Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War With a New Introductory Essay (Paperback)

by Eric Foner (Author) "Few events in the century of any nation have been the subject of such intense and detailed study as the American Civil War..." (more)
Key Phrases: free labor outlook, free labor argument, barring slavery, New York, Congressional Globe, Chase Papers (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"First-rate in every respect...a work of genuine distinction, and a major contribution to ante-bellum political history."--Kenneth Stampp, author of The Imperiled Union
"Still the best book on the politics of the 1850's."--Norman B. Ferris, Middle Tennessee State University
"It's the best book on Republican ideology there is. Foner is among the very best Americanists ever. Bravo!"--Harlow Sheidley, University of Colorado
"Foner's work remains the classic treatment of the subject!'--K.M. Startip, Williams Baptist College
"Excellent volume--Foner is always good anyway!"--John F. McCormack, Delaware County Community College


Product Description
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 1861. 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. At the heart of the controversy over the extension of slavery, he argues, is the issue of whether the northern or southern form of society would take root in the West, whose development would determine determine the nation's destiny.

In his new introductory essay, Foner presents a greatly altered view of the subject. Only entrepreneurs and farmers were actually "free men" in the sense used in the ideology of the period. Actually, by the time the Civil War was initiated, half the workers in the North were wage-earners, not independent workers. And this did not account for women and blacks, who had little freedom in choosing what work they did. He goes onto show that even after the Civil War these guarantees for "free soil, free labor, free men" did not really apply for most Americans, and especially not for blacks.

Demonstrating the profoundly successful fusion of value and interest within Republican ideology prior to the Civil War, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men remains a classic of modern American historical writing. Eloquent and influential, it shows how this ideology provided the moral consensus which allowed the North, for the first time in history, to mobilize an entire society in modern warfare.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (April 20, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195094972
• ISBN-13: 978-0195094978
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #111,279 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Significance of Republican Ideology, November 16, 2002

By	One Man's View (Lawrenceville, GA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

The Civil War era is surely one of the most complex, controversial, and tumultuous periods in our nation's history and one of the most difficult to capture. "Free Soil, Free Labor, ..." is a sterling effort to provide insight into the social philosophies of the time that almost inevitably led to the breakup of the Union. While ostensibly concerned with the ideology of the Republican Party leading up to the Civil War, the author clearly shows that the Republicans also both reflected and advanced the belief system that came to permeate much of the North.

A key component of Northern thinking emphasized a free labor and producer ethic, which extolled the virtues of free, independent, and propertied working men. Dependency was eschewed as evidence of personal shortcoming. But the institution of slavery violated that ethic in every way. Not only were slaves not free, but also Southern aristocratic society degraded free labor. To be a free laborer in the South was to be a member of a lower class. These diametrically opposed views of labor were the basis of an ongoing controversy dating from the Missouri Compromise over the issue of permitting slavery in newly obtained territories or newly admitted states. The Northern and Republican position was one of "free soil," for free laborers.

Though not emphasizing the chronological history of the Republican Party, the author traces the assimilation into the party of members or adherents of the Abolitionists, the Liberty Party, the Free Soil Party, anti-slavery Democrats and Whigs, the Know-Nothings, and the so-called radical Republicans. A good sampling of the pronouncements of the leading Northern political figures of the era as well as the positions of key newspaper publishers is quite illuminating. It is a mild criticism of the book that the author, in following the historical trail, at times provides insufficient background on historical events that he refers to such as the Wilmot Proviso, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Lecompton controversy, etc.

Certainly much of the rise of the Republican Party was due to a concern of Northern Whigs and Democrats that the political process in Washington was being dominated by a southern Slave Power. That Slave Power was seen as a force intent on expanding the geographical reach of slavery. Every attempt at expansion of slave territory drove more and more people to the ranks of the parties that became the Republican Party. The author is keen to point out that while anti-slavery was a moral crusade on the part of some Republicans, for most the prevention of the Slave Power in expanding its reach and the preservation and expansion of Northern society superceded any moral imperative to emancipate slaves.

It is not the author's intent to directly list the causes of the Civil War, yet it would be difficult to deny the relevance of this book in answering those questions. But the author does address some claims of causation. While not denying that protective tariffs were controversial issues, he downplays their overall significance. For one, many leading Republicans were free traders, not protectionists. Republicanism was not simply warmed over Whiggery intent on protecting industry. In fact, many Republicans had a distrust of emerging corporations. In addition, he gives little credence to suggestions that the Civil War represents either a failure of political compromise or political incompetence.

The author amply demonstrates that the election of President Lincoln in 1860 constituted a culminating point for both the North and the South. Clearly, the Republicans had emerged as a voice for a Northern society that was based on entrepreneuralism, free labor, progress, and expansion. For the South, the election of Republicans was seen as a dire threat to a way of life wholly different than that of the North. No longer the foremost power in Washington, Southerners had grave misgivings concerning the designs of Republicans on dismantling their society. And neither the Democrats who had stared down John Calhoun in the Nullification Crisis or the Republicans with a Whig background of Henry Clay's Americanism were about to simply let the South secede.

According to the author there was "the conviction that North and South represented two social systems whose values, interests, and future prospects were in sharp, perhaps mortal, conflict with one another." And for those who would downplay the essential role of slavery in the impending conflict, the author quotes another historian as indicating that "By 1860, slavery had become the symbol and carrier of all sectional differences and conflicts."

In an introduction twenty-five years after the original, the author acknowledges that the ideology of free labor was already fraying by 1860. In the first place, by that point more than half of all men were wage earners and not independent workers. Secondly, the Republican fiction that both capital and labor had similar interests was belied by the greater power of capital to make the employment relationship hardly free. But those realities rose to the front after the Civil War as industrialism really expanded.

For those who would have wanted a bigger and more comprehensive book, there is merit in that. The book is somewhat narrowly focused. That is not to deny that the capturing of Republican ideology is not a significant contribution. But Southern reactions as the Republican Party was growing would have been interesting. But this book should be on the list of anyone wanting to understand the Civil War era.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You don't have to be an historian to appreciate this work!, April 23, 1999

By	Steven M. Couch (Boston, MA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Foner's account of the antebellum formation of the Republican Party and its ideology is a model for what truly great history writing should be. This work is a relatively easy read (as history texts go), but without sacrificing any academic value. Of all of the books I've read about antebellum American politics, this is far and away my favorite.

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incisive and persuasive analysis., October 18, 2000

By A Customer

Ryan Setliff's crude economic analysis of the reasons for the formation of the Republican party (see next review) hardly stand up to Foner's convincing arguments, backed with a suitable array of EVIDENCE, for the tangled web of factors and motives that led individuals into the Republican part in the 1950s. Anyone wishing to understand this crucial period in US history cannot afford to miss this book.