Upper North.

The result was a partial realignment in which Union coalitions supplanted—but did not extinguish—the Republican Party throughout most of the North. Most administration candidates who contested the 1861 and 1862 elections ran as Unionists. Party composition varied locally; state-specific unionist parties existed in the border states, while in parts of New England and the Upper Midwest the Republican label remained in use. In line with contemporary sources, historians have sometimes referred to the "Republican–Union coalition" or party to suggest the heterogenous character of the administration party during this period.

Border states