They made the trip in a covered wagon, which they lived in until they cleared the land and built a log house on their one thousand acre homestead.

During the three months of winter Edwin walked four miles a day through the forests to the nearest school, which was held in a log house.

The remainder of the year he aided his father in cutting timber, digging up stumps and transforming the wilderness into meadow and grain field.

He states that "...when quite a chunk of a boy, with light heart and elastic step I left home and walked over the mountains and through the woods to Newark, New Jersey, 100 miles distant, to visit Grandma Thomas."

In April, 1850 he began an immigration to California, stopping in Milwaukee and then in Waukesha where his brother James and family were living.

It was in 1854 that his community position and influence gave him voice to call for a convention and name the Republican Party in the Madison, Wisconsin, in July, 1854.

It was before the days of title insurance, and he lost the home he paid for to foreclosure, and traveled West looking for a new start with his wife Catherine.

[4] His second family enjoyed the fruits of his youthful labors, and the daughters of his old age reflect that he and his young wife Margie (43 years his junior) had always appeared to be in love.

[2][4][5]: 358 In 1832, before political parties were divided over slavery, Hurlbut campaigned as a Jeffersonian Democrat with his father, for the election of Andrew Jackson's second term.

After the following incident in Wilmot's office in 1842, Hurlbut became a freesoiler sympathizer, making speeches and traveling by wagon with a flag inscribed "Polk and the Tariff" in 1844, and advocated for Cass in 1848:[1][5]: 368 One day, while I was a student in Judge Wilmot's office, before he became a congressman, a man came in and retained to prosecute the leaders of a pro-slavery mob.

The mob broke the windows, battered down the door, took the speaker out, gave him a coat of tar and feathers and rode him on a rail.

in 1854, he wrote the platform for the American Party, which held that all political parties should be held by Americans born in this nation, make slavery a local issue, stand for prohibition, and rule it a state issue to make rivers and harbors navigable.

"Issue a call for a people's mass convention and organize a new political party, with that as its main and, I may say, only object," I replied.

[1]The remainder of the above conversation expressed Hurlbut's conviction that a July rally in Madison could crystallize anti-slavery sentiment and carry the state.

Let us, sir, christen this child of promise after the party of Thomas Jefferson, that sterling representative of true Americanism.'

"The name caught the crowd, cheer upon cheer swept over the multitude, and the new organization was, by a unanimous vote denominated the Republican party.He was a delegate to the first national Republican convention, which nominated Gen. John C. Fremont for the presidency in 1856, with the slogan "Free Soil, Free Men, Fremont".

During the Second Great Awakening in the first part of the 19th century, convictions quickly changed with revivalist preachers, including Charles Finney, decrying the evil of slavery.

The Wilmot Proviso was in 1846, Harriet Tubman began her work, and the new Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 further propelled the slavery controversy.

[11] In addition, Israel Washburn, U.S. congressman from Maine, used the name Republican in reference to forming an anti-slavery party,[12] there were private meetings in Crawfordsville, Iowa, Ripon, Wisconsin, Exeter, New Hampshire, and the convention in Jackson, Michigan, which all claim to have first named the party republican in 1854.

He wrote out the notice for a July convention, which was printed for four weeks in Sherman Booth's Milwaukee Free Democrat paper and other newspapers in the state.

Three thousand delegates voted on the capital building steps in Madison on Hurlbut's proposed name of "Republican".

[10] Because the name "Republican" had been in common usage among anti-slavery and abolitionist groups throughout the North, one cannot attribute that word to any one person.