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Republican Party's Indictment of Slavery

This study will compare and contrast the Republicans' indictment of slavery, slaveholding society, and the South, as presented in Eric Foner's Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War, with Harriet Beecher Stowe's indictment of the same entities in her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. The essential position of the study is that the Republicans' indictment is based on practical, pragmatic, and economic grounds, while Stowe's indictment is based on ethics, religion and passion.

It will be the additional argument of the study that racism, religion and "small-r" republican ideology played differing roles, with these differences in part shaped by gender contrasts. That is, Stowe's womanhood, it can be fairly argued, allowed her to consider the ethical and religious issues involved in slavery. This may be in part due to the differences between the socialization of women and men in the United States of the middle 19th century. Women were taught to emphasize their emotional natures, including the compassion and empathy which underlie Stowe's critique of slavery. On the other hand, the male Republican politicians, socialized to consider more practical issues, focused on the economic drawbacks of slavery.

It is also important to note that a successful novelist exercises her passions more than her pragmatism, while a successful politician usually refers more often to the economic interests of the people rather than their religious or ethical impulses.

The economic superiority of free to slave labor became a major argument of the Republicans in their attempt to win northern votes. . . . Elaborate statistical comparisons between northern and southern states were commonplace in Republican speeches and editorials. . . In every department, the free state was far in the lead. Such comparisons, according to Republican spokesmen, proved that "socially, economically, politically, the slave labor-ag...

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Republican Party's Indictment of Slavery. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 16:00, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1689679.html