The Unionist Party, later known as the Unconditional Union Party in the border states, was a political party in the United States started after the Compromise of 1850 to define politicians who supported the Compromise. It was used primarily as a label by politicians who did not want to affiliate with the Republicans, or wished to win over anti-secession Democrats. Members included Southern Democrats who were loyal to the Union as well as elements of the old Whig Party and other factions opposed to a separate Southern Confederacy. Following the beginning of the Civil War, state conventions would even endorse fusion tickets of Republicans and War Democrats under the Unionist banner, which the national party itself would do in the 1864 presidential election in the form of the National Union Party. History Origins The label first appeared in 1850, during the dispute over the Compromise of 1850. Southerners who supported the Compromise (mainly Whigs) adopted the Unionist label to win over pro-Compromise Democrats and defeat anti-Compromise Democrats. The name change emphasized the Compromise issue and implied that ordinary Whig political issues, such as the tariff, had been set aside. By 1860, the Whig Party was defunct. A group of former Whigs formed the Constitutional Union Party, with John Bell as candidate for president. Also as in 1850, ex-Whigs and anti-secession Democrats combined as "Unionists" to oppose secessionists in state elections, especially in Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri and Virginia, where the Republican Party label was still toxic. Bell's candidacy was ineffective, but the state strategy proved successful as the American Civil War began in 1861. During the Civil War Following the splintered 1860 presidential election, it became apparent that much of the South would not abide by the election of Abraham Lincoln. In Missouri, Francis P. Blair, Jr. began consolidating that state's supporters of Lincoln, John Bell, and Stephen A. Douglas into a new political party, the Unconditional Union Party, which would lay aside antebellum partisan interests in favor of a single cause, the preservation of the Union. Blair and his supporters' primary goal was "to resist the intrigues of the Secessionists, by political action preferably, by force if need were". Another faction in Missouri also supported restoration of the Union, but with conditions and reservations, including granting the extension of slavery westward. Others believed that once the Southern states should be allowed to leave the Union peaceably as they would soon