An Agrarian Republic

Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era

Adam Wesley Dean

• Editorial: The University of North Carolina Press
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781469619927
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia de la Guerra de Secesión

The familiar story of the Civil War tells of a predominately agricultural South pitted against a rapidly industrializing North. However, Adam Wesley Dean argues that the Republican Party's political ideology was fundamentally agrarian. Believing that small farms owned by families for generations led to a model society, Republicans supported a northern agricultural ideal in opposition to southern plantation agriculture, which destroyed the land's productivity, required constant western expansion, and produced an elite landed gentry hostile to the Union. Dean shows how agrarian republicanism shaped the debate over slavery's expansion, spurred the creation of the Department of Agriculture and the passage of the Homestead Act, and laid the foundation for the development of the earliest nature parks. Spanning the long nineteenth century, Dean's study analyzes the changing debate over land development as it transitioned from focusing on the creation of a virtuous and orderly citizenry to being seen primarily as a "civilizing" mission. By showing Republicans as men and women with backgrounds in small farming, Dean unveils new connections between seemingly separate historical events, linking this era's views of natural and manmade environments with interpretations of slavery and land policy.

Notes

ABBREVIATIONS

ADC

Anna E. Dickinson Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

CFP

Cole Family Papers, Charles E. Young Research Library, Department of Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles

CG

Congressional Globe

DEB

Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco)

G&JP

Joshua R. Giddings and George Washington Julian Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

KSHS

Kansas State Historical Society, Lawrence, Kansas

NYDT

New-York Daily Times

NYT

New York Times

SFB

San Francisco Bulletin

INTRODUCTION

1. Wright, Old South, New South, 52; Paludan, A People’s Contest, 170, 173; Bushman, “Markets and Composite Farms in Early America,” 351.

2. Paludan, A People’s Contest, 152, 156.

3. Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth, 122; Brady, War upon the Land, 17. For earlier discussions of soil differences, see Bagley, Soil Exhaustion and the Civil War; and Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy.

4. For information on the naming of the Republican Party, see Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party, 105.

5. Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 4; Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, 765; McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 27–28.

6. Richard White, “‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?,’” in Uncommon Ground, ed. Cronon, 172.

7. Rodgers, “Republicanism,” 18; Onuf, Statehood and Union, 110–11, 113.

8. Lorain, Nature and Reason Harmonized, 525. Special thanks must be given to Benjamin Cohen, a former colleague at the University of Virginia, for alerting me to this source. For an extensive discussion of Lorain’s work, see Cohen, Notes from the Ground, 97.

9. Eric Foner and William Gienapp argue that a commitment to “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 property-owning independence” united the Republicans (Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, xxxvi). See also Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party, 353–54; Gienapp, “Who Voted for Lincoln?,” in Abraham Lincoln and the American Political Tradition, ed.. Thomas, 70.

10. Gallagher, Confederate War, 72, 98. Historians often miss how the debate over land development changed after 1848, either talking about the salience of Jeffersonian “agrarianism” or the ubiquity of “manifest destiny” throughout the nineteenth century. For one example, see Somkin, Unquiet Eagle, 117.

11. Paludan, A People’s Contest, 156.

12. Philip Shaw Paludan argues that the Homestead Act “helped Northerners look away from the problems of an industrializing society” (Paludan, A People’s Contest, 167). To a certain extent, this characterization is putting the cart before the horse. I contend that northerners thought they were creating an agricultural society in the West and did not envision the industrialization and urbanization of the later nineteenth century.

13. See Runte, Yosemite, 3.

14. George W. Julian, “The Overshadowing Question,” in Speeches on Political Questions, ed. Child, 448; Marx, The Machine in the Garden, 23.

15. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery, 15; Gallagher, Union War, 152. Two recent books have tried connecting events in the United States West and South during Reconstruction. Heather Cox Richardson focuses on the image of the West in nineteenth-century American politics, arguing that the popular mythology of the region created a belief held nationwide that “success came through hard work and that all Americans were working their way up” (Richardson, West from Appomattox, 5). Elliott West, in The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story, seeks the “common thread to emancipation, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and federal occupation of the South on the one hand and western railroad surveys, reservations, Indian wars, and Yellowstone National Park” on the other (West, The Last Indian War, 21). I argue that the link northerners saw between land use and social structure provided one of the “common threads.”

16. Susan-Mary Grant and Phillip Shaw Paludan contend that investigating the thoughts and beliefs of representative individuals or “thinkers” gives shape to otherwise abstract discussions of ideology and attitudes in the North during the Civil War era. See Grant, North over South, 11; and Paludan, A Covenant with Death, xii.

CHAPTER 1

1. Seward, “Freedom in the New Territories,” in The Senate, 1789–1989: Classic Speeches, ed. Byrd, 308.

2. Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, xiv; Berwanger, The Frontier against Slavery, xii; Freehling, The Road to Disunion, vol. 1, 306; Morrison, Slavery and the American West, 278.

3. For a description of Jefferson’s views on Missouri, see Freehling, The Road to Disunion, vol. 1, 119–22, 144.

4. Seward, “Freedom in the New Territories,” 300, 311. There was also a gender dimension to the debate over slavery’s expansion. Some northerners believed slavery was “incongruous to northern family ideals,” pointing to the sexual exploitation of slave women as harmful both to black and white families. See Pierson, Free Hearts and Free Homes, 18.

5. Seward, “Freedom in the New Territories,” 299, 309.

6. Ibid., 299–300. One historian has persuasively argued that Seward was more concerned about an East-West split than a North-South severing. See Wilson, Space, Time, and Freedom, 219.

7. Peterson, The Jefferson Image, 167; Seward, “Freedom in the New Territories,” 311.

8. Onuf, Statehood and Union, 110; Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 52, 55, 56; Wilson, Space, Time, and Freedom, 4, 12; McCoy, The Elusive Republic, 75, 10.

9. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire, 143.

10. Gates, History of Public Land Law, 219; Robbins, Our Landed Heritage, 7–8; White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own,” 138; Hyman, American Singularity, 25; Onuf, Statehood and Union, 21.

11. Hyman, American Singularity, 20–21, 24; Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire, 113; Onuf, Statehood and Union, 109–10, 113; Cohen, Notes from the Ground, 28.

12. Robbins, Our Landed Heritage, 17–18; Ellis,...