An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era (Civil War America)

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Description

The familiar story of the Civil War tells of a predominately agricultural South pitted against a unexpectedly industrializing North. Alternatively, Adam Wesley Dean argues that the Republican Party’s political ideology was once fundamentally agrarian. Believing that small farms owned by families for generations led to a model society, Republicans supported a northern agricultural ideal in opposition to southern plantation agriculture, which destroyed the land’s productivity, required constant western expansion, and produced an elite landed gentry hostile to the Union. Dean shows how agrarian republicanism shaped the talk over slavery’s expansion, spurred the creation of the Department of Agriculture and the passage of the Homestead Act, and laid the basis for the improvement of the earliest nature parks.

Spanning the long nineteenth century, Dean’s observe analyzes the changing debate over land development as it transitioned from specializing in the creation of a virtuous and orderly citizenry to being seen primarily as a “civilizing” mission. By showing Republicans as women and men with backgrounds in small farming, Dean unveils new connections between seemingly separate historical events, linking this period’s views of natural and manmade environments with interpretations of slavery and land policy.

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