Origins of the American Civil War
In almost every northern state, organizers attempted to have a Republican Party or an anti-Nebraska fusion movement on ballots in 1854. In areas where the radical Republicans controlled the new organization, the comprehensive radical program became the party policy. Just as they helped organize the Republican Party in the summer of 1854, the radicals played an important role in the national organization of the party in 1856. Republican conventions in New York, Massachusetts, and Illinois adopted radical platforms. These radical platforms in such states as Wisconsin, Michigan, Maine, and Vermont usually called for the divorce of the government from slavery, the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Laws, and no more slave states, as did platforms in Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Massachusetts when radical influence was high.
Mississippi Republican Party
In 1956, Wirt Adams Yerger, Jr., an insurance agent from Jackson, founded the modern Mississippi Republican Party and served as the first state chairman from 1956 until 1966. He was chairman of the Mississippi delegation to the Republican National Convention in 1956, 1960, and 1964. He was elected to a four-year term as chairman of the Southern Association of Republican State Chairman in 1960. In 2009, the central committee of the Mississippi Republican Party named Yerger Chairman Emeritus. The Mississippi Republican Party would grow in supporters with then President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who still twice lost the electoral votes of Mississippi. On September 24, 1960, Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon campaigned in the state, the first time a presidential candidate had appeared in the state in more than a century. During the 1964 Republican National Convention Mississippi delegates would help nominate Barry Goldwater for President. Goldwater would go on to win 87 percent of the vote in Mississippi in the 1964 Presidential Election, the first time a Republican would win the state since the Reconstruction Era. Only once since 1956 has a non-Republican presidential candidate won the state of Mississippi, Jimmy Carter in the 1976 Presidential Election. In 1988, Republican Congressman Trent Lott would defeat Democratic Congressman Wayne Dowdy to replace retiring Senator John Stennis(D-MS).