On the contrary, said a good many Republicans, the main purpose of excluding slavery from the territories was to protect white settlers from degrading competition with black labor. To refute the charge of egalitarian abolitionism, the free-state “constitution” of Kansas contained a provision excluding free blacks as well as slaves. “It is not so much in reference to the welfare of the Negro that we are here,” Lyman Trumbull told the Republican convention, but “for the protection of the laboring whites, for the protection of ourselves and our liberties.”
