Summary

Slavery was portrayed as a degenerate system of labor that threatened to undermine the independence of the white working class and reduce its members to the level of poor Southern whites. The Republican editors cast the issue in terms of family security, calling for Northern citizens to protect their family's future.

EXCERPT:

"Who, among working men, that has any respect for himself and for his wife and children, wishes to see this free State of Pennsylvania overrun with Slavery; every branch of industry, which now affords support for thousands of white people, who are willing to work for a living, supplied with the labor of negroes whos bodies and souls (while in the flesh) belong to their masters . . . Who among the high-minded, independent, intelligent mechanics of Franklin County, desires to see his means of supplying the wants of those dependant [sic] upon him, degraded by the competition of Slave labor?"

"Slavery, with all its blighting effects, will again be introduced into every Northern State, if the policy of the Nigger Democracy is suffered to be carried out . . . The Editor of [the Valley Spirit], and the Editor of every other locofoco paper, knows as well as do we, that the object of the leaders of the odious dogma of Slavery extension is to carry their systems of labor not only into the Territories, but into all the Northern States. The bolder among the hotspurs have, over and over again, declared that slavery is the best form of labor that capital can employ. Certain leading Southern locofoco orators have had the impudence to declare that 'color had nothing to do with slavery;' and that the rightful and normal condition of all poor laboring men is slavery.'"

Full-text web version of newspaper

"In the first half of 1860 Republican editors in Franklin's Repository and Transcript attacked slavery as a violation of nature that stole from the workingman the fruits of his labor; they focused mainly on slavery's potential to undermine free labor."