By the late 1850s, there was a widespread belief that a slaveholding oligarchy ran the country. That they ran it for their own benefit to spread slavery was also a popular belief. It was what Abraham Lincoln and the new Republican Party used to gain political power. It was also popular among conspiracy theorists, which pro-slavery opponents tried to use to discredit the idea. But it was members of the Free Soil Party in the 1840s and the Republicans in the 1850s that gave Slave Power its credibility. On March 12, 1857, the Cincinnati Daily Commercial published an article about Slave Power. The article called the United States "one great homogeneous slave-holding community" and that slavery had removed all state boundaries. It charged that Slave Power had three objectives. These were: to reopen the slave trade; to extend slavery to the entire country and beyond; and to make the white man a slave to the slave-holding Southern aristocracy and the Northern capitalists.