Land Reform, Labor, and the Evolution of Antislavery Politics, 1790–1860

City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 2-2017 A Reformers' Union: Land Reform, Labor, and the Evolution of Antislavery Politics, 1790–1860 Sean G. Griffin The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1883 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] A REFORMER’S UNION: LAND REFORM, LABOR, AND THE EVOLUTION OF ANTISLAVERY POLITICS, 1790–1860 by SEAN GRIFFIN A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2017 © 2017 SEAN GRIFFIN All Rights Reserved ii A Reformers’ Union: Land Reform, Labor, and the Evolution of Antislavery Politics, 1790–1860 by Sean Griffin This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in History in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ___12/9/2016______ __James Oakes________________________ Date Chair of Examining Committee ___12/9/2016______ __Helena Rosenblatt_____________________ Date Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Joshua Brown David Waldstreicher Manisha Sinha THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT A Reformers’ Union: Land Reform, Labor, and the Evolution of Antislavery Politics, 1790–1860 by Sean Griffin Adviser: James Oakes “A Reformers’ Union: Land Reform, Labor, and the Evolution of Antislavery Politics, 1790– 1860” offers a critical revision of the existing literature on both the early labor and antislavery movements by examining the ideologies and organizational approaches that labor reformers and abolitionists used to challenge both the expansion of slavery and the spread of market relationships. Extending the timeframe of the antislavery and labor movements backwards to the 1790s, this dissertation situates the origins of the pre-Civil War labor movement in republican ideology and currents of transatlantic radical thought, and traces the rise of agrarian and communitarian labor reform against the backdrop of the growing economic and political salience of chattel slavery. While acknowledging and seeking to explain the real differences that divided labor reformers and abolitionists throughout the period, “A Reformers’ Union” argues that important strains within each movement shared common understandings about the limitations of private property and the reach of the market. These shared understandings, and the discursive debates that shaped them, eventually fostered important organizational and institutional connections between the two movements, even as developments surrounding the slavery’s expansion in the 1840s and 50s inextricably linked the cause of land reform to antislavery. Land and labor reformers made critical contributions to the ideological foundations and popular appeal of the Liberty, Free Soil, and Republican parties, thus highlighting both the limitations and the potential of the politics of “free soil” and “free labor.” iv Table of Contents Introduction ………………………………………………………………………….... 1 Ch. 1. The Agrarian Origins of Antebellum Labor Radicalism: Free Labor, Property, and Slavery in the Early Republic.......................................................................................... 15 Ch. 2. “The Soul of the Plan Contemplated”: New Harmony, Nashoba, and Owenite Reform in the 1820s ......................................................................................................................... 51 Ch. 3. “As Tho This Great City Were Once Again on Fire”: The Working Men’s Parties, the Locofocos, and the “Urban Agrarian” Origins of Antislavery Politics .......................... 85 Ch. 4. “Our Refuge is Upon the Soil”: The National Reform Association and the Antislavery Crucible of Land Reform ............................................................................................... 123 Ch. 5. “The Genius of Integral Emancipation”: Associationism and Antislavery ........ 160 Ch. 6. “That Every Man, Who Desires a Farm, Should Have One”: Gerrit Smith’s Antislavery Frontier ............................................................................................................................ 199 Ch. 7. Towards a “Union of Reformers”: National Reform, the Industrial Congress, and the Politics of “Free Labor, Free Soil” .................................................................................. 227 Ch. 8. From Free Soil to Homestead ............................................................................. 261 Ch. 9. Kansas-Nebraska, the Fight for Homestead, and the Rise of Republican Free Labor ............................................................................................................................... 303 Epilogue........................................................................................................................... 349 Bibliography.................................................................................................................... 357 v introduction Sometime in October, 1828, a group of Philadelphia drew up a petition to Congress. Published in the Mechanics’ Free Press, the artisan newspaper edited by Working Men’s Party leader William Heighton, the petition recommended “placing all the PUBLIC LANDS, without the delay of sales, within the reach of the people at large, by the right of a title to occupancy only.” Enumerating their reasons for such a suggestion, the petitioners announced their alarm at “the present state of affairs,” which they held “must lead to the wealth of a few, and thus place within their reach the means of controlling all the lands of our country.” They expressed their strong disapproval of “every species of monopoly and exclusive privileges,” particularly those which produced such “unnatural exclusions” from access to land. Since all men, the petitioners held, had “naturally, a birth-right in the soil”—and since, if this right was denied, “they may be deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—the petitioners respectfully recommended that the Public Lands “be reserved as a donation to the citizens of the United States in the character of perpetual leases, free of rent” and conditional upon actual settlement. The “true spirit of independence can not be enjoyed, by the great body of the People,” they argued, without the recognition of a natural right to the land. The passage of a law granting them “the FREE USE of so much of the Public Lands,” along with strong deterrents to land speculation, were “the only effectual prevention of future monopoly and the best safeguard of the American Republic.”1 1 “Memorial to Congress,” from the Mechanics’ Free Press, 25 October 1828; in John R. Commons and Helen L. Sumner, eds., A Documentary History of American Industrial Society V (Cleveland: The Arthur Clark Co., 1910), 43–45. 1 The 1828 petition was not the first time that a group of urban workingmen made an appeal for access to the soil, nor would it be the last. With surprising regularity between the mid- 1820s and the beginning of the Civil War, urban workingmen looked to the land for salvation—a fact that has gone unrecognized in most recent accounts of the early labor movement and related responses to capitalist development in the period.2 Although the formation of trades unions, the emergence of “Working Men’s” political parties and their eventual merger into the Jacksonian Democrats, and the incidence of strikes and other militant labor actions in the period were all critical to the development of the early labor movement, the importance of these developments has been somewhat artificially magnified by generations of labor historians who sought to explain the origins of twentieth-century unionism and the failure of socialism to appear in American politics. Perhaps more importantly, these developments appear sporadic and halting when compared to the consistency with which one reform in particular was articulated by proponents of labor between the 1820s and 1860: the demand for free homesteads or equivalent access to the land, framed as the recognition of a “right to the soil.”3 Despite what appears in retrospect to be a somewhat quixotic, even romantic, spectacle— that of wage workers in the industrializing cities of the East casting their gazes wistfully westward, even as the Jeffersonian dream of universal independent proprietorship was rapidly receding into the past—demands for the recognition of a “right to the soil” would be central to 2 Important recent exceptions include Mark A. Lause, Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005); Jamie L. Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-Class Experience in Britain and the United States, 1800–1862 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Alex Gourevitch, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Reeve Huston, Land and Freedom: Rural Society, Popular Protest, and Party Politics in Antebellum New York (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 3 The question of “Why is there no socialism in the United States” was first raised in the form that has

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