My dissertation, in large part, focuses on the literary production of authors affiliated with the antislavery Free Soil movement. Comprising a genealogy of third-party antislavery coalitions including the Liberty Party, the Liberty League, the Free Soil Party, the Radical Abolitionist Party, and ultimately the Republican Party, the Free Soil movement was characterized by economic and political resistance to the slave power, which, Free Soilers claimed, was weakening the U.S. economy, devaluing northern labor, degrading the natural resources of the South, and threatening to expand westward so as to create a continental empire for slavery. I argue that Free Soil, committed to preventing the expansion of the slave system, viewed slavery as both environmentally destructive and unsustainable. As such, Free Soil arguments were explicitly ecological, not only juxtaposing the beauty and productivity of Northern spaces with the dilapidated and blighted landscapes of the South, but also rendering slavery as pollutive and toxic. Authors affiliated with the Free Soil movement (including, for example, John Pierpont, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Highland Garnet, Henry Bibb, Frederick Douglass, and Frederick Law Olmsted), channel Free Soil ideology to critique slavery, articulating an ecological antislavery ethic that renders slavery unnatural, destructive to the landscapes of the U.S., and environmentally unsustainable.
I plan to address how Black Free Soilers in particular—such as Bibb, Douglass, Garnet, James W. C. Pennington, Samuel Ringgold Ward, and James M. Whitfield— in addition to using Free Soil arguments to condemn slavery, substantially revise Free Soil ideology so as to make it more ecological and anti-racist. These authors construct what I am referring to as the Free Soil critique. The Free Soil critique draws upon Free Soil discourse to critique slavery while simultaneously and reflexively critiquing Free Soil as a useful analytic but one that is significantly limited in regards to race and nature. The Free Soil critique argues that the risk society of U.S. slavery did not simply affect particular spaces and specific individuals, and it certainly could not be contained within certain limits. The very nature of slavery, the Free Soil critique explains, corrupts and pollutes everything. Abolition, and the Free Soil movement more specifically, cannot address questions of geography and labor without challenging the environmental roots of American racism, without recognizing how the slave system oppresses and alienates all laboring bodies in the U.S., without understanding how the environmental pollution of slavery infects the entire nation, and without working to destroy the barriers that free black farmers face in the North.
As the Free Soil critique is preoccupied with expansion and pollution, I am drawing heavily upon new materialism, particularly the work of Stacy Alaimo, Jane Bennett, and Timothy Morton.
This is a fascinating project! Free Soil's articulation of antislavery and environmental critique is really suggestive, and I'm looking forward to learning more about whether & how Free Soil critique influenced other forms of antebellum (and subsequent) environmental discourse.
ReplyDeleteI couldn't help noticing, though, that much of Free Soil's critique of slavery also applies to a mode of production that was often opposed to (though in fact intertwined with) it: capitalism. Capitalism, too, "oppresses and alienates all laboring bodies" and "corrupts and pollutes" and destroys landscapes. So I wonder whether Free Soilers had an implicit critique of industrialization, and how they viewed the relationship between Southern plantations and Northern industry.
I'm also curious about Free Soil's own agrarian investments in racism and ecological transformations. Wasn't Free Soil discourse largely wrapped up in the Mexican-US War, Native American wars and displacement, and various forms of xenophobia and racism? I also think about the practically-enslaved labor used to mine guano, which was imported in to New England farms (not Southern plantations) to renew their depleted soil...
So I recently found out I won't be able to make it to the conference, but I hope to learn more about this project either on this blog or from reading your work in the future.
h
Thanks for these comments Hsuan. I think that the disparate treatments from Free Soilers of both capitalism and settler-colonialism reveal important tensions within the movement.
ReplyDeleteFirst, in regards to capitalism and the market revolution, the various aspects of the Free Soil coalition responded differently to increasing industrialization and issues surrounding free labor. Former Liberty Party members, generally speaking, were motivated by an evangelical critique of slavery and thus did not engage in much detail with the particulars of production in either the slave holding South or the industrializing North. Their views of nature and slavery's effects on the land were, I argue, rooted less in the ecological consequences of material production and more in an eschatological fear that slavery would effectively destroy the world. Former Democrats, or Barnburners, a group whose antislavery sympathies stemmed in large part from labor reform in the 1830s, held an explicitly anti-capitalist position. The Jacksonian wing of Free Soil thus critiqued the aristocratic Slave Power in a manner quite similar to critiques of the "Money Power" from a decade earlier. Their proposition--free farms in the West--would, they hoped, provide poor Northerners with opportunities outside of the increasingly capitalistic eastern states. These Free Soilers saw "free labor" ideas as essentially enslaving northern labor. Bound up with their racism, their critique of capitalism was that it was enslaving white workers (I'm drawing upon David Roediger's _Wages of Whiteness_ here). Former Whigs had a much different perspective, celebrating free labor and capitalism as an alternative to the aristocratic agrarianism of the Slave Power. The slaveholding economy, according to this argument, was backward, sluggish, and anti-democratic. The former Whigs also focused on white labor, arguing that nonslaveholders in the South had no economic opportunity since purchasing productive land was nearly impossible and since the availability of slave labor severely decreased wages for non-slaves. I'm interested particularly in how both the former Democrats and Whigs focused on land. For former Democrats, the territories of the West would be transformed by free, independent farmers into a rural alternative to the North. For former Whigs, the topographies of the North represented an aesthetically pleasing and ecologically harmonious alternative to Southern spaces, as free labor transformed not-terribly-productive land into an edenic space (I haven't looked much at guano, in this regard, but plan to, especially after reading Professor James's fantastic article on the subject in _ALH_).
In terms of expansion and settler colonialism, you're absolutely right that Free Soil discourse was rooted in xenophobia and racism. The narrative that the rural West was unsettled and open to white settlement relied on genocidal erasure and the sort of literary and imaginative effacement that simultaneously rendered the rural west as both an Edenic space, pre-modern and untouched, and also a decidedly modern space, waiting to be incorporated within American progress. I'm interested in exploring resistance to this narrative from within the Free Soil movement, such as the moment in James W.C. Pennington's _A Text Book of the Origin and History, &c. &c. of the Colored People_. Pennington, a former slave (known as the "Fugitive Blacksmith") was a founder of the Connecticut Liberty Party. He writes in his _Text Book_ that “Slavery had its origin simultaneously with the conquests of this continent, and was invented by that same plundering bloody and murderous spirit which characterised those conquests,” linking Removal with the expansion of slaveholding hegemony. Pennington and others, while proposing a free-soil vision for the American West remain troubled by the discourse of Manifest Destiny, and therefore seek anti-racist alternatives to that vision, recognizing the various links between Removal and slaveholding. Their collective argument is that the Free Soil vision for the West as a space of productivity and ecological harmony cannot be realized by either violent displacement or the sort of restrictive policies that reserved lands in the West for whites only.
ReplyDeleteSorry to hear you won't be able to make it to Lawrence. Thanks again for your comments. I hope we can talk more about this in the future. -- James