Free Soilers proposed breaking up land monopolies and dividing western lands into 50-to-100-acre homesteads that would grant white and black families independence.
(452) Some
Free Soilers were dedicated abolitionists, but many were not that radical.
It states that some Northerners "did not object to slavery on principle but claimed that slavery would undermine the free labor market." Indeed, as the 2015 version invites teachers to discuss, the Free Soil movement was against the expansion of slavery for economic--not moral--reasons, and
Free Soilers were often every bit as convinced of racial-superiority doctrines as their southern counterparts.
Southerners insisted, too, that abolitionists joined anti-slavery
Free Soilers to strengthen Free State police-power protections of free blacks and fugitive slaves under Personal Liberty Laws against enforcement of the federal fugitive slave law.
Hagedorn's brief treatments of state-level politics make it clear that Know Nothings,
Free Soilers, and Maine law advocates were agitating in full force during the election cycles that brought victories for advocates of free schools in the 1850s.
Higginson was an iconoclast on steroids, an Abolitionist, a promoter of women's rights, a defender of Catholics, a gun runner for the
free soilers in "bleeding Kansas'' in the 1850s, a protector of runaway slaves, the commanding colonel of the first regiment of former slaves to fight in the Civil War.
Whitman and his fellow
Free Soilers felt that whites should be free from blacks and slavery just as they should be free from the degradations of wage labor.
"Chase's interpretation of the Constitution," wrote Foner, "formed the legal basis for the political program which was created by the Liberty Party and inherited in large part by the
Free Soilers and Republicans." (88) "[B]eeause of Chase's efforts," this antislavery interpretation of the Constitution "eventually came to form the constitutional basis of the Republican Party program." (89)
Liberty Party leaders such as Gerrit Smith and William Goodell, many
Free Soilers in the late 1840s, and later Republicans refused to see him as anything more than a scheming politician.
The Barnburners contributed their leader, former President Martin Van Buren, as the Free Soil nominee--a great irony, since many credited (or blamed) Van Buren for the creation of the very party system the
Free Soilers sought to disrupt, especially the system's deliberate quashing of sectional controversy.
In Michigan, a coalition of dissatisfied abolitionists,
Free Soilers, Whigs, and "Free" Democrats were galvanized into forming a new party dedicated to opposing slavery.
It had its Barnburners and
Free Soilers. (6) It also had some of the nation's foremost black abolitionists, and in New York City it had one of the foremost black antislavery communities.