Intro -- Contents -- List of Illustrations and Maps -- Acknowledgments -- INTRODUCTION: Jacksonian Antislavery and the Roots of Free Soil -- CHAPTER ONE: Dissident Democrats in the 1830s -- CHAPTER TWO: Set Down Your Feet, Democrats: Politics and Free Soil in New York -- CHAPTER THREE: Making Hay from Democratic Clover: John P. Hale and the New Hampshire Independent Democracy -- CHAPTER FOUR: Marcus Morton and the Dilemma of Jacksonian Antislavery in Massachusetts -- CHAPTER FIVE: David Wilmot, the Proviso, and the Congressional Movement to Abolish Slavery -- CHAPTER SIX: The Cincinnati Clique, True Democracy, and the Ohio Origins of the Free Soil Party -- CHAPTER SEVEN: Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Speech, and Free Men: The Election of 1848 -- CONCLUSION: Free Soilers, Republicans, and the Third Party System, 1848-1854 -- Appendix -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y.

Taking our understanding of political antislavery into largely unexplored terrain, Jonathan H. Earle counters conventional wisdom and standard historical interpretations that view the ascendance of free-soil ideas within the antislavery movement as an explicit retreat from the goals of emancipation or even as an essentially proslavery ideology. These claims, he notes, fail to explain free soil's real contributions to the antislavery cause: its incorporation of Jacksonian ideas about property and political equality and its transformation of a struggling crusade into a mass political movement.Democratic free soilers' views on race occupied a wide spectrum, but they were able to fashion new and vital arguments against slavery and its expansion based on the party's long-standing commitment to egalitarianism and hostility to centralized power. Linking their antislavery stance to a land-reform agenda that pressed for free land for poor settlers in addition to land free of slavery, Free Soil Democrats forced major political realignments in New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Ohio. Democratic politicians such as David Wilmot, Marcus Morton, John Parker Hale, and even former president Martin Van Buren were transformed into antislavery leaders. As Earle shows, these political changes at the local, state, and national levels greatly intensified the looming sectional crisis and paved the way for the Civil War.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2018. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.