Unconditional Union Party

The Unconditional Union Party was a unionist political party in the United States during the American Civil War. Also called the Union Party, it was a regional counterpart to the National Union Party that supported the wartime administration of Abraham Lincoln.^[1] The party was active in the border states and Union-occupied areas of the Confederacy. After the war, it formed the nucleus of the Republican Party in the Upper South, while a minority of ex-Unionists became affiliated with the Democratic Party, including notably Francis Preston Blair Jr.^[2][3]

Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 United States presidential election on a platform that called for the exclusion of slavery from the U.S. territories. In the ensuing secession crisis, Southern Unionists opposed the efforts to engineer the secession of the slave states and organize an independent Southern Confederacy. The unionist movement included conditional unionists who preferred preservation of the Union but held out the possibility of secession as a last resort, as well as others inflexibly opposed to disunion. These latter unconditional unionists continued to oppose secession following the commencement of hostilities in April 1861. They were successful in preventing the secession of the border states and organized local Union parties that supported the national government throughout the war. By 1864, most had accepted the necessity of emancipation as a military expedient and supported the efforts to abolish slavery in the United States.