Abolition and the Rise of US Environmentalism

The Literature and Politics of Free Soil

James S. Finley

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781469694306
  9781469694290
• eBook ISBN:
  9781469688237
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

By the 1840s, many Americans recognized that the institution of slavery was destroying Southern landscapes while threatening to expand into the West. An increasing number of white Northerners believed that surrounding areas where slavery was legal with so-called free soil would hasten its collapse and forestall an environmental crisis. James S. Finley addresses this understudied intersection of US antislavery and environmental politics in the two decades before the Civil War, arguing that the debate over free soil—what it should look like and who should have access to this land—was an underrecognized precursor of modern American environmentalist movements.

Through the work of a group of Black writers and thinkers, the Free-Soil movement’s white supremacist underpinnings were challenged by an ecosocial vision that centered democratic communities and sustainable labor. By analyzing the output of authors who advocated for truly free soil, such as Frederick Douglass and Henry Highland Garnet, Finley finds commonalities in their attempts to reenvision communal relations between individuals and the land with contemporary movements for racial and environmental justice.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One. Sustaining Free Soil for White People
• Chapter Two. Free Soil After the End of the World
• Chapter Three. Turning the Free-Soil Principle into Practice
• Chapter Four. Thoreau Loses His Kin
• Chapter Five. Countering Racial Capitalism and Creating Truly Free Soil
• Coda: The Afterlives of Free-Soil Abolition
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index