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 Wisconsin, at which it was formally resolved that if the Kansas-Nebraska bill was enacted they would "throw old party organizations to the winds and organize a new party on the sole issue of the non-extension of slavery." The chief organizer of that meeting was A. E. Bovay, who had been in correspondence upon the subject with Horace Greeley and who at that meeting proposed that the new organization be known as the Republican party.

It was of course necessary to adopt a new name. The Whigs were the most numerous members of the new body, but they could not expect the Democrats to call themselves Whigs. Neither, of course, would the Whigs consent to be called Democrats, even if that name had not belonged to the party which they were about to fight. Neither Whigs nor Democrats would be known as Free Soilers. In those circumstances the suggestion of "Republican" was most felicitous. Democrats remembered that it had been adopted by Jefferson. Whigs recalled the use of it by the founders of their own party in opposition to Jackson. Free Soilers were reminded that Jefferson, in the Ordinance of 1787 which he drafted, was the pioneer Free Soiler who made the Northwest Territory free and would have made the Southwest similarly free if his will could have prevailed.

The formal adoption of the name and organization of the party were reserved to a little later date. It was on July 6, 1854. The place was a grove of giant oaks at Jackson, Michigan. There a state convention was held of Whigs, Democrats and Free Soilers opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska bill. Jacob M. Howard was chairman. A platform was adopted denouncing