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The Whig Party formed out of the National Republican Party, the leaders of which were John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay. They were nationalists, supported internal improvements and moral reforms, and desired gradual westward expansion in congruence with economic growth and modernization.
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The Democrats were the successors of Jeffersonian democracy. They favored localism and freedom from modern institutions such as banks, factories, and reform movements. They had a commitment to states' rights, a limited government, and an agrarian ideal.
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n 1840 the Whig Party ran a "Log Cabin and Hard Cider" campaign in which they presented their presidential candidate, William Henry Harrison, a Virginia aristocrat, as a simple man and hero of the people.
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The Democrats upheld a platform which endorsed "strict construction" of the Constitution in 1840. They opposed the government's interference with the spread of slavery, the existence of a national bank, and the federal funding of internal improvements.
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Again nominating James C. Birney, the Liberty Party continued to stand on an anti-slavery platform, including several planks for equal rights and the elimination of racial discrimination in the North
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The Free Soil Party absorbed men from the Liberty Party who had nowhere else to go; "Conscience," or anti-slavery, Whigs; and "Barnburner" Democrats, whose anti-black prejudices allied them with anti-slavery men.
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The Republican Party grew out of resistance to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which overrode the Missouri Compromise and allowed slavery to spread into Western territory by popular sovereignty. "Anti-Nebraska" men included anti-slavery Whigs, Democrats, Free Soilers, reformers, and abolitionists.