The Republican Party has long been identified as the "party of big business'. Their opposition to raising the minimum wage, their refusal to support legislation which protects the rights of workers and their attempts to break unions would certainly give one reason to believe that the GOP has always allied itself with big business. However, that is not true.
To say that the group of people classified as "wage-earners" was crucial to the development of the Republican Party would not be an understatement. "Wage-earners" in a society that prided itself on "independent yeoman farmers" was seen by most Southerners and some Northerners as a form of "slavery" far worse than anything in the South. However, the founders of the Republican party saw this group of laborers, who they believed had both the opportunity and motivation to improve their condition in life because they were free to earn wages, as a symbol of the free Northern society. As Eric Froner noted, "Republicans consolidated the free labor ideology and gave it its deepest meaning." A meaning that had been enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and forever protected and guaranteed by the Constitution: freedom.
For the Republicans, a slave society was "the antitheis of free" and the key to the free society in the North was the idea that upward mobility existed. Those who were born poor were not condemned to remain poor all their lives. Nor, for that matter, were they condemned to a life of labor. Many "wage-earners" believed that their jobs were not the "end", but rather a "means to an end": ownership of land and independence.
Republican political thought and ideology was based on the idea of "free labor", that is, a labor force whose members were free to choose the type of work they would do, the manner in which they would dispose of their earnings, how long they would work and at what rate of pay. They were, as Abraham Lincoln would say, free to enjoy "the fruits of their labor". Granted this utopian ideal never really exist, and the same "free labor" ideology was used to protect employers from government interference regarding regulation of the work place and prevent employees from a legal recourse to address their grievances. However, people in the North believed that this ideal society could exist, and the only obstacle in its way was the slave society of the South.
When Salmon Chase wrote and spoke about the SlavePower of the South which dominated the Federal Government and threatened to dominate the country, the implications were clear. The imposition of Southern society on the North would not only reintroduce slavey to a section of the country that had rid itself of that "peculiar institution", but would also destroy the upward mobility and lack of "class structure" that the North saw as one of its greatest assets. The South, in the opinion of the Republicans and many Northerners, was ruled by a small slave-owning planter aristocracy that impoverished a large group of white people because there was no chance of upward mobility, refused to accept change because it threatened their status and power, and enslaved an even larger group to do the work that they refused to do.
The most important contribution made by this new group of "wage-earners" was not that they comprised sixty percent of the Northern population and therefore, if they voted as a group, would give any national candidate a clear majority in the North. Rather, the concept of "free labor", which they symbolized, became a unifying force, not only within the newly formed Republican party and throughout Northern society, but also offered the common ground upon which many Northern Democrats and former Whigs could agree.
For Northern Democrats who now felt alienated from their party because of their anti-slavery stance but never would have joined forces with Whigs or embraced Whig ideology, the issue of "free labor", which "lay at the heart of Republican ideology" allowed them to join the Republican party without necessarily compromising their beliefs. These Democratic leaders who would exert considerable influence in the still developing party were from the Jacksonian era. They saw the idea of "free labor" as not only compatible with Jacksonian democracy, but as a natural extension of it. Just as universal male suffrage had opened the doors of government to the common man and put him on the path to independence but allowing him a political voice, so "free labor" would open the doors of land ownership to those born in poverty and ensure that the egalitarian society of independent landowners envisioned by the Founding Fathers and put forth by both Jeffereson and Jackson as the ideal would flourish.
Much to the dismay of Abolitionists and Radical Republicans who called for the immediate destruction of the institution based on moral precepts, Slavery was not seen, by a significant number in the North, in terms of how it degraded and/or abused the slaves. Rather, it was seen in terns of how it degraded and/or abused the poorer whites in society. Northern political leaders and journalists wrote at great length about the degradation of the poor white Southerner who, because of the aristocratic nature of the South, had no chance for upward mobility, and who, because this same Southern aristocracy viewed menial labor by whites as demeaning, were forever doomed to a life of poverty. Their Northern brothers, however, had, through "free labor" the chance to move up the social ladder. The extension of this "free labor" into the South would offer the same freedom to poor whites.
Given the fact that the majority of whites during this period, North as well as South, believed the white race was superior to the black, the promotion of "free labor" and the containment of slavery to one section of the country was yet another source of unity. By keeping Slavery and blacks out of new territories and states, the homogeneity of the white race in those areas would be protected. People may have believed Slavery that Slavery was morally wrong. They may have viewed Slavery as a contradiction to the democracy. They may have understood that no country can profess to be free when slavery exists. But they did not believe in total and complete equality between the races.
The "wage-earners" and the idea of a society built on "free labor", not slavery, was the glue that held the North together. Whatever their political and philosophical differences, Northerners, as a society, believed that "free labor" was necessary to maintain their ideal of a country which offered its citizens a "national freedom" and the opportunity to achieve economic independence.
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