An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era by Adam Wesley Dean (review)

Just before the Civil War, most Americans were still living in rural areas, if not working as farm labor in some capacity. Yet many modern Americans imagine that the antebellum era was a period dominated by an industrial North and an agricultural South. Where the West fell in this easy bifurcation is vague at best. Come exam time, too many college professors waggle their heads in dismay as they realize how the complex past of the mid-nineteenth century has been simplified in the nation’s historical memory. Adam Wesley Dean takes on this topic and gives his readers a look into the agrarian rhetoric used in Free Soil and Republican Party circles before, during, and after the Civil War. As Dean states it, the “central contention” of An Agrarian Republic “is that the political ideology of the Republican Party . . . was fundamentally agrarian” (2). With that said, Dean goes on to reexamine political rhetoric through this lens, from the early national period to the Gilded Age, with most emphasis on the 1850s to the 1870s.

Dates are important in Dean’s work because he takes a chronological approach to his subject. Chapter titles indicate a more topical approach, yet in each chapter the author moves the reader through time. For example, in chapter 1 (“A Question of Slavery in the West”), Dean highlights the importance of land in the political discussions of the period preceding the crisis of the 1850s, and he proceeds to touch on historical debates about land use starting with the eighteenth-century land ordinances and extending to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. His study of agrarian ideology follows this model throughout the rest of the chapters. In chapter 2, Dean starts with the death of the Whig and Free Soil Parties leading to the national success of the Republican Party in 1860. The author then returns to one of the themes of the first chapter in chapter 3; he argues that northern and western responses to secession demonstrated that opposition to slavery centered on southerners’ improper use of the land generally and the soil specifically. Southerners monocropped cotton to the detriment of both the physical and the cultural environment. Northerners, wedded to republican ideals, assumed that good land use and “civilization” went hand in hand.

In the second half of the book, Dean continues the joint topical-chronological approach. Yet the author switches gears a bit in chapter 4, veering from the war to the development of nature parks in California and Wyoming. This is his most interesting chapter, encouraging historians to give up the traditional paradigm of conservation versus preservation to understand the creation of the parks as a consequence of Republican ideals about land use and the need for federal power where states failed. In this case, as the nation watched Californians poorly manage the first public nature park in the United States, most Republicans learned that the next attempt in Wyoming would have to be federal. The importance of good land use and its connection to civilization was lost to the Republican majority by the 1870s; men such as George W. Julian became a minority who preached the old agrarian ideals of a party matured by war and success.

Still, as the war ended and Republicans became comfortable using federal power for the nation, they combined that power and the old agrarian ideals for the conquered. In chapter 5, Dean moves on to the postwar era when Republicans dominated Congress despite the ascension of Andrew Johnson. Through various policies, Republicans attacked the southern aristocracy and its poor land use and also attempted to turn Indians into good American farmers with the Dawes Act. In both cases, these congressmen adhered to the basics of republicanism, trying to instill the virtues of agrarian life but using new federal power to force the status of...