question of popular sovereignty in the territories in these terms. Those who favored popular sovereignty
because they felt states like California would vote to disallow slavery turned the idea of states rights
around on slave-holders. This helps to illustrate the danger in taking rhetorical devices at face value.
The most significant ill-fitting slavery issue is attitudes toward blacks. Slavery in the 1800s was
not a civil rights issue. Opposition to slavery among elites was often paternalistic, or even unrelated to the
well-being of slaves at all. Attitudes toward blacks are more like attitudes toward women’s rights,
immigrants and American Indians, all of which do not load well on the first dimension, despite having
many writers discuss them.
These issues, which might be grouped together as cultural, do not help to define the dominant
ideology of the 1850s. But they will become significant in the future, after the Civil War leads to a new
winner on the contemporary issues and frees space on the agenda for these other issues. These data cannot
tell us how well these off-dimensional issues formed their own dimension in 1850, but we know that, in
the future, they will come to be related. I do think that it is notable that one component of the free labor
ideology, attitudes toward labor unions, is in some ways similar to these issues. In fact, the reason it does
not fit well is that writers like William H. Seward, who are otherwise consistent Whigs, are pro labor. We
know that eventually, a schism in the Republican Party will give rise to the Liberal Republicans, and
people like Seward are the precursors of that development.
Nativism also doesn’t seem to be a part of the dominant ideological dimension, although some
Republicans later took nativist positions. But attitudes toward the Catholic Church, for instance, do not
map closely to the primary dimension. And there was a near elite consensus on immigration itself. Only
the editors of the International Review opposed immigration, and writers from across the spectrum
praised immigrants. That nativism is not on the first dimension does not necessarily explain why the issue
didn’t work as a party strategy. Nativisim might still have appealed to many voters. But its absence from
the dominant ideology would have made it easier to ignore when it turned out not to be electorally
successful.
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Convention