Simply defined, a political party is an organization to gain political power.  Political parties do this by running specific candidates in elections.  The United States has been primarily a two party system for years now: Republican and Democrat.  Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican elected to the Presidency.  The first Republican.  However, before he was a Republican he was a Whig.  What is a Whig?  Let me tell you.

The Whig Party started in 1834 as opposition to Andrew Jackson.  The Whigs can rightly be thought of as an extension of the Federalist Party.  They believed in a strong central government and endorsed something called The American System.  The American System was meant to create a strong, unified country.  Unified and strong.  Some of the issues it put forth were: putting high tariffs on imported goods so that people would buy U.S. products, preserving the Bank of the United States in order to have a stable currency, federal revenue through land sales, and national improvements such as roads and canals.  Whigs like Henry Clay believed that The American System would unite the country because every region would depend on each other.  For example, cotton from the South would go to factories in the North.  Factories in the North.

Slavery ended up splitting the Whig Party.  Whigs from the North supported abolition and halting the spread of slavery to the new territories, while Whigs from the South felt the opposite.  The newly formed Republican Party drew many people from the Whigs, including Lincoln.  A big factor in the Whig split was the Kansas – Nebraska Act which formed the new territories and stated that it was up to the settlers whether to allow slavery or not.  Stephen A. Douglas put forth the Kansas – Nebraska Act.