“A Natural Right to the Soil”: Black Abolitionists and the Meaning of Freedom

Abstract

African American periodicals in the antebellum era advocated a fartherreaching agenda than just the abolition of slavery. Taking up a mantle of agrarian equality that runs through the English Commonwealthmen, Jefferson, Paine, and the Free-Soil movement of the 1840s, Black abolitionists—in contrast to the Garrisonians—targeted land monopolies as the economic foundation of the chattel system, whose elimination would be a necessary condition for the freedom of all Americans. While early platforms of the Republican Party also fused antislavery with the Free-Soil agenda, Republican leaders yielded to large-scale agrarian and industrial concerns after the War, a pivot which thinkers like W.E.B. DuBois would later implicate as the death-knell for racial equality. Our research indicates that for at least a decade before the Civil War, Black writers promoted land reform as an essential component of emancipation, embracing a neo-republican understanding of liberty that predicated civil rights on economic independence.