You could probably get several different explanations for this, but one that could be argued goes back to the formation of the Republican Party and what voter factions it attracted.

Essentially, the Republican Party at its outset was a coalition of former northern Whigs (particularly the "Conscience Whigs"), disaffected left-wing northern Democrats (the "Locofocos" and some former Working Men Party members), northerners who had belonged to the Free Soil Party (themselves made up of former Conscience Whigs and Locofocos) and/or the Know-Nothing Party, as well as Temperance Whigs and Democrats.

But probably (certainly arguably, at least) the largest faction of voters that had formed the Republican Party were former Whigs in Northern states. And the Whig Party, historically, had been the party with closer ties to big business and industry. The economic conservative wing of the Whig Party had sometimes been characterized as "Whig-servatives". Michael F. Holt writes in The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War that the Whig Party in the North during the 1840s was largely "bankrolled" by "wealthy businessmen in New York City and Boston". A uniting principle of the party before it collapsed was its support of protectionist tariffs which were viewed as being beneficial to domestic U.S. businesses. Northern Whigs liked them because it drove up the price of imports, making domestic goods more attractive to U.S. consumers. And Southern Whigs supported them because the tariffs were seen as making goods like cotton more profitable.

After the Civil War, the Republican Party started to factionalize. Former Democrats and Whigs alike, such as John Fremont and Horace Greeley, joined up with the Liberal Republicans. On economic issues, many Republicans remaining within the party were more driven by traditional "Whig-servative" policies. Meanwhile, the northern Democrats survived by courting anti-big business, urban blue collar workers, especially Catholics and immigrants, a traditional voting bloc of theirs that dated back to the Working Men parties and the Locofocos. Many of the former Republicans who had joined the Liberal Republicans ended up joining or siding with the Democratic Party by the late 1800s, such as Carl Schulz, George Washington Julian, and Cassius Clay.

So it's really no surprise that the Republican Party wound up with a pro-big business wing. That said, both parties continued to have progressive and conservative wings on economic issues. Democratic president Grover Cleveland was a big business "Bourbon Democrat" while perennial Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan was a populist Democrat supported by the Farmers' Alliance. Within the Republican Party, there were the Silver Republicans and Progressives who were more anti-trust, and there were also economically conservative Republicans that were closer to big business. The big business wing dominated for much of the party's history, and it wasn't really until Theodore Roosevelt that the Progressives started to take a bigger hold on the party. Though even that was short-lived. Roosevelt challenged the conservatives in the 1912 election, and when he lost the nomination, a lot of progressive Republicans left with him when he ran as a Bull Moose. Those types of voters were subsequently courted by Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.

TL;DR: Abolitionist sentiment was not driven by a single set of economic principles. Many voters who joined the Republican Party at its outset had been pro-big business Whigs on economic issues, and this thread continued after the Civil War.