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Book Review: Free Soil, Free Men, Free Labor: The Ideology of The Republican Party Before The Civil War
Book Review: Free Soil, Free Men, Free Labor: The Ideology of The Republican Party Before The Civil War
Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party
Before The Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press. 1995. vii – 353.
transpired with the election of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency in 1860. The sectional
strife that had dominated the nation since the Missouri Compromise, eventually
culminated in a split within the Democrat party and the emergence to prominence of the
new Republican Party. The strife and sectional interests that surrounded slavery reached
an ideological apogee with the Presidential contest and the election of Lincoln. America
faced a choice about its destiny, would it become a nation of Free Men or Slavery? By
electing Abraham Lincoln, America placed slavery on the road to extinction and adopted
the Republican belief that, “‘free labor ideology,’ grounded in the precepts that free labor
was economically and socially superior to slave labor and that the distinctive quality of
Northern society was the opportunity it offered wage earners to rise to property-owning
The start of the Civil war is most often discussed by focusing on the great men of
the era, specifically Abraham Lincoln, or the specific events. Allen Guelzo and Mark
Neely both offer great attention to President Lincoln and his evolution from a Whig
Commander in Chief. Other scholars, like James McPherson and David Potter, offer
excellent narratives and insight into the events leading up to the shots fired on Fort
Sumter; however, Eric Foner, in Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, offers unique
scholarship by exploring the ideological characteristics of the Republican Party and how
ideology, “the average American . . . was driven by an inordinate desire to improve his
condition in life, and by boundless confidence that he could do so” (p. 13). Foner posits
that Northern society embraced the idea that the wage earner held his future in his own
hands and that everyone in America had the opportunity improve their lives. The North
in general, and the Republicans specifically, believed in the dignity of labor, that man
was designed to work and that through labor his economic and social condition would
improve; borrowing from Whig roots the Republicans also purported that the government
had a role by providing economic opportunity through tools such as the Homestead plan
(pp. 12-14).
Foner establishes, in a new introduction, that the free labor ideology, that
ultimately found its home in the Republican Party, originated in colonial America. He
argues that as late as 1770 most who arrived from England and Scotland occupied a
unique position of contractual fixed length servitude, where they ultimately earned their
freedom and that, “by the time of the Revolution the majority of the nonslave population
were farmers who owned their own land” (p. xi). He concludes that the social mobility of
colonial Americans set the stage for the “free labor” beliefs that eventually dominated
abolitionists, the conservatives, and the moderates and how they viewed the issue of
slavery and its economic circumstances in Southern society. Foner concludes that the
Republicans, remarkably, were able to combine sectional interests and free labor
ideology into a “morality . . . that became the most potent political force in the nation”
and resulted in Republican hegemony of the executive branch in 1860 (p. 309).
Forner offers valuable insight into the Republican Party by examining its
ideological origins from Colonial America till the eve of the Civil War. He also
illustrates the importance of the radicals, conservatives and moderates in shaping the
Republican view of southern society; however, he elides much of the opposition ideology
and the events that shaped both. In many ways, the events that led to the civil war were
shaped by the beliefs of the Republicans, Democrats, Abolitionists, and Fire Eaters;
however, historians must explain the predominant ideologies within the context of the
societies in which they exist. Foner does little to explain the evolution of the Free Labor
ideology within the context of the Missouri Compromise, Kansas Nebraska Act, Dred
Scott, or John Brown’s raid. Ideologies can explain why societies believe what they
believe; however, only ideologies examined within the context of events provide the