Abstract
African American periodicals in the antebellum era advocated a fartherreaching agenda than just the abolition of slavery. Taking up a mantle of agrarian equality that runs through the English Commonwealthmen, Jefferson, Paine, and the Free-Soil movement of the 1840s, Black abolitionists—in contrast to the Garrisonians—targeted land monopolies as the economic foundation of the chattel system, whose elimination would be a necessary condition for the freedom of all Americans. While early platforms of the Republican Party also fused antislavery with the Free-Soil agenda, Republican leaders yielded to large-scale agrarian and industrial concerns after the War, a pivot which thinkers like W.E.B. DuBois would later implicate as the death-knell for racial equality. Our research indicates that for at least a decade before the Civil War, Black writers promoted land reform as an essential component of emancipation, embracing a neo-republican understanding of liberty that predicated civil rights on economic independence.
Introduction
Nineteenth-century abolitionism has long been portrayed as the summit of the liberal tradition, the culmination in the fight for liberty in its modern, possessive-individualist, form (Davis, 1966; Hartz, 1955). Within present-day discussions of race and American history, this narrative reinforces the depiction of chattel slavery as a kind of anomalous affront to the natural rights credo which was decisively rectified by the 13th Amendment—as opposed to, say, one of countless manifestations of racial domination throughout the western hemisphere. 1 This understanding is bolstered in part by the rhetoric of William Lloyd Garrison and his followers, who, on the pages of The Liberator from the 1830s through the 1860s, propounded a Thoreauvian skepticism of government and rebuffed any common cause with laborites, Fourierists, Free-Soilers, and other movements with communitarian leanings (The Liberator, 1832, 1837, 1847). The “peculiar institution” of slavery was their summum mallum. Tellingly, on December 29, 1865, 2 weeks after the 13th Amendment was ratified, Garrison published a victory-lap issue of The Liberator and shut the paper down (The Liberator, 1865).
The neoliberal account of abolitionism gets considerably murkier, however, when one takes a closer look at African American journals from this era. In comparison to the Garrisonians, Black abolitionists adopted a more complex understanding of slavery and its roots, as well as a more holistic concept of freedom. In promoting antislavery, Black thinkers, increasingly in the late 1840s and 1850s, focused not only on abolishing the chattel system, but also on expanding civil rights and securing economic independence. While they resisted any equivalence laborites might draw between wage earning and slavery, many Black thinkers nevertheless entertained the vexing possibility that the formal abolition of bondage might not actually bring freedom from domination, and that African Americans could well find themselves stranded in a holding pattern—as Douglass (1869) would later put it, “no longer slaves, but. . .not yet quite free”.
Their personal experiences with the structural realities and blatant racism of the Northern labor markets had persuaded many Black abolitionists that the United States would need to address far more than Southern slave codes if Black men and women were going to enjoy liberty in its fullest dimensions. Among other initiatives, the country would have to create and sustain the conditions for widespread land and business ownership among Blacks as well as Whites—to fight not only the chattel system, in other words, but also the growing consolidation of productive property nationwide. By the mid-1850s, most Black political thinkers were insisting that a true emancipation would put the formerly enslaved in full control of their economic production, dependent on nothing other than market demand for the fruits of their labor, not their labor itself.
This essay focuses on the centerpiece of this broad agenda, namely the growing commitment of Black abolitionists in the 1850s to the land reform ideas of the Free-Soil movement. Examining the leading Black journals of this period—The Colored American, The North Star (later Frederick Douglass’s Paper and then Douglass Monthly), and The Christian Recorder—we will argue that Black abolitionists came to see what the Free-Soilers called “land monopolies” in the South as the economic foundation of the chattel system and as a fundamental obstacle to freedom in its own right, whose eradication would be necessary for the United States to function as a body of free citizens. After tracing the premises of this thinking to the agrarian theories of classical and modern republicanism, as well as to the discourse on land reform in antebellum America, we will document the rising currency of this position within the Black press of the 1850s, highlighting the specific reform proposals debated on the pages of these journals, along with the rationales put forward by Black thinkers for distributing land more equitably. We will also compare the policy aspirations of Black abolitionists in the 1850s to those of the Republican Party, whose dominance in American politics in the decade following the Civil War owed in large part to the support from emancipated Black voters. What we will suggest in our postscript is that the disconnect between what Black abolitionists had proposed and what the GOP actually accomplished at the height of its influence puts later analyses of Reconstruction by thinkers like W.E.B. DuBois in a fresh light. Far from retrospective second-guessing, these postmortems on the abolitionist project expose the failure of White leaders to embrace a coherent strategy from Black thinkers to establish the freedoms of all Americans on a stronger footing.
