Buy Ebook from VitalSource. A classic, indispensable contribution to our understanding of the causes of the Civil War. Since its publication twenty-five years ago, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men has been recognized as a classic, an indispensable contribution to our understanding of the causes of the American Civil War. A key work in establishing political ideology as a major concern of modern American historians, it remains the only full-scale evaluation of the ideas of the early Republican party.
Now with a new introduction, Eric Foner puts his argument into the context of contemporary scholarship, reassessing the concept of free labor in the light of the last twenty-five years of writing on such issues as work, gender, economic change, and political thought. A significant reevaluation of the causes of the Civil War, Foner's study looks beyond the North's opposition to slavery and its emphasis upon preserving the Union to determine the broader grounds of its willingness to undertake a war against the South in 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.
This was the ideology that permeated the North in the period directly before the Civil War, led to the election of Abraham Lincoln, and led, almost immediately, to the Civil War itself. Free Soilers had seated only a handful of their candidates in Congress so far, but with the upcoming U.
Senate election, they saw a chance to cement their influence on public policy. The debate was raging: Would slavery be the law of the land in this new territory? In his Seventh of March Speech , as it came to be known, Senator Webster argued in favor of the Compromise of , including the abhorrent Fugitive Slave Law, as necessary to preserve the Union.
Anti-slavery partisans in Massachusetts, where opposition to the compromise was strongest, were shocked and angry. Boston , alongside African-American lawyer Robert Morris. The letter, recently acquired by the MHS, reads in part:. That same year, , many Democrats left their party in opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and joined former Whigs to create the new Republican Party. Accompanying them were most of those who had been Free Soilers, and the new Republican organization adopted most of the Free Soil platform, including opposition to the expansion of slavery.
In , the Republicans ran their first candidate for the presidency, John C. In that contest, the Republicans cast themselves as moderates and held fast to many of the ideas that had first been put forward by the Free Soil Party.
This result foreshadowed the way other third parties would influence American politics, briefly gaining strength and then fading, but setting out ideas and policies that other parties incorporated and used more effectively. The legacy of the antislavery third party was the election of Lincoln and the Civil War that followed. Resolved, That it is the duty of the federal government to relieve itself from all responsibility for the existence or continuance of slavery wherever the government possesses constitutional power to legislate on that subject.
No more slave states and no more slave territory. Let the soil of our extensive domain be kept free for the hardy pioneers of our own land and the oppressed and banished of other lands. Resolved, That we demand cheap postage for the people;. Resolved, That the free grant to actual settlers,. Resolved, That the obligations of honor and patriotism require the earliest practical payment of the national debt.
Smith, Gerrit. Blue, Frederick J. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, Brooks, Corey M. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Earle, Jonathan H.
Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil. Foner, Eric. New York: Oxford University Press, Rayback, Joseph G. Free Soil: The Election of Because moderates leaned toward the radical position in the 's, antislavery was central to Republicanism, but that sentiment, he correctly insists, was broader than moral outrage, racist hostility to the spread of Negroes, CIVIL WAR HISTORY jealousy of southern political power, or any other single theme which other historians have found at the core of Republicanism.
It was all these and more. They firmly believed that the North contained such a society but that equal access to opportunity for mobility depended on continued economic growth and the unobstructed expansion of that society westward.
Republicans viewed southern society based on slavery as the antithesis of everything they valued. It was a fixed, aristocratic and hierarchical society that degraded the laborer, both slave and free, precluded social mobility, and stunted the economic growth of the region.
The South particularly threatened northern society because an aggressive Slave Power controlled its politics, blocked majority rule in the nation, and, most importantly , was determined to use the federal government to extend slavery westward and thus prevent the spread of the North's free labor system. It was this threat to "the most fundamental values and interests of the free states" that gave the territorial issue its potency in the North.
Each section of the
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