photo #9241860

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY: June 16, 1854 Newspaper editor Horace Greeley calls on opponents of slavery to unite in the Republican Party Greeley’s call came at a pivotal moment: the Missouri Compromise’s 36°30′ parallel had long divided the North and South, but the Kansas-Nebraska Act allowed settlers to decide the slavery status of new territories, flooding the North with pro-slavery migrants US History. Greeley and other Northern leaders saw that the Whig and Free Soil parties were too fragmented to stop the spread of slavery, and that a new, unified party was needed. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Horace-Greeley