Union Party (Kansas)

The Union Party was a political party in Kansas during the American Civil War. It was the opposition to the Kansas Republican Party in its period of activity. The party was organized by War Democrats and Republican opponents of Jim Lane to counteract the latter's influence over federal patronage and the direction of the Union war effort. It was not an affiliate of the National Union Party, which Democrats and Radical Republicans in the party opposed. The party divided during the 1864 presidential campaign, with different elements supportive of the candidacies of Abraham Lincoln, George B. McClellan, and Salmon Chase, respectively. The end of the war and the subsequent events of presidential Reconstruction precipitated another political realignment in which Lane and other allies of Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, joined forces with Democrats in the National Union Party, while anti-Lane Radical Republicans rejoined the Republican Party.