Free Soil Movements

FREE SOIL MOVEMENTS. The leftward edge of mainstream American politics offered a venue for militant anti-slavery political efforts, some avowedly anti-racist and some not, in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Abolitionist debates over the value of political action prompted a decision in 1839 to launch the Liberty Party. The new party advocated the immediate elimination of slavery across the entire country and ran James G. Birney, a former slaveholder from Kentucky, as its presidential candidate in 1840 and 1844. A majority of the white men who voted in the Northern states had, to this time, never viewed slavery as more than a regional issue. The US War with Mexico (1846-1848), instigated in part by a Southern Democratic fantasy about seizing new territories into which slavery could expand, changed this perception.

The war hastened a growing convergence between the Liberty Party and the working-class based National Reformers, who advocated radical land redistribution. In 1846 and 1847, Liberty supporters and land reformers ran joint “Free Soil” tickets. Their successes in capturing the balance of power in Congress encouraged further concerted action. When the House received a bill to finance the war, Rep. David Wilmot, a northern Democrat, added a proviso that slavery would not be introduced into any territories acquired by the war. The South generally opposed this proviso, but Democratic senators essentially closed ranks to ensure its defeat. In response to the undisguised domination of the cotton South in the party, former President Martin Van Buren and his “Barnburner” faction of the New York Democrats called for an independent ticket. The new party united Barnburner and allied Democrats, antislavery Whigs, and some Liberty supporters around Wilmot’s plan to halt further extension of slavery. This new Free Soil party nominated a national ticket of Van Buren and Charles F. Adams.

Most abolitionists and land reformers supported the Free Soilers, but the radical core of these movements resisted the lure of Van Buren. Gerrit Smith, William Goodell, Charles C. Foote and other recalcitrant Liberty followers, particularly those active in the Underground Railroad, objected to abandoning abolitionism as a plank. Their 1848 annual National Industrial Congress seconded the Liberty League nomination of Smith.

Van Buren won over a tenth of the popular vote, confirming a solid, if spotty electoral base for antislavery politics across the non-slaveholding states of the North, a victory that threatened to bring down the entire two-party system. For various reasons, Van Buren and the Barnburners convinced themselves that they had made their point and abandoned third-party politics to return to their earlier partisan identity.

The most radical of the Free Soilers persisted, either under the old name or as the “Free Democrats.” They adopted radical land reform measures. Abolitionists both white and Black became publicly identified with the effort. In Wisconsin, their gubernatorial candidate, Warren B. Chase, was also the organizer of the Fourierist phalanx at Ceresco. Further radicalized by the bipartisan embrace and enforcement of a stronger Fugitive Slave Act, the Free Democrats ran a national campaign in 1852 with Sen. John P. Hale for president and former Congressman George W. Julian for vice president, calling for repeal of the law and denouncing slavery. The remaining Liberty Leaguers nominated Goodell and S.M. Bell of western Virginia, although most wound up supporting Hale-Julian.

In New York City, the insurgents allied with the most radical organizations in the community. When Hale spoke there, his platform had the Stars and Stripes on one side and the “drapeau rouge,” the red flag, on the other. There, the Free Democratic League affiliated with the Universal Democratic Republicans, a coalition organized by Hugh Forbes, a Scottish Garibaldian later to serve briefly as John Brown’s military advisor. It included the most radical of the old land reformers in the Ouvrier Circle of the Brotherhood of the Union, as well as American, German, French, Italian, Polish and other émigré associations, together with an unaffiliated but allied circle of African Americans around Dr. James McCune Smith. Later, this circle affiliated with the London-based International Association (1855-1859), forerunner of “First International,” the International Workingmen’s Association launched in 1864.

The persistent strength of the two-party system, reflected the widespread wish of politicians and the press to avoid sectional conflict, inspired the bipartisan passage of the Nebraska Act early in 1854. This Act authorized the formation of the Kansas and Nebraska territories and their movement towards statehood, and set aside the compromise of over thirty years standing in order to permit the possibility of a future slaveholding state in Kansas.

Spurred by the Free Democrats, the residents of Chase’s former Fourierist community gathered in Ripon, Wisconsin, meeting under the leadership of Alvan E. Bovay, the former national secretary of the land reformers. With women participating equally, these meetings called for a new political party. The idea spread quickly across the upper Midwest, inspiring other radicals, led by D.C. Henderson of the old Ouvrier Circle in New York to launch a state convention in Michigan. Sometimes called the People’s Party or the Anti-Nebraska Party, it increasingly adopted the proposal of Bovay, along with his old friend Horace Greeley and his powerful New York Tribune, to call themselves “Republican.” Its quality often varied by state, sounding more like the radical Free Democrats in some, while in others, such as New York, the remnants of the Whigs simply dissolved into that state’s leading party. The presidential campaign of 1856 drew these different state parties together behind the nomination of John C. Fremont of California and William L. Dayton of New Jersey.

The Liberty League faction reorganized, meanwhile, as the Radical Abolition party in which blacks and women freely participated. It ran Gerrit Smith for president in 1856, as it did in 1860, when the Republicans elected Abraham Lincoln.

These various efforts of reform and radical activists, achieving no singular political victories, publicized and pressed the issues of territories free of slavery, and the rights of African Americans to freedom from bondage.

Blue, Frederick J. The Free Soilers: Third Party Politics 1848-54. Urbana, Ill.: Univ. of Illinois Press. 1973.

Earle, Jonathan H. Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824-1854. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004

Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. 1970.

Lause, Mark. Long Road to Harpers Ferry: The Rise of the First American Left. London: Pluto Press, 2018.

Rayback Joseph G. Free Soil: The Election of 1848. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1970.