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 Fremont 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.
