Ripon's Little White Schoolhouse

 

Okay, okay, that inscription might be a hair vainglorious, but you can't blame the citizens of Ripon, Wisconsin for staking a claim, because they're right, partly anyway. Their precious Little White School House wasn't the only birthplace of the Republican party. For the record, two other places make similar claims--one just across the lake in Jackson, Michigan, another in faraway Maine. No Facebook Live feeds existed at the time, so while those three inaugurals went on hundreds of miles apart, what glued them together was a bloody grievance that had them all up in arms.

Just then, in 1854, a stem-winding congressman who never met a debate he didn't like, Stephen Douglas, of Illinois, presented a bill that drew out a plan for the U. S. of A.--much smaller at the time--to deal with the burning issue of slavery. In legislation that ranks near the top ten worst ever to make it out of Congress, the Kansas-Nebraska Act punched its way into law and history. 

The Civil War didn’t start because of one pitiful act of Congress but keep that thought in mind because the Kansas-Nebraska Act ruled that what was then called the Territory of Nebraska (which included significant chunks of Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado) would be slave or would be free depending on what the its residents determined it would be. Sounds like democracy, right? Maybe so, but soon enough it turned into Civil War.

Pro-slavery Missourians poured into the territory, as did a cloud of abolitionists from way out east. White men and women on both sides of the question, slave or free, had strong feelings. Let's gin that up some--men and women out there in Bleeding Kansas had more than strong feelings; they shot killed each other. It's that wickedly simple. 

But now we're a thousand miles from Ripon, Wisconsin. That night, in the middle of a March blizzard and teeth-chattering temps, a few Ripon locals got together to talk about a brand-new political party because most of them, Whigs at the time, couldn't abide being Jacksonian Democrats, nor could they stand being bound to an unholy alliance with Southern Whig slaveholders. So right there, in "the Little White Schoolhouse," Ripon, Wisconsin, a few outraged locals, abolitionists all, determined the time had come to split, to save the Republic--hence, a brand-new Republican party. 

Oh, my, they were hated. Among slave-holding Democrats the self-righteous abolitionists were despised. When the Rev. John Todd came up the Missouri on a steamer, on his way to an abolitionist church in Tabor, Iowa, he got into trouble long before he got to town. In a heated discussion about slavery, when one of the thugs detected an abolitionist, they wanted a scalp. "Shoot him," someone yelled. "Kill him." One idiot told him if it was his choice, he’d straight-up trade the pastor for a mongrel dog and shoot the dog. That man, Todd said in a memoir, was "a minister of the gospel from Missouri."

If you think politics today seems lethal, you’re not wrong; but what fomented godawful outrage in little Ripon, Wisconsin, was nothing to shake a stick at. That anger, all that divisiveness resulted, so history claims, in the brutal horrors of the American Civil War.

The only way in and out of Ripon, Wisconsin are two-lane roads, so if you want to take in the place and its marvelous story, you’ll likely have to go out of your way to find by “the Little White Schoolhouse.”

Right now, they’re moving it. For years the Little White Schoolhouse stood a block east of downtown, where you could drive right by, standing amid ancient oaks and maples and not see it at all. It's moving to greater prominence out west of town, where “the birthplace of the Republican Party,” will be more visible, more of a feature of a small prairie town in central Wisconsin, this hothouse of radical and—get this!--liberal Republican politics.

In the days of Trump, make of that what you will.