Free Soil Party

“ This refusal of the two parties to take a stand on the question of the hour so displeased many Whigs and Wilmot-Proviso Democrats that they held a convention at Buffalo, where the old Liberty party joined them, and together they formed the "Free-soil party." They nominated Martin Van Buren and Charles F. Adams, and in their platform made four important declarations:
1. That Congress has no more power to make a slave, than to make a king.
2. That there must be "free soil for a free people." ”

“ But the Free Soil leaders wisely determined that if they were to have a political party, they must have candidates for State officers as well as National. It is impossible to organize a political party with success whose members are acting together in their support of one candidate and striving with all their might against each other when another is concerned. My father was urged to be the Free Soil candidate for Governor. Charles Francis Adams and Edmund Jackson visited him at Concord to press it upon him as a duty. Charles Allen wrote him an earnest letter to the same effect. ”

“ The more intelligent of the Liberal party are now intent on a different object, but one equally descriptive of their secret sense of the failure of their grand panacea of free trade. They are full of the incalculable effects of the application of science to agriculture; expatiate largely on the analysis of soils and liquid manures, and indulge in learned disquisitions on the application of the refuse of towns and common-sewers to the improvement and fertilisation of the soil. ”

“ As in the cantons of Ticino and Neuchâtel, our legislative bodies might be opened to minority representatives. As in the Swiss Confederation, the great forests might be declared forever the inheritance of the nation. What public lands yet remain in each state might be withheld from private ownership except on occupancy and use, and the area might be so increased as to enable every producer desiring it to exercise the natural right of free access to the soil. Then the right to labor, now being demanded through the Initiative by the Swiss workingmen's party, might here be made an admitted fact. ”

“ If, in any instance, the original advocates of Free Soil have abandoned their integrity, and have courted allies who had no sympathy with their principles, but were only eager to join them in a struggle for mere political ascendency, then, in my judgment, they have lost infinitely more in moral power than they have gained in numbers. They have ceased to be genuine and single-hearted Free Soilers, whom I love, and have become partisans, whom I condemn. For myself, I will engage in any honorable measure most likely to secure freedom to the new territories. ”

“ I can't believe that the soil is free. Coal and oil and iron have too much of it. I think of the banners borne in the campaign of 1860, when Baron Renfrew stood that night on the balcony of his hotel. He will soon be king of England and emperor of India. And some one—either the men who carried those banners or their sons—some one now has a complete overlordship of this United States.
Why did not these banners make free men and a free soil? I suspect that the banner of protection to American industries was as influential at least as the free soil banner. ”

“ For just in proportion as agriculture advances or declines will the prosperity of the people rise or fall, and the integrity of our government be stable or questionable. This fact has been clearly demonstrated in the history of nations; hence, stewardship of the soil embraces not only conservation of its fertility, but the fostering of such social institutions and educational forces as may be necessary to support a rural civilization that will minister to all the physical, mental and spiritual wants of a highly intellectual and permanent population. ”

“ What more absurd disposition of our timber land could have been made than the laws under which it has passed to private hands? The Homestead and Preemption acts, framed for prairies, requiring the settler to live on and cultivate the soil, have been extended to our forests, and to comply with their terms, thousands of men have withdrawn from vocations by which they were increasing the wealth of the Nation, and with blankets and provisions strapped on their backs and axe and compass in hand have worked their weary way through the pathless forests to vacant Government lands, on which they filed. ”

“ Southern planters likewise had feared free homesteads for the very good reason that they only promised to add to the overbalancing power of the North.
In spite of the opposition, supporters of a liberal land policy made steady gains. Free-soil Democrats,—Jacksonian farmers and mechanics,—labor reformers, and political leaders, like Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois and Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, kept up the agitation in season and out. ”

“ It should be our constant policy by national and by State legislation to see that the water is used for the benefit of the occupants of the soil, of those who till and use the soil, that it is not exploited by any one man or set of men in his or their interests as against the interests of those on the land who are to use it. ”

“ Sooner or later we must adopt a national policy which shall more completely conserve our water resources, utilizing them not only for power and transportation, but primarily for the maintenance of soil fertility and greater crop production through supplemental irrigation, and all these great national interests should be considered collectively, broadly, and with a view to the fullest and best possible coordination. ”

“ West. "Of course, it is important that every citizen entitled to the privilege of voting in a democracy like ours should be able to exercise his franchise intelligently; but the citizen who is responsible for the management of farm lands ought surely to be at least as well informed concerning the principles which underlie the maintenance of soil fertility ”

“ With the aid of industrial machinery and by scientific cultivation of the land freed from monopoly the revolution must first of all supply the elemental wanes of society. In farming and gardening intensive cultivation and modern methods have made us practically independent of natural soil quality and climate. ”

“ Our land use policy is a different thing. I have just visited much of the work that the national government is doing to stop soil erosion, to save our forests, to prevent floods, to produce electric power for more general use, and to give people a chance to move from poor land on to better land by irrigating thousands of acres that need only water to provide an opportunity to make a good living. ”

“ In the midst of the present democratic ferment, into which so many of our writers blindly rush, it becomes an urgent duty to exhibit the peasant who renders Law inapplicable, and who has made the ownership of land to be a thing that is, and that is not. You are now to behold that indefatigable mole, that rodent which undermines and disintegrates the soil, parcels it out and divides an acre into a hundred fragments,—ever spurred on to his banquet by the lower middle classes who make him at once their auxiliary and their prey. ”

