Representations of Jessie Fremont, the wife of the Republican presidential candidate in 1856, had a prominent role in the campaign poetry of that year. The Jessie poems bind the period's cult of domesticity to the party's figurative anti-slavery system. According to these poems, Northerners intent on conciliating the Slave Power were spreading their own sterility, whereas men willing to make a home for Jessie in the White House were reproducing, through their own redemption, a future free West. The code of domesticity thus helped these poems to define collective political action as growing out of the strengths of free labor.