This is “The History of Political Parties”, a series looking in-depth at short-lived, obscure, or now-defunct political organisations from across the United States and the United Kingdom who made their mark on their respective political system.
Perhaps no political party in US history has fought as notably for a single issue as the Free Soil Party. A coalition of politicians opposed to the expansion of slavery, its creation has been described as an “important milestone on the road to the Civil War” whilst as a organisation, it has been credited with sowing the seeds for the establishment of the Republican Party.
Establishing The Free Soil Party
The Free Soil Party was a party uniting various strands of the anti-slavery movement from differing ideological perspectives.
This included anti-slavery elements from the two main parties. Northern “Barnburner” Democrats and “Conscious” Whigs collaborated with the already existing anti-slavery Liberty Party – who had run in presidential elections since 1840 – to form this new collective.
The party was created out of necessity in 1848 after both the Democratic and Whig Party candidates, Lewis Cass and Zachary Taylor, seemed apathetic to the anti-slavery cause. Whig Taylor was himself a slaveowner whilst Democrat Cass favoured the concept of popular sovereignty, allowing citizens to vote to decide if to allow slavery in that state.
The Free Soilers all supported the Wilmot Proviso, a failed proposal to ban the introduction of slavery into new territory won in the Mexican-American War.
1848 Convention
20,000 delegates from 19 states gathered in Buffalo, New York, in August 1848.
One of the convention’s prominent speakers, Ohio Representative Joshua Reed Giddings, remarked the conference was filled with “thousands of good and virtuous citizens, throwing aside party prejudices [and] declaring for freedom and humanity.” Future Free Soil Vice Presidential nominee George Washington Julian celebrated the “pervading tone of earnestness in the Convention and the growing spirit of political fraternity.”
Notable attendees include future presidential nominee Samuel J. Tilden, poet and journalist Walt Whitman, and abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass.
Although often labelled a single issue party, they had other policies too saw as a tariff to reduce national debt, federal government involvement in building infrastructure, and a homestead law to encourage farming on new western territory.
The platform was drafted by former Attorney General Benjamin Franklin Butler and future Supreme Court Justice Salmon P. Chase.
The party’s slogan was “free soil, free speech, free labor, free men.”
That said, it should be noted their motives were occasionally startling, bigoted, and racist. Historian Kenneth Stampp notes how the party had its fair share of Negrophobes who wanted to prevent black competition to white labourers and wanted to keep the ‘racial purity’ of the states. Indeed, the party bolted at the idea of black suffrage. As Stampp notes, they were “less anti-slavery than anti-black.”
Comprised of a big tent of political party members, the convention was given the tricky task of finding a universally-acceptable nominee.
Several Whigs supported Supreme Court Justice John McLean for the nomination whilst members of the anti-slavery Liberty Party coalesced around John P. Hale. However, the largest faction in the Free Soil Party were the anti-slavery New York “Barnburners”, who walked out of the Democratic convention.
The “Barnburners” emerged victorious, picking former President Martin Van Buren as their candidate. The convention chose Charles Francis Adams – grandson of John Adams and son of John Quincy Adams – as Buren’s running mate to pacify the Whig contingent.
One might say it was a Democrat, running with a Whig, standing on a Liberty plank.
The Van Buren Factor
Although a high-profile public figure, the former president was a surprising and contentious choice for the nomination.
Buren had been a Democratic bigwig for two decades. Elected Governor of New York in 1828 before becoming Secretary of State under Andrew Jackson, rising to the role of Vice President in 1832. Four years later, he became president as the handpicked successor of Jackson but was defeated for re-election in 1840.
He remained the party’s de facto leader by 1844 but his opposition to annexing Texas as a slave state led to southern opposition and made the two-thirds needed for nomination an impossibility. Van Buren would fall short of being nominated by the party he had helped found.
In 1848, he was yet again a prominent figure for the party’s nomination but walked out after the convention by splitting the New York votes between anti-slavery “Barnburners” and pro-slavery “Hunkers”. He was subsequently described by Democrats as the “Kinderhook Iscariot” for his defection.
Swept to the Free Soil nomination by his supporters, his back catalogue was not that of a typical anti-slave politician; he had previously opposed the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia and taken an anti-slave stance in the Supreme Court case United States v. Amistad (1841). One biographer described Van Buren as having a typical mid-19th century Democrat stance on slavery.
There has been much debate about whether Van Buren was really committed to the Free Soil movement or if he was fuelled by spite at the party that rebuffed him.