“ But when the farmer tries to adjust his production to demand by limiting production there is widespread criticism of his conduct. There should be continuance of efforts to retain the fertility of the soil, to improve methods of cultivation, and to prevent destruction of wide areas through erosion. The patrimony of the nation must be preserved through wise policies of reforestation and reclamation of waste lands. But the great immediate task is that of adjusting production to demand so that the rural population may advance in material welfare along with other groups. ”

“ It is amazing that while complaint is made of the influx of population to the social centres, the government does not employ the natural remedy of redeeming a region where, as statistics show, there are many million acres of waste land, certain parts of which, especially in Berry, have a soil from seven to eight feet deep. ”

“ But in terms of legal machinery, these areas present problems, chief among which is the matter of incentive on the part of those who must cooperate if the programs are to work. In an agricultural watershed, the effect of soil conservation practices and flood control measures on the health and productivity of the land is sharply evident to rural landowners and others in the neighborhood, who all benefit from it and usually are eager to cooperate. ”

“ The arid plains of the Great West have the richest of known soils, if a little human sweat mixed with water in sufficient quantity could be kneaded into it. Government as the lord paramount of its domain, should force the growing of trees and should prevent the destruction of timber wherever the same is necessary to keep up or improve the land. It has parted with the title to the soil, but still retains the power to use it for its own support. ”

“ To my mind, the Conservation movement has not sufficiently emphasized this problem. It has laid stress, I know, on the enormous loss by soil erosion, and has said something of inadequate agricultural practice; but the main question is yet practically untouched by the movement—the plain problem of handling the soil by all the millions who, by skill or blundering or theft, produce crops and animals out of the earth. Peoples have gone down before the lessening power of the land, and in all probability other peoples will yet go down. ”

“ The pendulum is now swinging back to the farm, and our great Nation is becoming aroused to the fact that its most vital concern is the elimination of soil waste, the promotion of scientific methods of agriculture, and the conservation of that soil fertility which is the foundation of our entire social, political and commercial superstructure. ”

“ As a nation we have scarcely lifted a hand yet to stop the waste of fertility or to restore exhausted lands; practically every effort put forth by the Federal government along agricultural lines having been directed toward better seeds, control of injurious insects and fungous diseases, exploitation of new lands by drainage and irrigation, popularly called 'reclamation,' although applied only to rich virgin soils which can certainly be brought under cultivation at any future time either by the Government or by private enterprise. ”

“ Reform is necessary to put a stop to the profligate waste of public lands, and their diversion from actual settlers, by the party in power, which has squandered 200,000,000 of acres upon railroads alone, and, out of more than thrice that aggregate, has of less than a sixth directly to tillers of the soil. ”

“ The welfare of a population depends primarily upon the cultivation of the soil. To develop this cultivation to the highest degree is eminently to the interest of all. That this highest degree of development cannot be attained under the rule of private property, has been shown. To obtain the greatest possible advantage from the soil, not its cultivation alone must be taken into consideration. ”

“ I hope it will continue to do it Departing from the original idea, so soon as it was found practicable and convenient, of selling by townships, congress has disposed of the soil in smaller and still smaller portions, till, at length, it sells in parcels of no more than eighty acres; thus putting it into the power of every man in the country, however poor, but who has health and strength to become a freeholder if he desires, not of barren acres, but of rich and fertile soil. ”

“ Unfertile land is made fertile by intensive culture. It has been said that the Paris gardener defies the soil and the climate. Every truck gardener there stipulates in renting land that he "may carry away his soil down to a certain depth, when he quits his tenancy." [171] In other words, soil is now a manufacture; we are no longer confined to fertile areas; we can make any area fertile by the application to it of industry and intelligence.
Municipalities can contribute enormously to the fertility of the land around them. ”

“ In 1865 the Legislative Assembly passed a bill amendatory of the law of 1860, providing, among other things, for securing the soil in exposed localities by grading, and by promoting the growth of grass and the formation of greensward over the surface. This has proved a most beneficial measure, and its adoption under corresponding conditions in the United States is most highly to be recommended. ”

“ But why should not the Federal government make all necessary provisions to furnish ground limestone and phosphate rock at the actual cost of quarrying, grinding, and transporting, in order that farmers on these old depleted soils may be encouraged to adopt systems of soil improvement ”

“ This usefulness would be much more limited still, if, thanks to the fertility of the soil, or the richness of the beet, 24,000 hectares would serve instead of 48,000. If there were only needed twenty times, a hundred times more soil, more capital, more labor, to attain the same result—Oh! then some hopes might be founded upon this article of industry; it would be worthy of the protection of the state, for it would open a vast field to national labor. But to produce much with little is a bad example, and the laws ought to set things to rights. ”

“ The District Court disposed, we think, of the conduit or service agent argument by its finding that the Government 'became the owner' of the fertilizer at the manufacturing plants which are outside the state and was engaged in distributing it in Florida as a part of the national soil conservation program. In promoting soil conservation by precept and demonstration through the Department of Agriculture, the United States, as in its other authorized activities, acts in a governmental capacity. ”

“ Is a community wise or foolish which uses different soils and climates instead of confining itself to one? Can two communities with different soils and climates exchange commodities to mutual advantage? If they can, there is a valid reason for the spread of population. Such a movement is not as insane as it seems to those who do not appreciate the localization of resources.
Professor Carver asks why England should not get all her agricultural products from her own soil. ”