Pennsylvania Republican State Central Committee

State: Pennsylvania

As opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act redrew political lines, anti-Nebraska Pennsylvanians fused with Know-Nothings in the hopes of also luring Whigs away from the Democratic Party. Pennsylvania held its first state Republican convention in Pittsburgh on September, 5, 1855. The call to the meeting was addressed to “The citizens of Pennsylvania, without regard to former party distinctions, who are willing to unite in a new organization to resist the further spread of Slavery and the increase of the Slave power” and stated that the purpose of the convention was to organize a Republican Party in Pennsylvania “which shall give expression to the popular will on the subjects involved in the repeal of the Missouri Compromise”. One of the final resolutions of the convention was the authorization of a state Republican executive committee, to be comprised of one member from each of the state’s congressional districts. The first Pennsylvania Republican state committee was subsequently organized after the Pittsburgh convention, with nineteen of the twenty-five seats going to Know-Nothings. In 1860 Alexander K. McClure was made chairman of the Pennsylvania Republican state committee as a reward for backing Abraham Lincoln over Pennsylvanian Simon Cameron at the 1860 Republican National Convention. At that time in Pennsylvania, the state level organization of Republicans and their allies organized under the moniker “People’s Party”, and as chairman of the state committee for the People’s Party, McClure was an effective organizer and helped ensure the election of Andrew G. Curtin as governor of Pennsylvania, and Lincoln as president.

Michael Fitzgibbon Holt, Forging a Majority: The Formation of the Republican Party in Pittsburgh, 1848-1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 159-60, 162, 265-66; The Daily Pittsburgh Gazette (PA), 6 September 1855, 2:1-7; Lewis L. Gould, “McClure, Alexander Kelly,” American National Biography, ed. by John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 14:884-85.