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

A century ago, historians conceptualized the Civil War as a conflict between the modern, industrialized, free-labor economic system of the North and the slave-based, agrarian, pre-modern aristocratic plantation system of the South. Dean argues that because Republicans had become, by the War’s outset, the majority party in the North, and because northern victory in the War was followed by the Industrial Revolution of the Gilded Age, the Republican Party of the Civil War era became falsely associated with industrialization. In this book, he centers the Republicans’ ideology in rural agrarianism—as evidenced by the party’s critique of slave-based agricultural land use, its policies for rural development in the West (as exemplified by its homestead, land grant, and railroad legislation during the War), its reconstruction program, and its (more internally divisive) role in the movement to create national parks.

Free Soilers and, later, Republicans maintained that free labor produced better land management than did slave labor. Thus, they fused the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian ethos of a producerist, agrarian republic of sturdy, independent, egalitarian farmers with the Whiggish ideal of proper land use and development as indicative of “civilization” and progress. Antislavery politicians argued that slave-based labor prevented agricultural diversification, exhausted the soil, and led to economic and social decay.

Dean supports his argument well. As Gienapp has shown, Republicans in the 1850s fared best in prosperous rural communities and small towns with a fairly equitable distribution of wealth, whereas northern Democrats were strongest in either the more isolated, stagnant, and impoverished rural areas or in the larger cities where the extremes of wealth and poverty were prevalent.¹ Because southerners had come to dominate the party by the late 1850s, and slaveholders were opposed to western development for fear of creating more free states, Democrats lost their earlier advantage among rural voters in the North. Moreover, the largest northern manufacturing magnates—among the last of the Whigs to join the Republican Party—were far more receptive than were rural northerners to calls for compromise with the South during the secession crisis.

Dean’s argument is not entirely new. In his seminal Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York, 1970), Eric Foner portrayed a Republican Party with a free-labor ideology that appealed to both the rural and urban middle classes, based on a critique of southern society as backward, stagnant, shiftless, and undemocratic that is certainly compatible with the Republican attacks on slave-based agriculture presented in Dean’s book. But whereas in Foner’s hands, Republican sympathy with the free-soil movement blended genuine ideology with an expedient co-option of Jeffersonian agrarianism, Dean, given his occasional overemphasis of the contributions of Frederick Law Olmstead and George Julian to the party’s ideology, sees nothing but sincerity in the Republicans’ agrarian-based antislavery worldview.

Certainly original is Dean’s inclusion of the West in the Republicans’ postwar reconstruction program. Republicans did not seek to industrialize the South and the West. Instead, they planned to “civilize” each region and strengthen loyalty to the union through the widespread land ownership of yeomen white farmers, former slaves, and Indians (whom they hoped, in vain, would give up their indigenous form of life and embrace farming, thus making more land available for white settlers). For Dean, the ill-fated Dawes Act of 1887, which encouraged, and sometimes coerced, Native Americans into abandoning their tribal form of government, should be considered an integral part of Reconstruction. Dean’s emphasis on the Republicans’ program of family farming also sheds light on the commitment of a sizable number of congressional Republicans (though by no means a majority) who favored the dissolution of southern plantations for distribution to former slaves (at least until the losses in the 1867 off-year elections).

The Republicans’ rural outlook was...