The Free Soilers Book

All the more impressive for having been initially released as a PhD dissertation, this is one of the most comprehensive and insightful treatments of a specific ideology that I've read. While it requires some fairly advanced knowledge of the issues of the antebellum political system (issues like the Wilmot Proviso, party factions like Barnburner Democrats, and key figures like Horace Greeley get dropped into the analysis with cursory to no effort made to explain their context), Foner manages to pull together a large amount of primary source material to explain just what ideological positions and political tactics took the Republican Party from marginal upstarts to the nation's dominant political party in less than a decade. While his decision to structure the book one theme at a time instead of purely chronologically means that the narrative jumps around a bit, ultimately it's a highly effective way to tie together all the threads of thought from the various movements and issues that dominated the national agenda in the 1840s and 50s - how the country would expand, who would get to settle in the new territories, and what kind of life they would be able to live.

My copy begins with a fascinating essay written by Foner for the book's 25th anniversary that delves more deeply than the original book did into how the free labor plank of the Republican platform related to industrial capitalism and the beliefs of the Founding Fathers. Catchphrases like "Free labor" have always meant different things to different people (he mentions the modern Orwellianism of "right to work" laws), but at the time of the Republican ascendancy, when the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution were making it clearer than ever that the US had broken decisively with its agrarian origins, the slogan implied to many people that the American promise of labor freedom meant working with and through industrial capitalism instead of against it. Instead of Thomas Jefferson's ideal of "every man a yeoman farmer", "every man a shopkeeper or factory laborer" was a much more attractive vision for the rapidly growing population of the North. Foner discusses the limitations of the ideal - the "freedom" to engage in wage labor often meant settling for dangerous, degrading, and poorly remunerated factory jobs; women were excluded almost entirely; arguments that white laborers shouldn't have to compete with black slave labor were often extremely racist - but in an era where the democratic, egalitarian, populist sentiments of Jacksonian democracy still remained powerful, "free labor" was quite congenial to the white working majority. He doesn't mention Karl Marx's "Address from the International Workingmen's Association" correspondence with Lincoln through Ambassador Charles Francis Adams, but even a socialist like Marx saw "free labor" as a powerful tool to help emancipate the working class from oppression.

The heart of the book is the sections where Foner traces the genesis of the party to the inability of existing parties to address the question of slavery. The Democrats were particularly wracked by the issue, even going so far as to split in two for the 1860 Presidential election and remain the underdog for most of the rest of the 19th century, but parties like the Whigs withered completely as other issues of the day like economic development were subordinated to the larger questions of abolition and national unity. The Republican Party that competed in unsuccessfully in 1856, more successfully in 1858, and triumphantly in 1860 was composed of several heterogenous groups of political refugees, and Foner constructs ideological and organizational genealogies for each:
- the Free Soil Party (an extremely influential single-issue anti-slavery party focused on slavery's negative economic impact on white workers, they invented the eponymous slogan of the book)
- the Liberty Party (a related but much smaller single-issue party that focused more on the immorality of slavery than its economic effects)
- many Whig Party members (the Henry Clay-led stereotypically pro-industry, pro-banking, pro-tariff "big government" party that broke up over its inability to unify on the slavery issue, Lincoln and many other Republican leaders were originally Whigs)
- the Know-Nothing Party (AKA the American Party, an anti-immigrant pro-WASP racist party that was officially neutral on slavery, but the anti-slavery wing liked how abolition helped white workers by reducing competition from slave labor)
- disaffected Northern Democrats (they hated how plantation aristocrats dominated the Southern wing of the party and were uneasy at slavery's relationship to their supposed Jacksonian ideals, even if they weren't quite comfortable with how Whig-dominated the Republicans were)

Each of these groups brought something different to the table, and it's interesting watching the Republican leadership trying to cobble together a coherent party platform out of all these antagonistic blocs. By far the most vigorous and essential to the Republicans' success were the radical abolitionists, and by far the best weapons in their arsenal were abolition and Unionism. Then as now, the American public had an almost religious reverence for what they believed the "will of the Founding Fathers" to be, and one successful tactic the Republicans hit on was to claim that the Constitution was actually completely neutral on the subject of slavery, yet was being hijacked by the Slave Power to pass things like the Fugitive Slave Act or get slavery extended to the Western territories. In contrast to people like William Lloyd Garrison who claimed that the Constitution was a "pact with hell" for either mostly punting on the question of federal involvement with the "peculiar institution" or actively abetting it, and who therefore remained fringe figures, Republicans figured out that it was much easier to convince people that the Constitution was perfectly fine as is and that all they were trying to do was restore its original vision.