Agrarian Justice and American Political Thought
Before examining how these ideas took shape in Black periodicals in the mid-19th century, we offer three prefatory remarks about their provenance: First, we note that the logic of agrarian equality goes back many centuries, and is closely linked to ancient theories of civil liberty, duty, and virtue; second, that modern republican thinkers in the 17th century revived the idea that free republics must maintain a high degree of landed equality; and third, that not only did founding-era thinkers in America embrace this premise, but a vibrant literature on agrarian justice sprung to life almost as quickly as the landscape came to be monopolized by speculators and plantation owners at the turn of the 19th century. When Black abolitionists adopted the mantle of land reform, in other words, they were amplifying a theory of republican liberty that was already well established.
Our first observation is that this theory is grounded foremost in the prerogatives of the free state, rather than, say, a proto-Rawlsian notion of distributive justice. The right of public decision-making, goes the ancient logic, properly belongs to the stakeholders of society, those whose private interest aligns most closely with that of the commonwealth, and who are therefore the most willing to defend it with their lives and treasure. 2 Accordingly, the more stakeholders a free society has, the stronger is its body politic and the greater its share of republican liberty and virtue. Any self-governing regime, therefore, has an inherent interest in promoting the widespread ownership of property, and of resisting the consolidation of land into the hands of a few. 3 In their own ways, the ancient republics of Israel, Sparta, and Rome all adopted property laws—some of them aggressively egalitarian—with a view toward maintaining the body politic. Their respective declines into various states of tyranny and imperialism, many have argued, trace directly to their slackening commitment to this principle. 4
In the modern era, this agrarian theory emerged in various critiques of European monarchies. Neo-republican thinkers, beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, correlated the imbalance of landed property, monarchical abuse, and the absence of public virtue among the citizenry. During the civil war of the 1640s and 1650s, for instance, the English Commonwealthmen—thinkers like James Harrington, Marchamont Nedham, and Henry Neville—called for the recovery of liberty not only through the permanent abolition of monarchy but also through the redistribution of land, an agenda which the Parliament pursued by confiscating royalist estates and allowing commoners to enclose public property, initiatives which were abruptly terminated with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 (Harrington, 1771, p. 32; Thirsk, 1990, pp. 138–148). Indeed, it was partially against this egalitarian fervor in England that the modern liberal tradition emerged with its concept of negative liberty, deemphasizing proprietorship in the commonwealth in favor of market-oriented freedoms, including the freedom to accumulate property (Locke, 1980, pp. 17–18).
There are both republican and liberal elements within the founding ideologies in America, but it is clear that most thinkers of this era were strongly committed to the ideal of a freeholders’ republic. For many, the young republic’s best hope lay in the fact that the vast majority of its citizens owned property, and that a seemingly endless stock of land could guarantee economic independence for most Americans for centuries to come. Even lukewarm republicans like John Adams and Noah Webster held this view. “The balance of power in society,” wrote Adams, “accompanies the balance of property in land.” Only by making “the acquisition of land easy to every member of society” could such power be secured “on the side of equal liberty and public virtue.” Wrote Webster in 1787, “a general and tolerably equal distribution of landed property is the whole basis of national freedom, and the very soul of a republic” (Wilentz, 2016, p. 33). Thomas Jefferson even tried in 1776 to secure an automatic land grant of 50 acres for every Virginian, and to keep the state’s Land Office decentralized so that county clerks could more easily survey tracts and distribute titles to small farmers (Sturges, 2011, p. 44). That same year, the framers of Pennsylvania’s first constitution empowered its legislature to create a system of land banks around the state, and even entertained a clause that would have allowed the legislature to “lessen property when it became excessive.” It did not take long, however, for monied interests throughout the states to prevail over this agrarian mindset. In Virginia, the lure of quick sales to large speculators proved too tempting for the legislature, which was eager to pay off huge public debts; in Pennsylvania, powerful financiers like Robert Morris persuaded the legislature in the 1780s to shutter the land banks system, forcing small farmers to deal directly with lenders (like Morris) in Philadelphia (Bouton, 2007, pp. 73–75). As Sturges notes, the agrarian project of early American republicans “appears as a brief moment of resistance amid a long history of economic transition from medieval feudalism to industrial capitalism” (Sturges, 2011, p. 47). Large-scale speculation became the norm on the western frontier, largely at the encouragement of the federal and state governments.
