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| Free Soil Advocates A Complex Group |
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| Opinion | |||
| Written by Grady Atwater | |||
| Tuesday, 02 February 2010 16:46 | |||
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Osawatomie’s early settlers were a complex group of people with a variety of philosophies and beliefs that motivated them to risk their lives to found the town. One group was the free-soil advocates, who emigrated to Kansas from the North and the South to stop the spread of slavery to the new territories of the west. Free-soil advocates were not necessarily abolitionists; rather, they thought that slavery was permissible where it already existed, but that it should not spread into the new territories of the West. Free-soil laborers, skilled workers and farmers saw slaves and freed slaves as an economic threat. Slaveholders often taught slaves skilled work, such as ironworking and other vital tasks. They leased slaves to other plantations and business owners, creating unemployment for non-slave laborers, and freed slaves sometimes were willing to work for lower wages than white laborers. Therefore, free-soil advocates opposed the spread of slavery into Kansas because they saw African-Americans as an economic threat. In fact, white family farmers saw the Southern plantation system as a fundamental threat to their existence. Plantations were large farms worked by slaves who, by simply outnumbering the labor of a small farm’s efforts, could outproduce small farms. In addition, Southern-style plantation owners farmed the land until the soil had been exhausted of nutrients, then moved west.  In addition to being opposed to the aristocratic power of the Southern planter class, free-soil farmers did not want slavery to destroy their livelihood and way of life by spreading to Kansas. Therefore, Osawatomie’s early free-soil settlers stood against slavery when the debate over slavery boiled over into open conflict in 1854. Free-soil advocates were interested in equality for whites, not particularly for African-Americans. They were opposed to the plantation owner’s political, social and economic domination and viewed proslavery forces’ efforts to make Kansas a slave state as an attempt to extend that influence west. Northern free-soil advocates emigrated here to oppose the control of Southern plantation owners, for their power extended into the North. Southern free-soil advocates came after fleeing the South, because they were not willing to be dominated by the planter class. When the conflict over slavery in Kansas erupted in 1854, these free-soil advocates became unlikely allies of abolitionists from 1854 to 1861, when Osawatomie was a prominent flash point in the struggle against slavery.
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