The Root and the Branch examines the relationship between the early labor movement and the crusade to abolish slavery between the early national period and the Civil War. Tracing the parallel rise of antislavery movements with working-class demands for economic equality, access to the soil, and the right to the fruits of labor, Sean Griffin shows how labor reformers and radicals contributed to the antislavery project, from the development of free labor ideology to the Republican Party's adoption of working-class land reform in the Homestead Act. By pioneering an antislavery politics based on an appeal to the self-interest of ordinary voters and promoting a radical vision of "free soil" and "free labor" that challenged liberal understandings of property rights and freedom of contract, labor reformers helped to birth a mass politics of antislavery that hastened the conflict with slave powers, while pointing the way toward future struggles over the meaning of free labor in the post-Emancipation United States. Bridging the gap between the histories of abolitionism, capitalism and slavery, and the origins of the Civil War, The Root and the Branch recovers a long-overlooked story of cooperation and coalition-building between labor reformers and abolitionists and unearths new evidence about the contributions of artisan reformers, transatlantic radicals, free Black activists, and ordinary working men and women to the development of antislavery politics. Based on painstaking archival research, The Root and the Branch addresses timely questions surrounding the relationships between slavery, antislavery, race, labor, and capitalism in the early United States.
Sean Griffin is a historian of the nineteenth-century United States and has taught at the City University of New York and the College of Charleston.
Introduction Chapter 1. Tom Paine's Progeny: Slavery, Labor, and Democracy in the Radical Atlantic Chapter 2. "A Very Intimate Connexion": The Working Men's Parties, Equal Rights Democrats, and Antislavery Immediatism Chapter 3. "The Genius of Integral Emancipation": Antislavery and Association Chapter 4. "The Greatest of All Anti-Slavery Measures": Working-Class Land Reform and Antislavery's Common Ground Chapter 5. A "Union of Reformers": The National Industrial Congress and the Antislavery-Land Reform Alliance Chapter 6. From Free Soil to Homestead: Working-Class Land Reform and Antislavery Politics Chapter 7. Antislavery, Labor, and the Res Publica: The Rise of the Republican Party Epilogue Notes Index Acknowledgments
"Exceedingly well researched in an impressively wide range of source materials, The Root and Branch brings together histories of American antislavery and of nineteenth-century labor reform exceptionally well to show how these movements intersected more frequently and more meaningfully than is typically understood. By bringing together these movements so fully and extensively, this book offers an invaluable contribution to scholarship on both American antislavery activism and labor radicalism." (Corey Brooks, Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics)