If land speculators managed to shift the debate on agrarian justice in the early republic, however, they did not end it. Paine (1797), the leading propagandist for both the American and French Revolutions, spent his final years decrying land monopolies in the United States, arguing for a steep inheritance tax and a guaranteed endowment of property to every citizen. By the 1820s, Paine’s ideas had taken root in the burgeoning working-man’s movement, led for a time by Skidmore (1829), whose Rights of Man to Property! advocated the near abolition of landed inheritance. Under the direction of George Henry Evans in the 1830s and 1840s, the movement’s rhetoric—most prominently in the New York journal The Workingman’s Advocate drew links between surplus labor, urban poverty, and the consolidation of land (Fure-Slocum, 1995, p. 122). Toning down the Spartan idealism of Paine and Skidmore, the land reformers of the 1840s coalesced around the more manageable agenda of “land limitation”—reserving the enormous new stock of western lands to “actual settlers” rather than speculators, “so that settlers might locate themselves near a market, or form markets among themselves. . .and become independent cultivators of the soil, capable of adding to the national wealth” (The Working Man’s Advocate, 1844). By 1848, the movement formed the Free-Soil Party, and managed to attract a prominent abolitionist, Gerrit Smith, who had recently steered Frederick Douglass away from the Garrisonians, to stand as the presidential nominee.
Garrisonian antipathy toward the land reform movement underscores the multilayered nature of the challenges facing African Americans in the 19th century, even those not living in formal bondage. If the White working class found itself losing ground in the productive economy by dint of ever-growing monopolies, Black Americans faced that same reality on top of manifold exclusions that were more overt. Every state and territory in America permitted unfettered discrimination on the basis of race in the markets for land and mortgages; Black homesteading throughout most of the South was a virtual impossibility; and fast-growing free states like Indiana, Michigan, Iowa, and Wisconsin banned African American settlement entirely (Hine et al., 2014, p. 168). Among land reformers, even Gerrit Smith made little effort to address these exclusions, mostly holding to the simplistic mantra that “to abolish land monopoly is to abolish slavery” (Council Grove Republican, 1848). For their part, Garrisonians adopted a righteous indignation toward any equivalence drawn between the injustices of monopoly and the horrors of the plantation. The Liberator regularly lampooned the Free-Soilers as “class of professed reformers, magnifying mole-hills into mountains, and reducing mountains to the size of mole-hills, strained at gnats and swallowing camels” (The Liberator, 1847). But while many Black thinkers also winced at the comparison of White poverty with chattel slavery, we should remember that the umbrage among White abolitionists on this count served mostly as cover for their ambivalence over how—and even whether—to integrate African Americans into the American body politic once emancipation was achieved.
The Black Press and Land Reform
It is only when we examine the Black press of the antebellum era that such a vision comes into view, fusing the negative liberties of the abolitionists with the positive liberties of the land reformers. Indeed, the most significant development within the wider abolitionist movement in the 1840s was the rise of Black periodicals, which offered platforms on which African Americans could express their own views independently of White editors, strategize for the movement, advertise jobs and other opportunities, feature Black poetry and prose, communicate in code for the Underground Railroad, and debate policies concerning migration, civil rights, and land reform. Black journalism itself traces back to the 1820s, and, unsurprisingly, had a reformist bent from the start. Freedom’s Journal, founded in 1827 in New York City by the Presbyterian minister Samuel Cornish and the Jamaican abolitionist John Russworm, is the earliest known periodical owned and edited by Americans of color. The Journal added a forceful voice to the abolitionist cause from its inception, but Cornish and Russworm clashed constantly over the issue of African colonization. When Russworm migrated to Liberia in 1829, Cornish devoted the paper to opposing the movement, rebranding it The Rights of All, in which form it ran until shutting down in 1830. Another prominent Black periodical, The Colored American, ran in New York City from 1837 until 1842, and was edited by the prominent physician James McCune Smith. Smith devoted The Colored American to promoting not only abolitionism but also civil rights in Northern states and Western territories, confronting the escalating attacks on Black suffrage and the racial assumptions behind them.
The 1840s saw the birth of several short-lived Black newspapers, including Martin Delaney’s Mystery, which he ran out of Pittsburgh between 1843 and 1847, The Ram’s Horn, edited by Thomas Van Rensselaer in Cortland, New York for 3 years starting in 1846, and The Impartial Citizen, which the labor activist Samuel Ringgold Ward started in 1849. But it was the literary talents—and financial connections—of Frederick Douglass that gave African Americans a periodical with broad appeal and staying power. Indeed, Douglass’s break with Garrison in 1847 was occasioned in part by his decision to strike out on his own with a paper that would compete for the readership of The Liberator. Working with Martin Delaney, Douglass launched The North Star out of Rochester, New York. Parting ways with Delaney over the issue of migration in 1851, Douglass took full control and renamed it Frederick Douglass’s Paper, turning it into one of the most successful journalistic outfits of the 1850s. The Christian Recorder, founded in 1852 in Pittsburgh, was the official newsletter of the African-Methodist-Episcopalian Church, and is the only Black periodical from the antebellum era still in print today. A popular weekly, The Anglo-African, was produced out of New York City from 1859 until 1865, but it focused more on the poetry, prose, and humor of Black writers than on policy.
