Binghamton University: Lincoln, Labor and Liberation

The free labor ideology of the nineteenth century was grounded in the beliefs that Northern free labor was superior to Southern slave labor. It was this free labor ideology and not the republicanism of the Revolutionary War era that caused slavery to be problematic by the time of the Civil War. This ideology was comprehensive - it had economic, social, moral, and political aspects. All facets of the theory need to be explored, which this article by Antonia Etheart tries to do, in order to fully understand how and why slavery became such an important issue.