Many Southerners, including white merchants and white small landowners, supported the Republican Party's actions to take power from southern planters.
Who are Southerners?
Although this classification has been contentious and other scholars have stated that Southern identity does not fit the criteria for defining as an ethnicity, some historians, sociologists, and journalists from the Southern United States classify white Southerners as an ethnic group.
What is Republican Party?
One of the two main modern political parties in the US is the Republican Party, sometimes known as the GOP or the "Grand Old Party". It has been the Democratic Party's principal political adversary since the mid-1850s.
The GOP was established in 1854 by ab-olitionists who opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which could have permitted ch-attel slavery to spread into the western territories.
Conservative Whig Party, from which Republican presidents Abraham Lincoln, Rutherford B. Hayes, Chester A. Arthur, and Benjamin Harrison all switched before becoming members, is regarded as its intellectual forerunner.
The Whigs' demise, which had once been one of the country's two major parties, increased the party's electoral success.
At the time of its founding, the Republican Party opposed the spread of slavery and backed economic reform and classical liberalism.
Hence, option D is correct.
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