Conservative to the Last Degree: The Emerging Illinois Republican Party and the Election of 1856

With the 1856 Illinois anti-Nebraska state convention rapidly approaching, former state legislator Orville H. Browning balanced his optimism for the coming national election with deep fears for what the meeting might yield. Writing to the state’s junior US senator, Lyman Trumbull, Browning explained his plan “to keep the party of this state under the control of moderate men, and conservative influences. . . . If we do so[,] the future destiny of the state is in our own hands.” But “if rash and ultra counsels prevail all is lost.”1 Browning’s hopes and fears for that election reflected the worldview of non-radicals—a broad constituency in Illinois—whom the historian Adam I. P. Smith has labeled the “silent majority” of the Northern electorate.2 Properly situating Illinois within the geography of what William W. Freehling has labeled the “Border North,” makes it clear that most Illinoisans held distinctly conservative antislavery convictions.3 To be sure, they preferred free labor to slavery, but like the residents of Indiana and some portions of New Jersey, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, the citizens of the state retained deep cultural and economic ties to their slave-state neighbors and proved reluctant to interfere