Summary

This article relied heavily on material from the New York Tribune. The Repository editors took issue with Breckinridge's views on slavery in the territories. Breckinridge and other Southern Democrats took the Dred Scott decision as the opportunity to extend their logic of the Constitution's protection of slave property. He contended that territorial governments cannot outlaw slavery, but Republicans argued that the same logic meant that these governments cannot allow it either.

EXCERPT:

"Regarding Slavery in the light in which it is seen by the Republican party--as a moral, social, political and economical evil--it would be impossible to consent to that action on the part of Congress thus demanded by Mr. Breckinridge and his party for the introduction of Slavery into the Territories."

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."