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The mood today is tense. Conversations can feel like minefields. One line sums it up perfectly: “The political atmosphere is so charged that people hardly dare speak their minds.”
That sentence sounds like it belongs in a modern editorial. But it was printed in the Indianapolis Journal in 1856, as Indiana—like the rest of the country—wrestled with divisions over slavery that threatened to pull the nation apart.
“Men do not argue with each other,” another observer wrote at the time. “They denounce each other.”
In the midst of that storm, an unlikely Hoosier rose to prominence: Henry Lane.
Lane was not what most people pictured when they thought of a statesman. Thin, pale and missing his front teeth, the former congressman looked nothing like the polished politicians of his age. (The denim suits he favored didn’t help.) Yet when he stood to speak, he could electrify a crowd. A contemporary described his speeches as alive with wit and vivid anecdotes that kept audiences riveted to the end.
That talent was never more on display than on July 13, 1854, when nearly 10,000 Hoosiers gathered in Indianapolis to protest the Kansas–Nebraska Act—the explosive measure that opened America’s western territories to slavery and shattered the fragile political balance between North and South.
That rally is remembered as the founding of the Republican Party in Indiana, although organizers avoided the “Republican” label at first, wary that Hoosiers would associate it with Eastern abolitionists. Instead, they called themselves the “People’s Party.”
The crowd was a jumble of factions—anti-slavery Democrats, ex-Whigs, Free Soilers, temperance crusaders and even anti-immigrant Know-Nothings. Democratic papers sneered at it as a “mongrel” gathering, certain it would collapse under its contradictions.
Lane proved them wrong. Mounting the platform, he wove together the disparate strands of grievance into a single, stirring message. He denounced Democratic Sen. John Pettit of Indiana, who had dismissed Thomas Jefferson’s declaration that “all men are created equal” as “a self-evident lie.” Lane thundered back that the Declaration of Independence was sacred, and that freedom, not slavery, was the true American birthright.
Most important, Lane offered a unifying principle broad enough to hold the coalition together: opposition to the expansion of slavery. “We are not a mere party of negation,” he declared. “We are a party of principle, formed to preserve the dignity of free labor and to resist the spread of human bondage.”
That fall, Lane’s hastily formed People’s Party captured nine of Indiana’s 11 congressional seats and gained control of the state Legislature’s lower house. In a matter of months, Indiana had become one of the most successful proving grounds for what would soon be known nationally as the Republican Party.
Lane’s greatest act of coalition-building came six years later, not in Indianapolis but in Chicago. As chair of Indiana’s delegation at the 1860 Republican National Convention, he worked behind the scenes to unite the state behind Abraham Lincoln, convincing wavering delegates that Lincoln could win the presidency where others could not. That show of unity helped tip the balance away from front-runner William Seward and toward the man who would become one of America’s greatest leaders.
Lane’s example is worth our recalling today. He wasn’t the loudest voice or the boldest reformer. He was an unlikely uniter—a man who understood that leadership in polarized times means making room for people who disagree with you, as long as you stand on principle and rally them to a cause worth fighting for.•
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Gotsch is executive director of Independent Indiana. Send comments to [email protected].
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