Free Labor Definition

Although the Republicans strongly advocated the concept of free labor and believed that the society in the North based on such an ideology was much more superior to the one in the South, they faced certain challenges from the Southerners while promoting their political ideology. First was the antagonism between the average Americans and the capitalists as the market economy kept developing. As a result, the social mobility and equality that made the Republicans so proud of did not exist at all. The society in the North was seriously stratified. Of all the classes, the poor hardworking people were hopeless and enslaved by the rich, which to the Southerners was just another type of slave. [1] The moral code that the Republicans claimed in the North was also under attack. According to George …show more content…
With the harsh disputes and animosity derived from political ideology, different social and economic systems rooted in both camps, the gap between the North and the South was actually very hard bridged, which made the Civil War inevitable. Many Northerners abominated everything related to the South. William Seward, an influential Republican politician, once wrote:
Shall I tell you what this collision means? Those who think that it is accidental, unnecessary, the work of interested or fanatical agitators, and therefore ephemeral, mistake the case altogether. It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become a either entirely a slave-holding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation. . . . [4]

To the Republicans, it was their moral obligation and divine mission to liberate the South for a free, modern and democratic nation. Above all, it was also their vision to build a world based on the success of the United States. Foner further