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Former Free Soiler Charles Francis Adams led on several presidential ballots of the 1872 Liberal Republican convention, but was ultimately defeated by Horace Greeley. [107] Many other former Free Soilers remained in the Republican Party, including former Free Soil Congressman Henry Wilson, who served as vice president from 1873 until his death ...
They joined with other anti-slavery groups, predominantly the abolitionist Liberty Party and some anti-slavery Conscience Whigs from New England and the Midwest, to form the Free Soil Party. This group nominated former President Van Buren to run again for the presidency. Their vote divided Democratic strength.
County results for the 1848 presidential election. Counties reporting pluralities for the Free Soil Party (Van Buren) are in green. In no county was the National Liberty Party (Smith) the largest party. Despite the optimism of the Free Soilers, Van Buren carried no electoral votes, finishing a distant third behind Cass and Taylor.
The result was the so-called "Free Soil Movement." Free-soilers believed that slavery was dangerous because of what it did to whites. The "peculiar institution" ensured that elites controlled most of the land, property, and capital in the South. The Southern United States was, by this definition, undemocratic.
From his seat in the Senate, Chase emerged as one of the leaders of the Free Soil Party. In 1854, during the vitriolic debates over the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, he penned the Appeal of the Independent Democrats and helped to arrange the fusion of the Free Soilers with other opponents of the Kansas–Nebraska Act to form the Republican ...
The Free Soilers' rhetoric was taken up by the Republican party as it emerged in 1854. The Republicans also argued that slavery was economically inefficient, compared to free labor, and was a deterrent to the long-term modernization of America.
The Kansas–Nebraska Act was the final nail in the Whig coffin. It was also the spark that began the Republican Party, which would take in both Whigs and Free Soilers (as well as sympathetic northern Democrats like Frémont) to fill the anti-slavery void that the Whig Party had never seemed willing to fill. [74]
American free-soilers, recently angered by the strengthened Fugitive Slave Law (passed as part of the Compromise of 1850 and requiring officials of free states to cooperate in the return of slaves), decried as unconstitutional what Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune labeled "The Manifesto of the Brigands."