Jacksonian Antislavery & the Politics of Free Soil, 1824-1854 (review)

Abstract

Jacksonian Antislavery & Politics of 1824-1854. By Jonathan H. Earle. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. 282. Cloth, $59.95; paper, $22.50.)Jonathan H. Earle has written an important and overdue history of Soil Party's origins. terms Free Soil, Free and Free Men are familiar to historians today primarily of Eric Foner's work of same name, Labor, Men: Ideology of Republican Party Before Civil War (1970). It has been thirty-five years since publication of that influential volume, and during those years it has stood as our basic understanding of Soil Party. It makes good sense, then, that one of Foner's former students should offer historians another vantage point from which to consider Soilers. Yet rather than carrying readers into ideological origins of Republican Party, Earle takes us farther back, to earliest days of antislavery extension party, noting that because 'free soil' is one of antebellum America's most elusive terms, one of this study's ambitions is to clarify its origins and meanings (13). He finds that many of most important leaders came from steadfast Jacksonian roots.Men such as William Leggett, Thomas Morris, and David Wilmot, to name a few, were thoroughgoing, hard-money Democrats. They fought monopolies and banks that made up Money Power and argued against special privilege and aristocracy. They were also opposed to slavery early on and ultimately transferred their antiaristocratic ideals into a focused and effective attack on Slave Power, another form of elitist rule. Democratic dissidents, reasonably satisfied that Jackson and his administration had Money Power on run, writes Earle, discovered that another enemy-slavery-had risen in its place. Thomas Morris argued to Senate that the slave power of South and banking power of North, are now uniting to rule this country (7-8). Thus it was early opposition to slavery of staunch Democrats that fit snugly within their already fixed hatred of economic power that forged early Soil ideology. Earle is careful to point out that these men were not radical abolitionists. They wedded their attack on slavery with traditional beliefs, such as land reform and principles of political democracy: Free Soil Democrats went beyond simple hostility to Slave Power and its pretenses, linking their antislavery opposition to a land reform agenda that pressed for free land for poor settlers, in addition to land free of slavery. resulting union between radical Jacksonianism and antislavery movement . . . is far more important than historians have allowed (5).The apparent anomaly of Earle's argument is that Soil opposition to further western extension of slavery and their focus on Slave Power, both of which were major components of later Republican Party, had solidly origins. Party was, after all, proponent of Gag Laws and banning of abolitionist tracts from mail. Earle acknowledges, The Party leadership generally treated antislavery Jacksonians as heretics and often banished them from party. Morris and other early Soil dissident Democrats, however, claimed that proslavery leadership had abandoned true Jacksoman principles, not dissidents themselves (6-7). …