Skip to main content
Presented to you through Paradigm Publishing Services

University of Pennsylvania Press

Visit our Partner Page See all our books
book: The Root and the Branch
Book
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

The Root and the Branch

Working-Class Reform and Antislavery, 1790–1860
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2024

About this book

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 the Slave Power, 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.

Author / Editor information

Contributor: Sean Griffin 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.

Reviews

"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." --- "In his thoroughly researched overview, Sean Griffin examines the connections between the workers' movement and the abolitionist movement . . . and shows that a surprising number of workers' associations expressly included abolitionist demands in their political agendas. Indeed, by focusing on political discourse, he recovers minimized and overlooked voices. [Griffin's] detailed study unveils a more complex and nuanced portrait of the antebellum labor movement." --- "What few historians are successful in doing, Sean Griffin accomplishes masterfully: making sense of a complicated story by bridging studies in labor and antislavery and standing among those scholars . . . who have explored the relationship between slavery, antislavery, and free labor."

Topics

  • Publicly Available

    Frontmatter

    i
    Download PDF
  • Publicly Available

    CONTENTS

    vii
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    Introduction

    1
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    CHAPTER 1 Tom Paine’s Progeny: Slavery, Labor, and Democracy in the Radical Atlantic

    23
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    CHAPTER 2 “A Very Intimate Connexion”: The Working Men’s Parties, Equal Rights Democrats, and Antislavery Immediatism

    49
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    CHAPTER 3 “The Genius of Integral Emancipation”: Antislavery and Association

    76
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    CHAPTER 4 “The Greatest of All Anti-Slavery Measures”: Working-Class Land Reform and Antislavery’s Common Ground

    102
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    CHAPTER 5 A “Union of Reformers”: The National Industrial Congress and the Antislavery–Land Reform Alliance

    125
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    CHAPTER 6 From Free Soil to Homestead: Working-Class Land Reform and Antislavery Politics

    147
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    CHAPTER 7 Antislavery, Labor, and the Res Publica: The Rise of the Republican Party

    171
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    Epilogue

    203
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    NOTES

    217
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    INDEX

    273
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

    283
    Download PDF

Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
June 12, 2024
eBook ISBN:
9781512825930
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
View content
https://doi.org/10.9783/9781512825930
eBook ISBN: 9781512825930
Keywords for this book
antislavery; labor movement; land reform; utopian communities; Fourierism; National Reform Association; Republican Party; nineteenth century; abolition; westward expansion; agrarian reform; capitalism; Homestead Act; Slave Power; radicals; activists; antebellum partisan politics; working class blue collar labor movements; communitarian social experiments; Frances Wright; revisionist; urban northeast
Downloaded on 25.4.2026 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.9783/9781512825930/html?lang=en
Scroll to top button