Free Soil Free Labor Free Men or Babylons Ark

Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War with a New Introductory Essay

Author: Eric Foner

Since its publication twenty-five years ago, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men has been recognized as a classic, an indispensable contribution to our understanding of the causes of the American Civil War. A key work in establishing political ideology as a major concern of modern American historians, it remains the only full-scale evaluation of the ideas of the early Republican party. Now with a new introduction, Eric Foner puts his argument into the context of contemporary scholarship, reassessing the concept of free labor in the light of the last twenty-five years of writing on such issues as work, gender, economic change, and political thought.
A significant reevaluation of the causes of the Civil War, Foner's study looks beyond the North's opposition to slavery and its emphasis upon preserving the Union to determine the broader grounds of its willingness to undertake a war against the South in 1861. Its search is for those social concepts the North accepted as vital to its way of life, finding these concepts most clearly expressed in the ideology of the growing Republican party in the decade before the war's start. Through a careful analysis of the attitudes of leading factions in the party's formation (northern Whigs, former Democrats, and political abolitionists) Foner is able to show what each contributed to Republican ideology. He also shows how northern ideas of human rights--in particular a man's right to work where and how he wanted, and to accumulate property in his own name--and the goals of American society were implicit in that ideology. This was the ideology that permeated the North in the period directly before the Civil War, led to the election of AbrahamLincoln, and led, almost immediately, to the Civil War itself. At the heart of the controversy over the extension of slavery, he argues, is the issue of whether the northern or southern form of society would take root in the West, whose development would determine the nation's destiny.
In his new introductory essay, Foner presents a greatly altered view of the subject. Only entrepreneurs and farmers were actually "free men" in the sense used in the ideology of the period. Actually, by the time the Civil War was initiated, half the workers in the North were wage-earners, not independent workers. And this did not account for women and blacks, who had little freedom in choosing what work they did. He goes onto show that even after the Civil War these guarantees for "free soil, free labor, free men" did not really apply for most Americans, and especially not for blacks.
Demonstrating the profoundly successful fusion of value and interest within Republican ideology prior to the Civil War, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men remains a classic of modern American historical writing. Eloquent and influential, it shows how this ideology provided the moral consensus which allowed the North, for the first time in history, to mobilize an entire society in modern warfare.

Table of Contents:

	The Idea of Free Labor in Nineteenth-Century America
	Abbreviations Used in Footnotes and Bibliography
	Introduction	1
1	Free Labor: The Republicans and Northern Society	11
2	The Republican Critique of the South	40
3	Salmon P. Chase: The Constitution and the Slave Power	73
4	The Radicals: Anti-Slavery Politics and the Moral Imperative	103
5	The Democratic Republicans	149
6	Conservatives and Moderates	186
7	The Republicans and Nativism	226
8	The Republicans and Race	261
9	Slavery and the Republican Ideology	301
	Bibliography	319
	Index	337

Book review: Joy of Grilling or Williams Sonoma Savoring Meat and Poultry

Babylon's Ark: The Incredible Wartime Rescue of the Baghdad Zoo

Author: Lawrence Anthony

When the Iraq war began, conservationist Lawrence Anthony could think of only one thing: the fate of the Baghdad Zoo, located in the city center and caught in the war's crossfire. Once Anthony entered Baghdad he discovered that full-scale combat and uncontrolled looting had killed nearly all the animals of the zoo.

But not all of them. U.S. soldiers had taken the time to help care for the remaining animals, and the zoo's staff had returned to work in spite of the constant firefights. Together the Americans and Iraqis had managed to keep alive the animals that had survived the invasion.

Babylon's Ark chronicles the zoo's transformation from bombed-out rubble to peaceful park. Along the way, Anthony recounts hair-raising efforts to save a pride of the dictator's lions, close a deplorable black-market zoo, and rescue Saddam's Arabian horses. His unique ground-level experience makes Babylon's Ark an uplifting story of both sides working together for the sake of innocent animals caught in the war's crossfire.

Publishers Weekly

Anthony, a South African conservationist and recipient of the U.N.'s Earth Day award, details how, through a series of complex maneuvers, he entered Iraq after the American invasion and led the fight to save what was left of the Baghdad Zoo. Most of the animals were killed by war and looting; the remainder were starved and in filthy cages, with no staff to care for them. Anthony describes how he, along with the zoo's former deputy director and several brave workers, risked daily danger to save the bears, lions, tigers, monkeys and birds. Anthony fended off looters with a gun obtained from a sympathetic U.S. soldier, spent his own funds for equipment and bartered the use of a satellite phone for food and other essentials. Anthony vividly recounts the rescue of other animals, including the inhabitants of the appalling Luna Park Zoo and Saddam's prize Arabian horses, saved from the hands of black marketeers. The author takes no position on the invasion. His goal is for his mission, so dramatically recounted with journalist Spence's help, to set an example of conservation and respect for animal life. 8 pages of color photos. (Mar. 12) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Terrific tale about how Iraqis, a South African conservationist and American soldiers saved the animals of the Baghdad Zoo. In April 2003, in the opening days of the Iraq War, the Baghdad Zoo was bombed, its animals released or taken. Watching the war unfold on television, South African conservationist Lawrence Anthony became determined to travel to Baghdad and save what animals he could. Upon arrival, Anthony discovered Dr. Husham Hussan, the zoo's vet, daily risking his life in an effort to feed and hydrate the few remaining creatures, including a Bengal tiger, a blind brown bear, several lions, a lynx and a few boars. Baboons, monkeys and various birds, all of whom had escaped their damaged cages, freely wandered the zoo grounds. With the zoo's water pumps broken, the two men ferried water to the parched animals bucketful by bucketful from a nearby canal, an all-day job in 115-degree heat. Although still engaged in combat, American soldiers offered to help, giving the animals their MREs (Meals Ready to Eat), and "liberating" crucial supplies, ranging from cleaning solvents to generators to food for the zoo staff. In addition to saving the zoo's animals, Anthony and his team rescued lions from one of Saddam's son's "love nests," closed down a black-market exotic-animal ring and rounded up some of Saddam's prized Arabian horses. Happily, the zoo's future was secured when coalition forces offered to rebuild the zoo and the surrounding Al Zawra Park as a symbol of goodwill toward the Iraqi people. A wartime story with a joyful ending.