1848 Presidential Election
The Free Soil campaign can be summarised by one of the party’s pamphlets in that election. It described the two major party candidates as a “Northern man with Southern principles [and a] Southern man with Southern principles” who were both “utterly unworthy [of] the suffrage of a free people.”
They too had national support from anti-suffrage paper The National Era.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the seminal work of Free Soiler Harriet Beecher Stowe, was first published in The National Era. The party was also supported by a number of prominent female newspaper editors: Jane Grey Swisshelm of The Pittsburgh Saturday Visiter and Clarina I. H. Nichols of The Brattleboro Wyndham Country Democrat.
Their cause was tempered however by anti-slavery forces sticking with their party affiliations. For instance, noted young abolitionist Abraham Lincoln stayed true to the Whig Party and stumped for Zachary Taylor whilst Van Buren loyalist Thomas Hart Benton held firm for the Democrats.
A surface-level look at the Free Soilers’s may imply a disappointing showing for the new third party; they won no states and thus no electoral votes. However, this nationwide picture does not tell the whole story.
The party won over 10% of the vote, the strongest performance by a third party candidate in US history up to that point.
Their support base came from the north, where they captured 14.4% of the vote.
The Free Soil Party performed best in Vermont, where they won a 28.5% share of the vote.
However, they perhaps had the most impact in one of the two states where they finished second: New York. Also being runners up in Massachusetts, Van Buren’s near 120,000-strong vote tally in Van Buren’s home state of New York siphoned off votes from Democrat Lewis Cass, who would have won both the state and the election had Van Buren’s vote gone to him. In the words of William DeGregorio, Buren’s candidacy “fatally handicapped” Cass’s run for the presidency.
In all, MVB won 300,000 votes, a ten-fold improvement from the anti-slavery Liberty Party’s showing four years earlier.
Despite what it may appear on first glance, it was a huge step forward for the anti-slavery cause, and – with both free state Whigs and Democrats vying to stake their claim as pro-free soil – the issue was now, in the words of Conscience Whig William Seward “at length a respectable element in politics.”
1848: A Congressional Foothold
1848 also saw the Free Soil Party assert a Congressional foothold.
In the Senate, two party members won seats, with victories for Salmon P. Chase in Ohio and John P. Hale in New Hampshire.
In addition, they captured a double-digit number of seats in the House of Representatives, including two in Ohio, with more seats won in special elections the same Congress.
Notable Representatives elected include Barnburner Chairman Preston King, future party Vice Presidential nominee George Washington Julian, and Joshua Giddings, a popular Senator censured from the House in 1842 for breaking the gag rule on the mention of slavery but overwhelming re-elected in his home state.
Although only winning nine of the 117 House seats, no party won an overall majority, meaning Free Soilers held the balance of power in the chamber and could thus wield influence. As such, the election for a House Speaker dragged for three weeks with 63 ballots as parties failed to negotiate a new gavel-holder.
1848: The Height of Free Soil
Although this might seem like a promising start for the new organisation, if anything, it was the height of the movement. Indeed, from here on out, the party went into a gradual decline due to a number of factors.
The acclaimed Civil War and Reconstructionist historian Eric Foner notes how most of the party’s work after 1848 was done by the more autonomous state parties, diminishing its impact.
Another factor taking the wind out of the Free Soilers sails was the passage of the Compromise of 1850, a bipartisan effort led by Whig Henry Clay and Democrat Stephen A. Douglas and signed by President Millard Fillmore to attempt to settle the slavery issue.
Prominent Free Soilers such as Chase, Hale, and Democrat Charles Sumner led the revolt against the Compromise even if, in the eyes of the public, it managed to quell a contentious issue – if only temporarily.
This can be seen in the results of the 1850 Midterms. Here, the party was pushed into fifth place in the House of Representatives behind the newly-formed Union and Southern Rights parties.
They lost over half of their seats in the House, including losing all representation in one of their stronger states, New York. Their popular vote total plummeted from 237,000 to 82,000.
That said, the party got a boost when the next year when, working in conjunction with the Massachusetts state Democratic Party, Free Soiler Charles Sumner was elected to the Senate. Democrats were reticent to nominate Sumner but the balance of power-wielding Free Soilers nominated him. It meant drastic change from the previous holder of the seat, pro-Compromise and Fugitive Slave Act Senator Daniel Webster.
