Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War - Softcover

Foner, Eric

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0195013522 ISBN 13: 9780195013528

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1971

Synopsis

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 tweny-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, and it finds these most clearly expressed in the ideology of the growing Republican party in the decade before the war's start. By 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.

About this title

About the Author

Eric Foner is Professor of History at Columbia University, and author of Tom Paine and Revolutionary America and Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War.

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

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1971
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0195013522
• ISBN 13: 9780195013528
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368