This weekend the Foresters' bus is heading north, to (hopefully) beat some Cheeseheads. Our opponents, the Ripon College Redhawks and the Lawrence University Vikings, are both nestled in small to medium sized towns in Northeastern Wisconsin, firmly within the radius of Green Bay Packers fandom.
The women are going all-in on Saturday. We want to win, we want to play well, we want to enjoy playing this great game with one another. In that spirit, this blog is going to ignore Lawrence and Appleton and the question of what the Vikings have to do with a landlocked paper-mill-dominated town in the American Midwest, and focus solely on Ripon, a small town with an interesting story.
On February 28, 1854 a group of about 30 people (I assume they were men) gathered in a small white schoolhouse in Ripon, WI. These men, all opponents of the spreading of slavery and vehemently against the recently passed
Nebraska Act decided to form a new political party that would have that opposition as a central tenet of its platform.
They decided to call this party 'Republican' to link it to the Declaration of Independence and the Founding Fathers. Months later, the first group that gathered under the name "Republican Party" met in Jackson, MI; giving that town a similar claim as the Birthplace of the Republican Party.
By 1858 the Republican Party dominated the Northern States, while the Democratic Party dominated the South. Two years later, in 1860, the Party nominated a self-educated Illinois lawyer for President. Abraham Lincoln had represented Illinois in Congress as a member of the Whig party, but he was instrumental in forming and uniting the Republican Party under the idea of "Free Labor, Free Soil, Free Men." That labor should not be done by slaves, which cheapened the idea of hard work for everyone, but rather by free men; land should not be locked up in large plantations but rather available for independent, small farmers; and that holding people in chains was not what the Founding Fathers had meant by "all men are created equal."
On Saturday we will find ourselves in Ripon, the birthplace of the Party that nominated a President who saw our nation through a divisive and unique Civil War. We will come on a bus filled with men and women from all over the country, from all different cultural and racial backgrounds, with all different kinds of political beliefs. We will come, we will play, and we will leave, all beneficiaries of a legacy begun when those 30 white men met in a schoolhouse in 1854. Maybe we'll even remember to thank them and those who followed in their footsteps in fighting for equality.
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