The Rising Currency of Land Reform
As early as 1829 articles began to appear in the Black press urging African Americans to purchase land wherever they could, and urging White citizens to help them. Indeed, Samuel Cornish made a point of pushing a Black landownership in America to counter the appeal of African colonization. “Let the monied men among us,” he urged, “advance 500 [dollars] each, one half in the purchase of land and the other in furnishing the instruments of husbandry—let them choose their farmers and settle them on lands.” “I have no doubt,” he concluded, “if such settlements could be formed in different states, we should soon see agricultural pursuits engrossing the attention of the body of our colored people, and that a few years would witness and improved an happy state of society among them” (The Rights of All, 1829a). A few weeks later, Cornish followed up with this prediction: “Could a large tract of our country be settled by intelligent and industrious colored persons with certain municipal privileges among themselves, there can be no doubt in the minds of men who justly estimate the influence of rational liberty that the result would prove that, in proportion as we restore to the people of color their long lost freedom with liberality, we shall secure to the nation a powerful auxiliary of strength and defense” (The Rights of All, 1829b). Cornish’s vision, as ambitious as it might have been, illustrates the expansiveness of liberty as a concept within the Black press of the antebellum era, and its affinity with ancient agrarian thinking. Cornish explicitly ties together freedom, land, virtue, and civic obligation, seeking a swath of property for African Americans as a correction of injustice and as a chance to strengthen the republic itself by enlarging its stakeholders.
Similar aspirations were taken up in the 1830s by The Colored American, whose case for Black landownership came in the form of direct advice to African American settlers on the western frontier. The paper stressed the importance of landholding for the economic independence for individuals and for the commercial and civic development of the nation at large, urging Black settlers to be discerning in their purchases, examining “not merely individual lots or tracts of land,” but surveying “the whole city, so as to ascertain. . .what important improvements are in progress, or are contemplated, calculated to enhance the value of ground in their vicinity.” Notably, The Colored American discouraged speculation as self-destructive for individuals and communities alike: “Speculation does not plant a blade of grass, and when a commodity has passed through 500 hands, though it may have risen in nominal price, it has not increased in quantity or in value” (The Colored American, 1837).
These agrarian impulses notwithstanding, until the late 1840s African American writers were as reluctant as White abolitionists to make common cause with the land reform movement. A January 1849 article in The North Star by Martin Delaney captures this hesitancy. In it Delaney acknowledges the spectacular ascendance of the Free-Soil philosophy, noting that “true friends of freedom everywhere favor this movement, in preference to all other political movements yet at issue.” Delaney’s concern is that the commitment of Free-Soilers to Black land ownership was tentative at best. “The most prominent feature of the American policy,” he warns, “is to preserve inviolate the liberty of WHITES in this country, and to attempt to deny or disguise this is both unjust and dishonest.” What Delaney fears most is that the movement will not hesitate to align itself with proslavery Democrats if it becomes advantageous to do so. “Securely concealed behind this veil of deception, and defended by the ramparts of such vast political machinery, the accustomed cry of ‘Free Soil’ will be thundered through the nation, every ear listfully catching the sound, and while the colored people are contentedly waiting for results favorable to their redemption, the rights of the whites will be established the claims of the slave power conceded, and slavery extended into every new State and Territory south of 36° 30′” (The North Star, 1849). The charge is striking, considering the fact that Gerrit Smith, the Free-Soil nominee for president the previous November, was a major benefactor of The North Star, having provided most of the seed money for its launch in 1847, and sustaining it through its first rocky year of publication.
