Summary

Slavery has allowed an aristocratic minority to highjack the government's agenda for the past 60 years, Republican editors charged. Because of the three-fifths rule in the Constitution, the "Slave Power" provided the South with virtually equivalent power in the Senate despite the South's decidedly smaller white population. The editors contrasted slavery with "freedom" and tie "freedom" to the political inequality they perceived in the representation from the North "with its teeming millions of white Freemen."

EXCERPT:

"This insignificant number [slaveholders], devoting their time and attention exclusively to politics, and possessing the principal part of the wealth of the South, are thus armed with an overpowering influence, which is always directed to secure the political promotion of those of their own class, while the nonslaveholders are kept in the back-ground or overshadowed by these lords-of-the-lash."

"We have permitted a miserable, sectional minority too long to override and insult the majority; and if it is permitted to continue, and if by our supineness we consent to the declaration that, 'Freedom is sectional and Slavery is national,' by allowing the Republican party to be defeated, then we tacitly admit the interests of Slavery in this Republic are paramount to those of Freedom."

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."