Free Hearts and Free Homes: Gender and American Antislavery Politics

By Michael D. Pierson

Book Overview

By exploring the intersection of gender and politics in the antebellum North, Michael Pierson examines how antislavery political parties capitalized on the emerging family practices and ideologies that accompanied the market revolution.

From the birth of the Liberty party in 1840 through the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln in 1860, antislavery parties celebrated the social practices of modernizing northern families. In an era of social transformations, they attacked their Democratic foes as defenders of an older, less egalitarian patriarchal world. In ways rarely before seen in American politics, Pierson says, antebellum voters could choose between parties that articulated different visions of proper family life and gender roles.

By exploring the ways John and Jessie Benton Fr mont and Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln were presented to voters as prospective First Families, and by examining the writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lydia Maria Child, and other antislavery women, Free Hearts and Free Homes rediscovers how crucial gender ideologies were to American politics on the eve of the Civil War.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807854557
• ISBN13: 9780807854556
• Release Date: June 2003
• Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
• Length: 268 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 7.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Give 'em Jessie!

I loved this book! It really opened my eyes about the way women were able to act politically in an age when they could not vote. Pierson tells great stories about the way reformers tried to change the system. He looks at many newspaper and fictional sources, showing us how the stories that people read every day shaped their perceptions of family, and the roles of men and women. These perceptions about northern life also shaped the way people looked at slavery, as a system to be abolished. The section on Jessie Benton Fremont was great -- a fantastic lady that I had never heard of -- but who could have been first lady. This book is also thoroughly researched, with a wide-ranging source base that shows us innovative ways to interpet evidence about the past.

The history of "Family Values" politics

A clear and comprehensive account of how political parties are always out to get your vote by pushing your hottest buttons. This book shows how northern politicians before the Civil War tried to win over voters by appealing to their best and worst instincts about what men and women ought to be doing and how families should work. The section on Mary Todd Lincoln and the 1860 campaign is great, and the Democrats are so piggish! It's scholarly, but also funny at times.