A significant change, however, was already sweeping the pages of The North Star on the matter of land reform in the late 1840s (The North Star, 1848a). Even before Delany’s polemic, the paper’s columns, under Douglass’s influence, were beginning to embrace the Free-Soil ethos, reprinting lengthy speeches by land reform advocates like Smith and George Julian, a Congressman from Indiana and the main author of the Homestead Act. More importantly, The North Star and other papers took up the cause of land reform as a plank of abolitionism itself, a necessary condition for the permanent liberation of Black Americans. This is evident both in the specific reforms proposed and in the rationales put forward for these reforms. Black abolitionists supported several policy goals on the matter of land in the late 1840s. First, in concert with Free-Soilers, they promoted the introduction of a federal statute on land limitation in the western territories, confining tracts to those who settle the land in person, and limiting even those plots to the size of a typical household farm—between 300 acres. “It is a great curse to the Western Reserver,” wrote The North Star as early as 1848, “that thousands upon thousands of acres of the best land are held by non-resident nabobs, who got them for almost nothing, and now ask two prices for them. . . Who doubts the propriety—nay the necessity—of Land Limitation?” (The North Star, 1848b). Second, pushing the Free-Soil philosophy to its outer edges, the Black press in the 1850s promoted a policy of outright grants of land to settlers (Frederick Douglass’s Paper, 1851a, 1852b). Third, Black abolitionists insisted—and pressured the Free-Soil Party to do so as well—on securing land grants to Americans of all races, recognizing that the earth “is equally the property of the meek and strong, the learned and the unlearned, the black, the red, and the white man” (Frederick Douglass’s Paper, 1853b). And finally, with an eye to other historical forms of slavery beyond the chattel system, Black abolitionists pushed for federal oversight of banking and for safeguards against predatory lending—for “the enactment of laws in the territories and states by which those lands, thus distributed, shall be secured to them against public and private creditors” (Frederick Douglass’s Paper, 1852b).
Neo-Republican Rationales
One reason Black abolitionists came to embrace land reform is that Free-Soilers like Gerrit Smith had persuaded them that land monopoly was the leading economic factor behind the survival of the chattel system. “Next to slavery and the rum trade, if not equally with them,” wrote Frederick Douglass’s Paper in 1852, “does land monopoly impoverish, oppress, and degrade mankind, and curse the country. We are not sure, indeed, it is not the monarch evil of the world. Of a certainty, slavery is dependent on it for its existence, and must die with it” (Frederick Douglass’s Paper, 1852b). But Black political thinkers in the 1850s also developed the land reform ethos into a farther-reaching case for civil equality, a vision for reestablishing an integrated, and more economically independent, body politic in America. This vision, we argue, merged a quasi-Lockean belief in the natural right to land ownership with the classical republican emphasis on a landed citizenry.
First, as with the right against bondage, Black abolitionists contended that landed property is a natural entitlement that governments must protect against monopolies as much as against trespassers and thieves. Frederick Douglass’s Paper declared in 1851, “the right of every man to his needed share of the soil is as inborn, inalienable, and absolute as his right to life itself; and the world has suffered more wrong and wretchedness from the violations of this right than it has even from slavery” (Frederick Douglass’s Paper, 1851b). Again in March of 1852, the paper affirmed that “every man is entitled to a home as truly as he is to his life or liberty. Indeed, life and liberty are impossible without a home. And as it is the gift of God, it is inalienable property of every human being” (Frederick Douglass’s Paper, 1852a). In the very next issue, the paper doubled down once more, arguing that “the right which lays at the foundation of all others is the right to the soil” (Frederick Douglass’s Paper, 1852b). 5
Black abolitionists did not simply believe that landowning was a natural right; they also subscribed to the ancient correlation between land ownership and civil liberty—that a free person must be a freeholder who is dependent on no one else for their livelihood. But whereas Roman theorists like Polybius and Cicero might have used this theory to fence out the landless proletariat and the enslaved from the rights of citizenship, Black abolitionists used it to make a deeper point about emancipation: American slaves would not be free until they had gained a genuine foothold on the land. “The farmer,” wrote The Colored American, “is the most independent man in the community” (The Colored American, 1839). To permit speculation and monopoly, on this logic, is to strike that the heart of American freedom. Rep. George Julian, making an early pitch to the House of Representatives for a western homestead bill in 1851 (a speech which was reprinted favorably in the Black press), argued that “it was never designed that man should be wholly dependent upon his fellow for the bread and breath of life. It was never designed that he should be deprived of a homestead for himself and his family as a defense against the cold-blooded rapacity of avarice” (The National Era, 1851). In this vein, Black land reformers positioned themselves as the only true defenders of American capitalism, rightly understood. The emerging conflict between labor and capital, they argued, could be neutralized if every citizen had reasonable access to productive property. “God made every man a capitalist and a laborer also,” Frederick Douglass’s Paper explained in 1853. Only when “capital becomes monopoly” does labor become “servile dependence.” “How obvious, then, that governments should set limits to land monopoly, that all may have homes, and board, and clothing; and thus restore the natural harmony between labor and capital” (Frederick Douglass’s Paper, 1853a).
It is important to remember that Black abolitionists, in contrast to the Garrisonians, sought for African Americans a full array of freedoms that included not just a release from the plantation but membership in the body politic, with the rights to vote, serve on juries, give testimony under oath, and serve in the military. 6 As we have noted, land ownership within classical agrarian theory was a civil liberty connected to these other rights. Nineteenth-century abolitionists who embraced land reform did so with the same goal of cultivating a healthy republic with the broadest possible base of freeholding citizens. Thus, the Black press of the 1850s promoted the republican trope of farming as the birthplace of civic virtue, the “nursing father of the State.”: “No other occupation. . .is so well calculated to inspire trust in [one’s] Creator and charity toward his creatures” (The National Era, 1851).
