Republican National Committee members from across the country are in Pittsburgh for their annual summer meeting, a gathering that takes place a few blocks, and a century and a half, from their party's first national gathering.

With the editor of the Daily Pittsburgh Gazette as one of the event's key organizers, Republicans traveled here in February 1856 to set the stage for the party's first nominating convention later that year in Philadelphia.

Its nominee, John Fremont, fell short in that year's election, but the new party's next standard bearer, Abraham Lincoln, captured the White House four years later.

The party's hierarchy meets today at another high point for the GOP, which controls the presidency and both chambers of Congress.

The meeting comes after a congressional session in which GOP majorities pushed through legislation embodying Bush administration priorities on an array of issues, from the Central American Free Trade Agreement to renewal of the Patriot Act. At the same time, however, the president's central domestic priority, an overhaul of the Social Security system, shows no signs of gaining legislative momentum.

The glass-half-full/half-empty analysis applies to the president as well. Less than a year ago, he won re-election with a record popular vote total, but he headed to his Texas ranch after the congressional recess with approval ratings noticeably eroded.

Better news from Iraq could change those numbers quickly. Administration officials in Washington and Baghdad are hoping that success in crafting a new constitution could set the stage for political stability and a reduction in American troop levels. For the present, however, there are no signs of an end to the insurgency, whose resolution, one way or another, will help write the Bush page in history.

With political antennae already sensitive to portents for the next presidential election, an unstated part of the agendas of the formal and informal gatherings in the Omni William Penn Hotel will involve handicapping the prospects of the party's would-be successors to Bush. More overtly, the GOP hierarchy will be focused on preserving its majorities in next year's midterm elections.

One of them, U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum's anticipated challenge from state Treasurer Bob Casey Jr., will be highlighted throughout the GOP meetings. Santorum is one of the featured speakers at the RNC session tomorrow. Beyond whatever applause he receives there, party members will have an opportunity to demonstrate more tangible support at a fund-raising reception tomorrow night at the Sen. John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center in the Strip District.

The designated theme of the summer meeting is "Give Us A Chance, We'll Give You A Choice: Strengthening Lincoln's Legacy."

That title highlights both the outreach campaign that RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman has pursued in the hope of transforming contemporary politics as well as the evolution of the Republican Party since its pre-Civil War birth.

Since being named chairman, the former Bush campaign manager has made a series of speeches and appearances heralding the goal of expanding Republican inroads with constituencies traditionally more friendly to Democrats.

Earlier this summer, in a widely noted speech to a meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Mehlman acknowledged and disavowed the so-called Southern Strategy that came of age in the Nixon era and under which, Mehlman said, "some Republicans gave up on winning the Africa-American vote, looking the other way, or trying to benefit from racial polarization.

"I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong."

Mehlman's opposite number, Democratic Chairman Howard Dean, has derided the GOP appeal to African-Americans, Hispanics and other minorities. By some estimates, Bush increased his share of both black and Hispanic support in 2004, but the Democrats still retained the vast majority of the votes of both demographic groups.

Discussion of the Southern Strategy is also a reminder of the very different geographical strengths of the Republican Party today and the fledgling movement that came together in a Downtown hall in 1856.

The widening regional rift over slavery had shaken the foundations of both existing major parties, the Democrats and the Whigs. The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, which overturned the Missouri Compromise and created the opportunity for slavery to expand into new territories, outraged Whigs outside the South and shattered the party as a national force while the Democrats became the pro-slavery party in the South. The Republican Party emerged in that political vacuum, drawing anti-Nebraska Whigs and Democrats.

The party traces its roots to a meeting in Ripon, Wis., in 1854. In the following months, Republicans met and organized in various local and state gatherings across the Northeast and Midwest. According to the most exhaustive account of the 1856 Pittsburgh meeting, an article by Leonard Bernstein in the Western Pennsylvania Historical Review in 1966, its genesis came in a meeting between Ohio Gov. Salmon Chase and David White, editor and publisher of the Gazette.

White had editorialized in favor of a national meeting of the new party. Chase, who would become Lincoln's secretary of the treasury, met with White in the fall of 1855 to discuss the proposal. As a result, delegates from 24 states came to Pittsburgh for a convention that began on Feb. 22, 1856, Washington's birthday.

Horace Greeley, the abolitionist New York editor, was among them, heeding, at least temporarily, his own call to "Go West."

Contrary to some reports, including a contemporary account in the Gazette, Lincoln was not among the delegates. According to historians, including Bernstein and biographer Benjamin P. Thomas, Lincoln was meeting the same day with a group of Republican newspaper editors in Illinois. Lincoln did come to Pittsburgh in February 1861 on his way to Washington for his inauguration.

The delegates who came to Pittsburgh assembled in Lafayette Hall, a brick building near Wood Street and Fourth Avenue. They debated procedures for the nominating convention that took place later that year. Harrisburg was the first choice considered, but it was rejected in favor of the better accommodations available in the much larger Philadelphia.

The delegates approved a party address, a kind of manifesto, written by New York Lt. Gov. Henry Raymond, a former editor of The New York Times elected on a platform of opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Some of the new party's strongest support came from states like New York that have evolved politically into the blue states of recent elections. By contrast, Republicans were anathema at the party's birth in what are now the rock-solid red states of the South.

The committee members who will begin their meeting today are happy with the latter transformation. Through initiatives such as Mehlman's outreach campaign, they hope to reverse the former trend.