Race and the GOP: The Road to Perdition 

The Republican Party was born in 1854, largely to oppose expanding slavery and, for many of its founders, to abolish it. By 1860, the party’s platform declared the African slave trade a “crime against humanity and a burning shame” and called attempts to extend slavery westward “a dangerous political heresy.” 

“Opposition to slavery was the party’s soul,” according to historian Fergus M. Bordewich, who has written extensively about America’s first century. “Republicans considered slavery morally repugnant, economically backward, degrading to the basic principles of free labor, and fundamentally anti-American.”

Among the most prominent party founders was U.S. Congressman Thaddeus Stevens (R-Pa.)  

“Stevens was one of the most effective political abolitionists in the U.S.,” Bordewich said in an interview. “He viscerally loathed slavery, harbored no color prejudice, and was a passionate leveler, who argued tirelessly for racial equality and refused to be buried in a racially segregated cemetery.” 

During the Civil War, Stevens zealously emphasized prosecuting the conflict. Afterward, he strongly advocated radical Southern Reconstruction. 

Now, his legacy is being honored.

On May 1, the Thaddeus Stevens and Lydia Hamilton Smith Center for History and Democracy, an interpretive museum and education center, will open. It is in Lancaster, Pa., Stevens’s final hometown and an Underground Railroad hub.

Smith was Stevens’s mixed-race housekeeper and collaborator. The state-of-the-art center is in Stevens’s home and adjoining law office, enhanced by 25,000 square feet of modern exhibition galleries. 

In the 1850s, “Lancaster County was on the front line of the antislavery fight,” said Robin Sarratt, president & CEO of LancasterHistory. “From his Lancaster home, Stevens became a powerful voice andunyielding champion of both freedom and equality, the non-profit history organization developing the Stevens and Smith Center. More Americans should know his legacy’s impact on our lives........

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