As land ownership creates more virtuous citizens, it simultaneously deepens their commitment to the welfare of the republic, and their willingness to risk life and treasure in its defense—a loyalty that compels, in the ancient agrarian logic, a reciprocal obligation on the part of the state to protect the citizens’ access to land. In this vein, the Black abolitionist press is replete with references to the Roman Republic—focusing not on Spartacus or the slave uprisings of the first century, but rather on Tiberius Gracchus, the Plebeian Tribune of the second century who was martyred in the fight for land reform. For 19th-century Free-Soilers, Tiberius’s mission was proverbial—to limit the claims of the patrician class over the ager publicus, and to grant the plebians (i.e., the soldiers who had secured this land to begin with) a guaranteed foothold within it. A striking passage from Frederick Douglass’s Paper in 1852 captures the affinity of the abolitionists with this cause: [The injustice of land monopoly] was well described by Tiberius Gracchus, a Roman Tribune, two thousand years ago. “The wild beasts have their caves to retire to, but the brave men who spill their blood in our cause have nothing left but air and light; without any settled habitation they wander from place to place with their wives and children; and their generals do but mock them, when, at the head of their armies, they exhort them to fight for their sepulchers and domestic gods” (Frederick Douglass’s Paper, 1852b).
Thus, a full decade before Frederick Douglass and others lobbied President Lincoln to create Black regiments for the Union Army, African American abolitionists were identifying their cause with that of the citizen-soldiers of ancient Rome. The long-term vision is unmistakable. While Garrisonians sought to end the chattel system, Black abolitionists wanted to remake the entire body politic in America, not only racially integrating its ranks, but also securing the economic liberty of its citizens.
Land Reform and Postbellum Politics
For a brief moment in the history of American politics, the stars aligned to elevate a party that was committed to thwarting both plantation slavery and land monopoly. The Republicans, who in 1854 merged the patchwork of rearguard movements that had flamed out in the previous two election cycles—the Free-Soilers, the Liberty Party, and the fractious Whigs—united behind the campaign promise of “free labor and free soil.” To be sure, until the Civil War was well under way, the GOP made no public commitment whatsoever to abolishing slavery in the south. 7 But for Black abolitionists, the Republican Party presented their best chance yet to oppose the westward expansion of slavery and the reviled Fugitive Slave Law. What should now be clear from our analysis is that the Republican agenda on land grants and land limitation was almost as attractive to Black political thinkers of that decade as its stance on slavery. The governing philosophy of the early GOP was to support “the middle-class goal of economic independence,” on the supposition that “free labor” meant not merely the absence of chattel bondage, but “self-employment,” or the ownership of capital—“a business, a farm, or a shop” (Foner, 1970, p. 17). 8 As such, Republicans, at least in their earliest configuration, saw land reform in the west as the single most important stratagem in the long battle against both urban poverty in the north and the southern plantation system.
The centerpiece of this agenda was the Homestead Act, which languished in Congress for more than a decade until a Republican Senate, House, and President ushered it in to law in May 1862. The bill, which went into effect on January 1, 1863—coincidentally on the same day as the Emancipation Proclamation—achieved most of the long-running goals of the Free-Soil movement, providing tracts of land in the western territories for $1.25 per acre, confining this allocation for “the purpose of actual settlement and cultivation,” and limiting the purchase to 160acres per household (Congressional Record, 1862). While the Act made no specific exclusions on the basis of race, Congress saw fit to amend it in 1866 with explicit language allowing and encouraging Black settlement. However, the failure of the Homestead Act to provide land grants free of charge proved to be a significant impediment to Black settlement after the War, particularly in light of the obstacles that arose against former slaves’ accumulating savings and capital. Lenders in the South banded together to oppose mortgages for African Americans; Black business owners and farmers faced targeted violence; and Black laborers quickly found themselves bound to contracts with their former owners in which they would be paid in scrip that carried no value beyond their plantations.
