[robowombat]

Hardly surprising. The economy of most of the South revolved around staple agriculture mostly performed by black chattels. Who is about to line up for the destruction of ones economy as well as letting loose very large numbers of blackamoors? The closest current analogy is the damage that the Paris Protocol would do to the US economy if it were enforced and that is a much milder effect than the end of slavery would have in the South. The GOP had fastened on the existence of slavery as a vote getting mechanism. Hence as soon as the party was organized they commenced yelling about slavery incessantly. The goal being to get a majority of white males in the mid-west who would become voters to support the new party which was really just the northern Whigs trying to build a constituency. The Whigs under John Quincy; Adams or Clay could never convince a majority of Americans to vote for the ‘American Plan’ of high tariffs, centralization of banking and mass subsidies to connected elites for railway construction. So yelling about slavery especially in the territories where it was never going to be a real issue, became the GOP default. Windbags like Seward positively relished agitating the rubes with such political crapola as ‘irrepressible conflict’.

Between the GOP tactical vote trolling campaign and the abolitionist venom and finally actually plotting and supporting an attempt to start a slave uprising under John Brown Southerners had very good reason to not trusting anything a northern politician might say about guaranteeing slavery and believing they had no place in the federal union.

[DiogenesLamp]

Well stated, and exactly corresponds with what I have, in the last three years, come to regard as the true situation.

The fact that the "free soil movement" was founded and headquartered in New York, is a clue about this being a contest of political power, with slavery being used cynically to secure that power in the manner that "Dreamers" are being utilized nowadays.