Background
The Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic States, including Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, had legally permitted slavery in the 17th, 18th, and even part of the 19th centuries, but in the generation or two before the American Civil War, almost all slaves in such states had been emancipated through a series of statutes.
The first U.S. region entirely free of slavery was the Northwest Territory, which was ordained free under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, passed just before the U.S. Constitution was ratified. The states created from this region—Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota —were generally settled by New Englanders and American Revolutionary War veterans granted land there. Because this region was entirely slave-free from its inception and separated by the Ohio River from the South—which was pushing an expansion of legal slavery into the West—the concept developed of "free states" in contrast to "slave states." The rural parts of these states, at one time in direct East-West rivalry with the Northeastern commercial states, realigned with the Northeastern states, which were newly free of slavery, and together these regions created the amalgamation of states prohibiting slavery, known in the context of the Civil War as the free states.
Anti-slavery settlers in "Bleeding Kansas" in the 1850s were called Free-Soilers, because they fought (successfully) to include Kansas in the Union as a free state.
Read more about this topic: Slave And Free States
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