As much as these actions obstructed western settlement among African Americans, they were even more decisive against the accumulation of land among Blacks in the South, where most freedmen preferred to settle, given their familiarity with the terrain. Even before the Civil War ended, the Union Army had undertaken to settle tens of thousands of freed slaves on southern property, particularly after Gen. William T. Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15 in January of 1865, which set aside nearly 400,000 acres along the South Carolina coast, as well as thousands of army mules for African American-owned farms—“forty acres and a mule” for the formerly enslaved. Sherman’s order came only days after he sat down with African American clergy in Savannah, Georgia, to seek their advice on how to deal the emancipated population. “The way we can best take care of ourselves,” they explained to Sherman, “is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor” (The Christian Recorder, 1865). The exchange illustrates the widespread view—not just among Black intellectuals and journalists but also among the recently emancipated—that land ownership would be central to the security of their freedom. After the War, the United States took up, and then quickly aborted, a plan to settle freedpeople on an additional 850,000 acres of abandoned land throughout the defeated Confederacy—as the historian Eric Foner puts it, “hardly enough to accommodate all the former slaves, but sufficient to make a start toward creating a Black yeomanry” (Foner, 1988, p. 158). The Confiscation Acts of 1861 and 1862 had granted the Union Army the authority to seize property, and creation of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands fashioned a legal framework for dealing with this property as public land, with priority given to former slaves. In May 1865, the Bureau’s superintendent, Gen. Oliver O. Howard, issued a circular modeled on Sherman’s Field Order, empowering his local chiefs to carve up plantations that owners had deserted during the war, and to allocate small tracts of it to the emancipated community—in many cases, those who had actually been keeping the properties going for several years.
The headwinds that formed against even these modest initiatives only underscore, in our view, how universal was the belief that the emancipation of African Americans would happen only with their acquisition of land. The Bureau’s plan itself was understaffed and virtually unfunded from the start. President Johnson’s declaration of amnesty in the summer of 1865 effectively reversed both Sherman’s and Howard’s efforts to reallocate abandoned lands, and in fact evicted thousands of new Black landowners from property they had already begun to cultivate, putting the land back into the hands of Confederate rebels (in most cases, the freedmen’s former owners). The exasperation on the part of those who had briefly tasted property ownership underscores how crucial many Black Americans saw land ownership to the emancipation project. Freedpeople on Edisto Island, South Carolina, even formed a committee to issue a formal appeal to Gen. Howard. “We Have property In Horses, cattle, carriages, & articles of furniture, but we are landless and Homeless,” they explained after 369 new homesteads reverted to 46 plantations in October 1865. This state of affairs effectively narrowed their choices down to hiring themselves out to the planters or living as vagabonds. “You will see,” they concluded, “this Is not the condition of really freemen” (Hine et al., 2014, pp. 292–293; Hahn et al., 2008, Doc. 108A). By the end of 1865, some 40,000 African Americans had been removed from land they had acquired either during the war or in the months following Appomattox. The Southern Homestead Act of 1866, which designated certain parcels for the formerly enslaved, did little to help, as most of these acres were swamplands that White owners had abandoned for reasons of agricultural unsuitability. Federal policy, in other words, forsook its commitment to Black land ownership almost as quickly as it had adopted it. As Foner puts it, “by 1866 the Bureau’s definition of “free labor” had been significantly transformed: Instead of carving out a two-pronged labor policy, in which some Blacks farmed independently while others worked as hired laborers for White employers, the Bureau found itself with no alternative but to encourage virtually all freedmen to sign annual contracts to work on the plantations. Its hopes for long-term Black advancement and Southern economic prosperity now came to focus exclusively upon the labor contract itself (Foner, 1988, p. 164).
In spite of broad hopes, even within the Black press, that the Bureau could effectively ensure the fairness and honesty of these contracts, it became clear that the formerly enslaved lacked the leverage to enter into anything other than the most exploitative labor arrangements, and by the end of 1866 most found themselves working for their old masters under conditions not that different from slavery itself. “You are now free,” Freedman’s Bureau officials began to explain to Black workers, “but the only difference between slavery and freedom is that neither you or your children can be bought or sold,” a dictum that prefaced more concrete warnings, like “You cannot not be paid in money,” and “Do not ask for Saturday,” and “Whatever the order is, obey it without a word” (Hahn et al., 2008, pp. 218–219). Even the prospect of purchasing land was foreclosed by the numerous covenants the planter class formed in late 1865 to refuse land sales to African Americans. As one Northern observer noted at the time, “so long as they retain possession of their lands, [plantation owners] can oblige the negroes to work on such terms as they please.” The intention of planters was not merely to exploit their former slaves for labor, but to actually reclaim in perpetuity their position of economic domination. One Mississippi planter wrote in his diary in 1865, “Our negroes have a fall, a tall fall, ahead of them, in my opinion. They will learn that freedom and independence are different things” (Foner, 1988, pp. 134–135). It did not take the Black press of the Reconstruction Era long to conclude that the restoration of the old land monopolies was to blame for the obstacles they faced on the path to freedom. “Land monopolies tend only to make the rich richer and the poor poorer,” The Christian Recorder, the newsletter for the African-Methodist-Episcopal Church wrote in 1867, urging the State of South Carolina to “offer ever practical inducement for the division and sale of unoccupied lands among the poorer classes” (The Christian Recorder, 1867). Without land, Frederick Douglass warned repeatedly, emancipation would never be complete: “The man who has it in his power to say to a man, ‘you must work the land for me for such wages as I choose to give,’ has a power of slavery over him as real, if not as complete, as he who compels toils under the lash” (Douglass, 1883).
