Eric Foner.

Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party

Before The Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press. 1995. vii – 353.

Arguably, the most monumental exercise of suffrage in American history

transpired with the election of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency in 1860. The sectional

strife that had dominated the nation since the Missouri Compromise, eventually

culminated in a split within the Democrat party and the emergence to prominence of the

new Republican Party. The strife and sectional interests that surrounded slavery reached

an ideological apogee with the Presidential contest and the election of Lincoln. America

faced a choice about its destiny, would it become a nation of Free Men or Slavery? By

electing Abraham Lincoln, America placed slavery on the road to extinction and adopted

the Republican belief that, “‘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 rise to property-owning

independence” (p. ix).

The start of the Civil war is most often discussed by focusing on the great men of

the era, specifically Abraham Lincoln, or the specific events. Allen Guelzo and Mark

Neely both offer great attention to President Lincoln and his evolution from a Whig

politician, to the Republican Presidential nominee, to the successfully re-elected

Commander in Chief. Other scholars, like James McPherson and David Potter, offer

excellent narratives and insight into the events leading up to the shots fired on Fort

Sumter; however, Eric Foner, in Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, offers unique

scholarship by exploring the ideological characteristics of the Republican Party and how

it evolved in Northern society.

 Antebellum Northern society offered fertile ground for the growth of Republican

ideology, “the average American . . . was driven by an inordinate desire to improve his

condition in life, and by boundless confidence that he could do so” (p. 13). Foner posits

that Northern society embraced the idea that the wage earner held his future in his own

hands and that everyone in America had the opportunity improve their lives. The North

in general, and the Republicans specifically, believed in the dignity of labor, that man

was designed to work and that through labor his economic and social condition would

improve; borrowing from Whig roots the Republicans also purported that the government

had a role by providing economic opportunity through tools such as the Homestead plan

(pp. 12-14).

Foner establishes, in a new introduction, that the free labor ideology, that

ultimately found its home in the Republican Party, originated in colonial America. He

argues that as late as 1770 most who arrived from England and Scotland occupied a

unique position of contractual fixed length servitude, where they ultimately earned their

freedom and that, “by the time of the Revolution the majority of the nonslave population

were farmers who owned their own land” (p. xi). He concludes that the social mobility of

colonial Americans set the stage for the “free labor” beliefs that eventually dominated

northern society and the Republican Party.

Foner further explores the Republican Party by examining the radicals, or

abolitionists, the conservatives, and the moderates and how they viewed the issue of

slavery and its economic circumstances in Southern society. Foner concludes that the

Republicans, remarkably, were able to combine sectional interests and free labor

ideology into a “morality . . . that became the most potent political force in the nation”
and resulted in Republican hegemony of the executive branch in 1860 (p. 309).

Forner offers valuable insight into the Republican Party by examining its

ideological origins from Colonial America till the eve of the Civil War. He also

illustrates the importance of the radicals, conservatives and moderates in shaping the

Republican view of southern society; however, he elides much of the opposition ideology

and the events that shaped both. In many ways, the events that led to the civil war were

shaped by the beliefs of the Republicans, Democrats, Abolitionists, and Fire Eaters;

however, historians must explain the predominant ideologies within the context of the

societies in which they exist. Foner does little to explain the evolution of the Free Labor

ideology within the context of the Missouri Compromise, Kansas Nebraska Act, Dred

Scott, or John Brown’s raid. Ideologies can explain why societies believe what they

believe; however, only ideologies examined within the context of events provide the

historian with an accurate and insightful understanding of the past.

William R Cox, 475725

American Public University