James Finley
Texas A&M University - San Antonio
James S. Finley is Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University – San Antonio. He is editor of Henry David Thoreau in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and his scholarship has appeared in ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society and the Thoreau Society and was part of the faculty for the 2017 NEH seminar “Living and Writing Deliberately: The Concord Landscapes and Legacy of Henry David Thoreau.”
“Free Soil” James S. Finley Texas A&M University—San Antonio My proposed keyword, “Free Soil,” considers what is arguably the central intersection of environmental and social justice in the antebellum US. Free... [ view full abstract ]
“Free Soil”
James S. Finley
Texas A&M University—San Antonio
My proposed keyword, “Free Soil,” considers what is arguably the central intersection of environmental and social justice in the antebellum US. Free soil, I argue, represents not simply landscapes free of slavery but also a radical heuristic by which antislavery activists attacked the slave system and white supremacy as unnatural, ecologically destructive, and unsustainable. As both a means of critique and as a vision for the future, free soil insists on the creation and maintenance of ecosocial communities that are truly democratic, that value sustainability over market forces, and that reject racial biopolitics.
Treating free soil specifically as a keyword for the environmental humanities, on the one hand, brings into relief the literary production of the Free Soil movement and the extensive, yet largely unappreciated, archive of free soil literature written by Henry Bibb, John Brown, Lydia Maria Child, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and others affiliated with the movement. On the other hand, this material is deeply concerned with ecological questions in ways that exceed the normative whiteness and agrarianism of both the Free Soil Party and Romantic US nature writing. Historians of antislavery politics as well as ecocritics, I argue, have failed to recognize the radical ecosocial vision of these Free Soilers.
Finally, considering free soil as a keyword for C21 environmental humanities dramatically reworks the analogy between C19 abolition and C21 climate change, shifting the focus from the moral suasion of Garrisonians to the radical materialist politics of Free Soilers. Free soil in the Anthropocene looks a lot like the ecosocial communities envisioned by Bibb, Brown, Delany, and others: anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and ecologically sustainable.
