The overshadowing fact of the sixties was the Great Civil War, which during its continuance, dominated public thought and action and put a corresponding check upon Indiana's development. Preceding the final outbreak, and part and parcel of our war history, was a period of turmoil and fierce conflict of opinion, which, while it prevailed over the country, playing about the ever-agitated question of slavery was particularly acrid here. Our mixed population with its large element from the south that was southern in its sympathies imperiled our standing as a union and antislavery state. As an evidence of the anti-Negro sentiment that existed the constitution of 1850 had in it a clause prohibiting all Negroes or Mulattoes from coming into or settling in Indiana. The Democratic Party of Indiana was for years in this ascendancy, and its endorsement and support of Federal Legislation that made for the extension of slave territory was so pronounced, and, from the northern viewpoint, so flagrant, that many, after fruitless protests seceded from its ranks. Conspicuous among these seceders was Oliver P. Morton, who, at a Democratic State Convention, held in Indianapolis in 1854, walked out amid taunts and hisses, after taking a stand against the Kansas-Nebraska bill, which gave those two great states over to the slave power.

Throughout the early fifties, owing to this vexed slavery ghost that would not down, the elements of a new party, not yet crystallized, were segregated under such names as "Free Soilers," "Abolitionists," "Free Democracy," "Barnburners," and the "People's Party," which later "was the preliminary organization of the Republican Party" in Indiana. Other parties, such as the Prohibition and "Know-nothing" organizations were in the field, but the political movement at the time of greatest historical import was the one that was feeling its way toward alignment on the nation's greatest problem, that of slave versus free labor - a problem that involved both economics and morals.

These various currents finally merged in the organization that was destined to work out the country's salvation - The Republican Party, which took definite form at a convention held in Pittsburgh on the 22nd of February 1856. That year O. P. Morton, as candidate of the "People's Party" for Governor of Indiana, canvassed Indiana, and during the campaign, according to his biographer (Foulke, p. 58), he "organized the Republican Party in Indiana.

The wrangling between the parties during the latter fifties was a discredit to Indiana. Through their refusal to act together they failed, in the Legislature of 1857, to make an appropriation for the expenses of the State Government, and Governor Willard borrowed enough to pay the interest on the public debt, while Indiana institutions had to be temporarily closed. Also the Democrats, by an irregular proceeding, elected Jesse D. Bright and Graham N. Fitch to the United States Senate. The next Legislature, the Republicans being then in the ascendancy, declared the previous irregular proceedings illegal and elected Henry S. Lane and William M. McCarty, but the United States Senate, which was Democratic, did not recognize these Republican contestants.

IN a word the irreconcilable antagonism between the free and the slave states that grew more and more bitter as the great issue was repeatedly forced upon the people, found in Indiana full expression.