Southerners played right into their hands by forcing repeated showdowns over how to deal with each new territorial acquisition, using the Kansas-Nebraska Act to renege on the Missouri Compromise, or trying to get federal judges to overturn Northern "personal liberty" emancipation laws for escaped slaves via terrible Supreme Court decisions such as Dred Scott. Much like with "free labor", "free soil" was a powerful rallying cry for Northerners who were tired of the increasingly frequent standoffs forced by the delicate balance of power in the Senate between free and slave states, and hoped to use the newly acquired territories to break the political stalemate. However, even given the advantage of those provocations, the Republicans still had to fight off defectors within their ranks who started to flirt with states' rights from the opposite direction. Many otherwise orthodox Republicans gave extremely impassioned speeches in the 1850s about the rights of free states to nullify pro-slavery federal laws like the Fugitive Slave Act, only to change their tune when, thanks to the influence of the more moderate and conservative factions, they discovered that abolition and pro-Unionism was a better sell in most of the North.

To that end, Foner does go into the demographic aspect of who in the North supported abolition and who didn't, in slightly greater detail than James McPherson did in his otherwise peerless Battle Cry of Freedom. The parts of Northern states that were settled by Germans or Yankees (generally the northern parts - even to this day many downstate or rural areas of the Northern states are culturally and demographically similar to the South) hated slavery, while big cities were mostly apathetic. Small towns were often the most fervently Republican, while cities remained more Democratic thanks to their efforts to appeal to immigrants. The nativist and temperance movements, previously powerful and independent, eventually became subsumed into the broader Republican coalition, much to their chagrin. There were forceful debates over exactly how far to entrench opposition to slavery in the party platform - was endorsing popular sovereignty sufficient, or was the risk of allowing slavery in the territories too great, and therefore outright abolitionism the only acceptable option? Once the Republicans had recaptured control of the government from the Slave Power, could it confine slavery to the South and allow it to wither away somehow, or would more extreme measures be needed?

The radical faction was helped once again by the South's intransigence and threats of secession, and though its preferred candidates like Salmon Chase or William Seward proved unacceptable to the party at large, a moderate former Whig like Abraham Lincoln had to endorse radical principles like slavery's "ultimate extinction" sufficiently in speeches like the famous "House Divided" one to gain the 1860 Presidential nomination. Different arguments were used to support the Republican message in different parts of the North, and one of Lincoln's hidden strengths was that as "everyone's second choice" his candidacy could be rendered palatable to just about every Northern demographic, particularly given his unrelenting emphasis on keeping the Union together at all costs. The Republicans' emphasis on national unity, the evils of slavery, and the power of free labor to help the workingman gave them a greater and greater advantage in the North, and in 1860, Lincoln and the Republican Party won convincingly in the Senate, House, and Presidential races.

It's important to keep in mind that the rhetoric about "free men" was directed more at white Americans than blacks - even Lincoln was forced to claim in his debates with Douglas that he wasn't in favor of making blacks socially or politically equal: "I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects - certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man." (This distinction between natural rights and social or civil rights would cause free blacks many problems in later years, from the famous Reconstruction-era Slaughterhouse cases and Plessy v. Ferguson all the way until the civil rights acts and cases of the 1960s). Though many Republicans abhorred the idea of living alongside blacks, and opposed black suffrage or allowing blacks to serve on juries, they made many converts by arguing that the institution of slavery drove down wages for white workers, as well as encouraging undesirable patterns of aristocratic government in Southern states that harmed poor blacks and whites alike. While most Americans agreed that whether settlement in the new Western territories would be slave or free was of vital importance, many "racially progressive" politicians openly hoped that blacks would be excluded from the new lands altogether, or perhaps colonized in Africa or Latin America as a further tentacle of Manifest Destiny. Often the question of who's on the side of progress means picking the lesser of two evils, and Southerners could see that whatever their Northern counterparts agreed with them on in regards to racial superiority, the Republicans' fundamental opposition to slavery meant that ultimately no compromise was possible.

In contrast to his discussion of pre-war Northern Republicans, Foner talks much less about the ideological currents of the South or the Democrats, or about how the Republican ideology survived past the war into Reconstruction and the Gilded Age. This is a pity for several reasons. There's a lot to be said about how much of Southern opposition to the North was due to their conception of themselves as a unique region of the country, with their own ethnic heritage and distinct culture, and how with the South out of the government during the war, many important initiatives were passed - good ones like the Morrill Land Grant College Act, the Homestead Act, and the National Banking Act, along with more mixed ones like the Pacific Railroad Act. Additionally, I would have liked for more info on how the Democratic Party managed to survive splitting in two in 1860 and remaining the usually weaker party for the next few decades instead of simply dissolving. Finally, further discussion on how the "free labor" plank of their platform endured the increasing amount of labor violence in the later part of the 19th century would be very interesting, since labor biographies such as Ray Ginger's The Bending Cross focus more on key characters like Eugene Debs than the philosophical systems they were fighting. All told, however, this is an excellent survey of its topic.