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Abolition and the Rise of US Environmentalism
The Literature and Politics of Free Soil
James S. Finley (Author)
9781469694306
Paperback / softback, published 11 August 2026
238 pages
23.5 x 2.5 x 15.5 cm, 0.386 kg
"Finley’s work helps us see that the Free Soil movement was conservationism avant la lettre, and that the twin goals of early conservationism were to preserve the land by enacting racial exclusions rooted in the idea that Black people were pollutants.”—Jennifer C. James, author of A Freedom Bought with Blood: African American War Literature from the Civil War to World War II “Among the first books to offer a nineteenth-century genealogy of environmental justice—a movement that scholars and writers tend to see as originating in the 1980s. I have been in search of scholarship that sheds light on this history, and Finley’s book offers us just that.”—Abby L. Goode, author of Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability
By the 1840s, many Americans recognized that the institution of slavery was destroying Southern landscapes while threatening to expand into the West. An increasing number of white Northerners believed that stopping slavery’s growth by surrounding areas where it was legal with so-called free soil would hasten its collapse and forestall an environmental crisis. James S. Finley addresses this understudied intersection of US antislavery and environmental politics in the two decades before the Civil War, arguing that the debate over free soil—what it should look like and who should have access to this land—was an under-recognized precursor of modern American environmentalist movements.
Through the work of a group of Black writers and thinkers, the Free Soil movement’s white supremacist underpinnings were challenged by an eco-social vision that centered democratic communities and sustainable labor. By analyzing the output of authors who advocated for truly free soil, such as Frederick Douglass and Henry Highland Garnet, Finley finds commonalities in their attempts to reenvision communal relations between individuals and the land with contemporary movements for racial and environmental justice.