Summary

The Repository editors printed in full the Maryland Republican Party executive committee appeal which neatly summarized the position of the party along the border region. Slavery should be opposed, the committee stated, not because blacks were equal but because it jeopardized free labor and had a negative impact on white workers. They openly maintained the Republican party was a "white man's party" and that the issue at stake was whether slavery will be "nationalized" or not.

EXCERPT:

"The assertion, either so ignorantly or maliciously made, that the Republican Party proposes by force to abolish slavery and elevate the negro to a social equality with the white man, we denounce as a most unfounded accusation."

"This party is essentially the white man's party. Its sympathies are enlisted in behalf of the white race, and its fundamental object is to protect and ennoble free labor."

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."