Textbook
James A. Banks, et al., eds., United States: Adventures in Time and Place (New York: McGraw-Hill School Division, 1999), 462.
Slave owners were pleased because the new law opened Kansas and Nebraska to slavery. Many Northern farmers and workers who wanted to move west opposed the law. They worried that rich Southern planters would grab the best land in these territories and use slave labor to farm it. They demanded that the western lands be "free soil." Many "free soilers" joined with abolitionists to form the Republican Party. The Republicans believed that no person should own another and that all new states should be free states.