Meanwhile, in Ohio, the Whigs chose anti-slavery candidate Benjamin Wade to appease Free Soilers, meaning two new Senate seats were given to two vocal voices against the practice of slavery.
1852: Hale For Prez?
The party contested their second – and final – presidential election in 1852, nominating radical abolitionist John P. Hale.
The runner-up to the party’s 1848 nomination, he had been opposed to the Senate’s “Gag Rule” barring discussion of slavery, the annexation of Texas as a slave state, and the Fugitive Slave Act.
Despite such status, Hale reportedly did not want to run for president but was encouraged to do so by Chase, who warned not running Hale would inflict the “most serious injury” on the anti-slavery cause. George Washington Julian was chosen as his running mate.
Their convention, held in August in Pittsburgh, was more radical than four years previously, calling slavery “a sin against God and a crime against man.”
However, by this point, the party was becoming increasingly moribund as a national outfit.
As former VP nominee Charles Francis Adams remarked, the party’s “moral tone…never was more thoroughly broken.”
Further hindering their effort was the fact that, like in 1848, many anti-slavery “Conscience” Whigs, like William Seward and Horace Greeley, backed Whig Winfield Scott. Meanwhile, 1848 Free Soil candidate Martin Van Buren supported Democrat Franklin Pierce; in 1849, the New York state Free Soilers had folded back into the Democratic Party.
The party did best in Massachusetts, winning 22% of the vote.
On a national scale, Hale won less than 5% of the vote and only 6.6% of the vote in the free states. Hale also lost re-election to his Senate seat when Democrats gained the New Hampshire legislature in state elections.
Notable achievements include the election of a second Representative in Ohio, and the election of Gerrit Smith. Smith was an ally of John Brown and champion of progressive causes such as women’s suffrage and directly-elected Senators and the 1848 nomination of a Liberty Party ticket independent from the Free Soil Party.
Fusions, Coalitions, and Collapse
A stake was driven through the heart of the party once more with 1854’s Kansas-Nebraska Act. The Act created the namesake two US territories, whose slave status was one of popular sovereignty, leading to bloody and violent conflicts known as “Bleeding Kansas”.
It caused a seismic realignment in the US political system – and not just for the Free Soilers. In light of this and its dismal 1852 results, future Vice President Henry Wilson declared the Whig Party dead whilst Horace Greeley called for the formation of a new Northern party.
Leading Free Soilers such as Giddings, Chase, and Sumner condemned the Act and wrote the manifesto Appeal of the Independent Democrat.
From here on out, successes were limited and those that did occur were on fusion tickets and not under the Free Soil name.
This continued the long-standing coalition success Free Soilers had in Massachusetts after working alongside state Democrats. After the Democrats supported an anti-slavery plank at their 1849 convention, the two worked together at the state level and managed to elect George Boutwell as Governor, Nathaniel P. Banks as Speaker, and Henry Wilson as Senate President.
After the 1854 Midterms, when the House was deadlocked, Free Soilers – as a part of an Opposition bloc – helped anti-slavery Representative Nathaniel P. Banks become speaker of the House. Banks, a member of the “Know Nothing” Party, remains the only third party Speaker in US history.
In 1855, Henry Wilson won election to the Senate. Previously a gubernatorial candidate for the Free Soilers, Wilson ran on a “Know Nothing” ticket aligned with the Free Soil Party. He was also the Chairman of the 1852 convention and a crucial vote in ensuring George Washington Julian was the 1852 VP candidate rather than Chairman of the party’s National Committee Sam Lewis.
By 1856, the Free Soilers had integrated – alongside northerners, Conscience Whigs, and anti-Nebraska forces – into the anti-slavery Republican Party, which would be in power by 1860. After the Civil War, the party ended the practice of slavery under the 13th Amendment and would continue to be the dominant party until the end of the century – and has remained perhaps the most successful political organisation in US history.
The Free Soil Legacy
Above all, the Free Sil Party’s greatest historical impact will be raising the anti-slave cause even before it was a major partisan political issue.
Although their electoral successes were limited, the party were able to get several nationwide officials elected who would go on to have a great impact during the mid-20th century. Henry Wilson would become a Republican Vice President, Charles Sumner would become a martyr for the anti-slavery movement after his bludgeoning on the Senate floor, and Salmon P. Chase would go on to serve as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
Laying the groundwork for the formation of the Republican Party who would dismantle slavery in the United States, the Free Soil Party can be viewed as perhaps the most crucial third party in American history.
GRIFFIN KAYE.