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The Republican party began as a coalition of anti-slavery "Conscience Whigs" and Free Soil Democrats opposed to the Kansas–Nebraska Act, submitted to Congress by Stephen Douglas in January 1854. The Act opened Kansas Territory and Nebraska Territory to slavery and future admission as slave states, thus implicitly repealing the prohibition on slavery in territory north of 36° 30′ latitude, which had been part of the Missouri Compromise. This change was viewed by Free Soil and Abolitionist Northerners as an aggressive, expansionist maneuver by the slave-owning South.

The Act was supported by all Southerners, by Northern "Doughface" (pro-Southern) Democrats and by other Northern Democrats persuaded by Douglas' doctrine of "popular sovereignty". In the North the old Whig Party was almost defunct. The opponents were intensely motivated and began forming a new party.^[2]

The new party went well beyond the issue of slavery in the territories. It envisioned modernizing the United States—emphasizing giving free western land to farmers ("free soil") as opposed to letting slave owners buy up the best lands, expanded banking, more railroads, and factories. They vigorously argued that free market labor was superior to slavery and the very foundation of civic virtue and true republicanism—this was the "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men" ideology.^[2]