the new republican party envisioned modernizing the united states, emphasizing expanded banking, more railroads and factories, and giving free western land to farmers ("free soil") as opposed to letting slave owners buy up the best properties. it vigorously argued that free market labor was superior to slavery and was the very foundation of civic virtue and true republicanism; this was the "free soil, free labor, free men" ideology. without using the term "containment", the republican party in the mid-1850s proposed a system of containing slavery. historian james oakes explains the strategy: the federal government would surround the south with free states, free territories, and free waters, building what they called a 'cordon of freedom' around slavery, hemming it in until the system's own internal weaknesses forced the slave states one by one to abandon slavery.