The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War

The sparing superiority of go off to slave labor became a major argument of the Republicans in their attempt to win northern votes. . . . Elaborate statistical comparisons amongst northern and southern states were commonplace in Republican speeches and editorials. . . In e really department, the free state was far in the lead. such comparisons, according to Republican spokesmen, proved that "socially, economically, politically, the slave labor-agricultural system is a failure (Foner 44).

The Republican opposition to slavery on economic rather than ethical grounds was in part base on a view which Stowe herself sh ard---"that it was not the Negro himself who was to darned for the southeast's backwardness; it was rather that the institution of slavery deprived him of both(prenominal) the education and the incentives which made the labor of northern freemen so tillable" (Foner 45).

While Stowe sure as shooting shared this practical view with the Republicans, she did not stop there, as we shall see, but went on instead to dumbfound a passionate position based on moral philosophy and religion.

The Republicans also did not stop there, but went on to induct another(prenominal) argument which was rooted in part in what was the racist attitude---conscious or unconscious---of numerous Republicans. The Republicans argument, after all, implied that there was something missing in the institution of slavery that was not lacking in free labor. Foner explains this shortcoming from the Republican point of vie

In any case, Stowe's indictment of slavery and the South is meant to short-circuit the kind of logical arguments upon which the Republican politicians' position is based. This is not to say, however, that Stowe simply overloads the reader with one scene after another of unrelieved brutality committed against slaves by white slaveholders.

Although Stowe certainly includes in her novel anti-slavery arguments based on reason, her novel's most properly and moving images, passages and scenes are rooted in the emotions. Whatever the quick-scented arguments against slavery might be, they cannot begin to match the effectiveness of such emotional "arguments" as that contained in the following, the account by a slave of his beating by his "master":

. . .

and put my boy like a calf in a trader's pen. You urgency to send Jim and me back to be whipped and tortured. . . . But you haven't got us. We don't accept your laws, we don't own your country' we stand here as free, under God's sky, as you are; and, by the great God that made us, we'll fight for our independence till we die (Stowe 208).

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin. New York: Macmillan, 1994.

The scenes of this story . . . lie among a race hitherto ignored . . . ; an exotic race, whose ancestors, born on a lower floor a tropic sun, brought with them, and perpetuated to their descendants, a character so basically unlike the hard and dominant Anglo-Saxon race, as for many years to have won from it only misunderstanding and despite (Stowe 1).

Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

The more one delves into a comparison between Stowe's and the Republicans' indictments of slavery, the more it becomes clear that Stowe's argument is radically different, no matter that both were staunchly against the institution. In the very first paragraph of the novel, in fact, Stowe makes clear that she believes that blacks are, rather than the inferior race, the superior:

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