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Its search is for those social concepts the North accepted as vital to its way of life, finding these concepts most clearly expressed in the ideology of the growing Republican Party in the decade before the war’s start. Through a careful analysis of the attitudes of leading factions in the party’s formation (northern Whigs, former Democrats, and political abolitionists) Foner is able to show what each contributed to Republican ideology. He also shows how northern ideas of human rights—in particular a man’s right to work where and how he wanted, and to accumulate property in his own name—and the goals of American society were implicit in that ideology. At the heart of the controversy over the extension of slavery, he argues, is the issue of whether the Northern or Southern form of society would take root in the West, whose development would determine the nation’s destiny.