Epilog
In 1935, decades after some 4 million freedmen and women had fled the poverty and violence of the South, mostly to northern factory towns, W.E.B. DuBois offered a postmortem on the abolitionist project that highlighted the short-sightedness of modern liberalism in general. “Abolitionists failed to see that after the momentary exaltation of war, the nation did not want Negroes to have civil rights and that national industry could get its way easier by alliance with Southern landholders than by sustaining Southern workers.” The specific failure on this front was to deal with the problem of monopoly, which came to pervade the entire economy after the war. In fact, DuBois contends, the Republican Party ultimately did fatal damage to American liberty in the late 19th century, yielding not only to the old plantation class in the South but also to the designs of railroad barons in the West and to the consolidation of manufacturing in the North. “The new plan was to concentrate into a trusteeship of capital a new and far-reaching power which would dominate the government of the United States. . .a new feudalism based on monopoly” (DuBois, 1935, p. 583). 9 The upshot was as much political as economic, rendering the nation’s republican institutions “almost fantastic in their travesty of real popular control.” African Americans stood little chance of advancement if freedom was slipping away from White laborers as well.
DuBois, of course, was writing in the middle of the Great Depression, when the implications of this transition were being felt with particular acuteness by working-class Americans across racial lines. The New Deal framework for reform—expanded labor rights, a federal safety net, and bank insurance—largely accepted the finality of this transition, along with the closing of the frontier of public land. “Just as freedom to farm has ceased,” Franklin Roosevelt noted during the campaign of 1932, “so also the opportunity in business has narrowed.” The task at hand, Roosevelt determined, was not to reverse this trend, but rather to “adapt existing economic organizations to the service of the people” (Roosevelt, 1932). As radical as the New Deal might have seemed to many Americans, the federal government made virtually no attempt to restructure the American economy—to lift people out of wage labor, for instance, or to establish a broader base of economic independence. There was certainly no effort to address the persisting vulnerabilities experienced by people of color. African Americans, who had retreated to the margins of public life in the face of voter suppression, found themselves excluded from the two Depression-Era initiatives that most closely approximated the old Free-Soil ethos—residential mortgage assistance and small business loans – an exclusion which further exacerbated an already significant wealth disparity along racial lines, even within the wage-earning sector. A range of cyclical inequalities, from educational and health disparities to environmental injustices, can be traced to the myriad ways in which American financial institutions excluded people of color from home and business ownership at the very time government was promoting these opportunities for Whites (Banzhaf et al., 2019). In his “Case for Reparations,” Ta-Nehisi Coates focuses not on the economic legacies of slavery itself but rather on the lost access to appreciable property through redlining, racial covenants, and infrastructural neglect (Coates, 2014).
Our research suggests that well before the Civil War began, Black abolitionists grasped the stakes of property distribution to a much fuller extent than historians have generally acknowledged, anticipating by more than a century the retrospective analyses of thinkers like DuBois and Coates concerning the need to establish real property ownership among African Americans. The Black press of the antebellum era promoted a vision of integrated homesteading and land limitation, not simply on account of egalitarian ethics or even fairness, but as a matter of freedom itself, in its agrarian formulation. Even if White abolitionists did not, Black abolitionists viewed emancipation as nothing short of full membership in the American republic, a membership which would rely directly upon access to productive land. This should remind us that a sizable cohort within the movement to abolish slavery operated under a theory of liberty that had more dimensions than the freedom from interference articulated in the 13th Amendment, or the rights of due process laid out in the 14th, or even the formal right of participation that came in the 15th. Attuned to the dynamics of economic power, Black abolitionists insisted on elevating the workers of the soil to owners of the soil, and this on the longstanding theory that to be free is to be a stakeholder in the commonwealth of citizens.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank reference librarians at the Library of Congress, and Heather Thomas in particular, for facilitating access to African American periodicals of the nineteenth century. We are also grateful for the feedback from Barbara Kellerman, Robert Colby, Laura Roost, and from our co-presenters on the Theoretical Approaches to Democracy panel at the 2022 Midwest Political Science Association annual meeting in Chicago.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Jack Wartell’s contributions to the article were funded by a generous research grant from the Honors Program at Christopher Newport University.
