By 1856, it was clear that the Republican Party—a coalition of antislavery Democrats, northern Whigs, Free Soilers, and Know-Nothings opposed to the further expansion of slavery—would become the major alternative to the Democratic Party in the North. Republicans managed to convince most northerners that the Slave Power, as they called the South’s proslavery political leadership, posed a more immediate threat to their liberties and aspirations than “popery” and immigration. The party’s appeal rested on the idea of “free labor.” In Republican hands, the antithesis between “free society” and “slave society” coalesced into a comprehensive worldview that glorified the North as the home of progress, opportunity, and freedom.
The defining quality of northern society, Republicans declared, was the opportunity it offered each laborer to move up to the status of landowning farmer or independent craftsman, thus achieving the economic independence essential to freedom. Slavery, by contrast, spawned a social order consisting of degraded slaves, poor whites with no hope of advancement, and idle aristocrats. The struggle over the territories was a contest about which of two antagonistic labor systems would dominate the West and, by implication, the nation’s future. If slavery were to spread into the West, northern free laborers would be barred, and their chances for social advancement severely diminished. Slavery, Republicans insisted, must be kept out of the territories so that free labor could flourish.
Political Chart of the United States, an 1856 chart graphically illustrating the division between slave and free states and providing statistics to demonstrate the superiority of free to slave society. The image underscores the Republican contention that it is essential to prevent slavery from spreading into the western territories. John C. Fremont, Republican presidential candidate, is pictured at the top.
To southern claims that slavery was the foundation of liberty, Republicans responded with the rallying cry “freedom national”—meaning not abolition, but ending the federal government’s support of slavery. Under the banner of free labor, northerners of diverse backgrounds and interests rallied in defense of the superiority of their own society. Republicans acknowledged that some northern laborers, including most Irish immigrants, were locked into jobs as factory workers and unskilled laborers and found it extremely difficult to rise in the social scale. But Republicans concluded that it was their “dependent nature”—a lack of Protestant, middle-class virtues—that explained the plight of the immigrant poor.
Republicans were not abolitionists—they focused on preventing the spread of slavery, not attacking it where it existed. Nonetheless, many party leaders viewed the nation’s division into free and slave societies as an “irrepressible conflict,” as Senator William H. Seward of New York put it in 1858, that eventually would have to be resolved. These “two systems” of society, Seward insisted, were “incompatible” within a single nation. The market revolution, Seward argued, by drawing the entire nation closer together in a web of transportation and commerce, heightened the tension between freedom and slavery. The United States, he predicted, “must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation.”