Which political party opposed the spread of slavery

The Free Soilers' presidential candidate, John Hale, received only five percent of the vote. As a result of this poor performance, the party ceased to exist by Its former members tended to join the newly established Republican Party. The Free Soil Party played a major role in Ohio politics during the late s and the early s. The Whig Party nominated Zachary Taylor as its presidential candidate in Many Whigs in the North opposed this choice because Taylor was a slaveholder.

Ohio voters elected a handful of Free Soilers to the Ohio legislature. The legislature was nearly evenly divided between Democrats and Whigs. The Free Soilers had much greater power than their numbers suggested as both the Democrats and the Whigs needed the Free Soilers to enact legislation. The Free Soilers used their influence to convince the Democrats in the legislature to overturn most of Ohio's black laws in Few U. Besides managing his generals and the war Louis XVI was skeptical of the fledgling republic, but his dislike of the British eventually overcame these concerns Live TV.

This Day In History. History Vault. Great Britain. Civil Rights Movement. Art, Literature, and Film History. Middle Ages. Cold War. The relative calm over the sectional issue was broken in over the issue of slavery in the territory of Kansas. Pressure had been building among northerners to organize the territory west of Missouri and Iowa, which had been admitted to the Union as a free state in This pressure came primarily from northern farmers, who wanted the federal government to survey the land and put it up for sale.

Promoters of a transcontinental railroad were also pushing for this westward expansion. Proslavery southerners now contended that popular sovereignty should apply to all territories, not just Utah and New Mexico. They argued for the right to bring their slave property wherever they chose. Attitudes toward slavery in the s were represented by a variety of regional factions. Since the s, abolitionists, led by journalist and reformer William Lloyd Garrison, had cast slavery as a national sin and called for its immediate end.

For three decades, the abolitionists remained a minority, but they had a significant effect on American society by bringing the evils of slavery into the public consciousness.

By the s, some abolitionists advocated the use of violence against those who owned slaves. In , the Liberty Party, whose members came from the ranks of ministers, was founded; this group sought to work within the existing political system, a strategy Garrison and others rejected.

Meanwhile, the Free-Soil Party committed itself to ensuring that white laborers would find work in newly acquired territories and not have to compete with unpaid slaves. It is important to note that, even among those who opposed the expansion of slavery in the West, very different attitudes toward slavery existed.

Some antislavery northerners wanted the West to be the best country for poor whites to go and seek opportunity. They did not want white workers to have to compete with slave labor, a contest that they believed demeaned white labor. Radical abolitionists, in contrast, envisioned the end of all slavery, and a society of equality between blacks and whites.

Others opposed slavery in principle, but believed that the best approach was colonization; that is, settling freed slaves in a colony in Africa. The growing political movement to address the issue of slavery stiffened the resolve of southern slaveholders to defend themselves and their society at all costs.

As abolitionists fanned the flames of antislavery sentiment, southerners solidified their defense of their enormous investment in human chattel. This map shows the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska, complete with proposed routes of the transcontinental railroad. As these different factions were agitating for the settlement of Kansas and Nebraska, leaders of the Democratic Party in and sought to bind their party together in the aftermath of intraparty fights over the distribution of patronage jobs.

Illinois Democratic senator Stephen Douglas believed he had found a solution—the Kansas-Nebraska bill —that would promote party unity and also satisfy his colleagues from the South, who detested the Missouri Compromise line.

In January , Douglas introduced the bill. The act created two territories: Kansas, directly west of Missouri; and Nebraska, west of Iowa. The act also applied the principle of popular sovereignty, dictating that the people of these territories would decide for themselves whether to adopt slavery. Douglas hoped his bill would increase his political capital and provide a step forward on his quest for the presidency. Douglas also wanted the territory organized in hopes of placing the eastern terminus of a transcontinental railroad in Chicago, rather than St.

Louis or New Orleans. After heated debates, Congress narrowly passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In the House of Representatives, the bill passed by a mere three votes: to This move had major political consequences. The Democrats divided along sectional lines as a result of the bill, and the Whig party, in decline in the early s, found its political power slipping further.

Most important, the Kansas-Nebraska Act gave rise to the Republican Party , a new political party that attracted northern Whigs, Democrats who shunned the Kansas-Nebraska Act, members of the Free-Soil Party, and assorted abolitionists.

The new Republican Party pledged itself to preventing the spread of slavery into the territories and railed against the Slave Power, infuriating the South. As a result, the party became a solidly northern political organization. As never before, the U.