Over a century and a half ago, the Republican Party was founded on a conviction about human dignity and its defense in public policy. These ideas must continue to steer the direction of today’s GOP. To understand this ethos, it is important to start in Ripon, Wisconsin, where a little white schoolhouse sits unassumingly on the side of Fond du Lac Street.
The road has a distinctly American appearance: chain restaurants, gas stations, and mom-and-pop shops line both sides for miles. The building itself, tucked between a Culver’s and a Ford dealership, draws little attention. The National Registry of Historic Places assesses it as a “simple, small, one-story frame building sided with clapboards and painted white — a typical one-room schoolhouse in appearance.”
Alvan Bovay was a prominent citizen of Ripon in the mid-1850s. He was a lawyer with connections in New York City and had a passion for education that led him to teach mathematics at the local college. He also had a finger on the ideological pulse of the town and the country at large. In 1852, Bovay was a staunch member of the Whig Party, but he disagreed with his friend Horace Greeley on the future of the party. Greeley, the founder of the New York Tribune, predicted a win for the Whigs in the upcoming presidential election, but Bovay gauged that the party’s “vitality was gone, and that its issues no longer commanded attention.” Bovay was right; Franklin Pierce routed the Whig candidate, Winfield Scott. The Electoral College sided with Pierce 254–42.
Two years later, as the Kansas-Nebraska Act threatened to solidify the institution of slavery in the growing frontier, Bovay could read in his local newspaper: “The passage of this bill, if pass it should, will be the call to arms of a great Northern Party [with]…every man with a heart in him united under the single banner cry of ‘Repeal! Repeal!’”
On a windy Monday evening in March 1854, Bovay organized a meeting in the one-story schoolhouse with clapboards. The result of the meeting was the dissolution of the local Whig and Free Soil town committees and the establishment of a new party. The new party offered the Northern Whigs the structure they needed to effectively oppose the Democratic establishment and gave the Free Soilers the platform they needed to advance their mission of “Free Soil, Free Labor, and Free Men.” The main objective of the big tent party would be to abolish slavery; its name would be the Republican Party.
The movement soon spread far beyond Ripon. In Jackson, Michigan, a convention of 1,000 abolitionists nominated a slate of Republican candidates only three months after the meeting in the Ripon schoolhouse. By the end of the year, like-minded men established a state convention and central committee in neighboring Illinois. Alvan Bovay had given the grassroots political anti-slavery movement a name and an identity, and a party infrastructure was rapidly built around that identity.
By the time of the first Republican National Convention, in 1856, the party had adopted a second concrete objective: eradicate the practice of polygamy. Within the first platform, the newly awakened visionaries articulated:
“Resolved: That the Constitution confers upon Congress sovereign powers over the Territories of the United States for their government; and that in the exercise of this power, it is both the right and the imperative duty of Congress to prohibit in the Territories those twin relics of barbarism — Polygamy, and Slavery.”
The party had quickly developed two distinct objectives with deep social ramifications. Crucially, both goals reflected the party’s belief about the dignity of man. These two distinct aspects of the party’s origin, a desire to protect the dignity of man and specific goals to do so, make the GOP coherent. This desire and the creative, goal-oriented vision it fosters is the birthright of the GOP.
If people are made in the image of God, then they matter. Their freedom to pursue truth and beauty and righteousness matters; a culture that says that that freedom can be lawfully inhibited by slavery is an affront not only to the dignity of individual humans but also humanity. Furthermore, if people matter at an intrinsic level, their behavior matters too, and external preservation of freedom must mature into an internal preservation as well. While slavery could chain the body, polygamy could chain the soul; for America to flourish, it would have to pursue freedom in both areas.
Today, appeals to human dignity still underpin conservative arguments in most social issues, from abortion on demand to physician-assisted suicide to transgenderism. Legalized slavery denied the intrinsic value of both individual people and humanity at large; liberal abortion and euthanasia policies reflect similarly on people’s status as imagebearers. Legalized polygamy comprised a building block of a stable society: the nuclear family.
Likewise, transgenderism destabilizes society at a fundamental level. The conservative movement has historically recognized the necessity of placing a high value on both individual human worth and societal flourishing, and even today this conviction still represents the core breaking point between the conservative Republican and the Libertarian.
Yet even the most authoritarian Republicans understand government must be limited in its pursuit of the preservation of dignity. After all, the government can (and often does) get it wrong. Conservative activism picks up where government intervention leaves off. Such awareness of moral responsibility motivated Nellie Gray to start the March for Life. Her movement never let go of its specific goal to protect the dignity of man: overturn Roe. They eventually won. A similar vision motivated Charlie Kirk, and his movement continues on in full force in the wake of his death. This generational history of protecting human dignity in scores of cultural and political battlegrounds is the Republican legacy, and it is the reason the GOP continues to flourish.
Alvan Bovay eventually left the party he started. At the end of the Civil War, he felt the party had outlived its raison d’être, so he joined the infant Prohibition Party. He died in 1903, well after the inclusion of the Fourteenth Amendment into the Constitution and the near eradication of polygamy. Yet, he left enough of his vision in the Republican Party to empower it for years to come.
In the current cultural moment, the GOP must reclaim Bovay’s mantle. Those who do so will protect the dignity of all Americans, no matter their party affiliation.
