On the evening of March 20, 1854, a group of people met in a small frame school house to protest the opening of the Kansas and Nebraska territories to slavery. Disgusted with the failure of existing political parties and the U.S. Congress to uphold the cause of freedom in the West, they formed a new antislavery party and called it Republican. They came out of the schoolhouse in agreement that one unified front was crucial to the fight against slavery and thus began the Republican Party.  "We went into the little meeting held in a school house Whigs, Free Soilers, and Democrats. We came out of it Republicans and we were the first Republicans in the Union," Alan E. Bovay later wrote. It was his friend, Eastern newspaper publisher Horace Greeley, who boosted the name to national prominence.

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