Abolition and the Rise of US Environmentalism: The Literature and Politics of Free Soil with Dr. James Finley (via Zoom)

By the 1840s, many Americans recognized that the institution of slavery was destroying Southern landscapes while threatening to expand into the West. An increasing number of white Northerners believed that stopping slavery’s growth by surrounding areas where it was legal with so-called free soil would hasten its collapse and forestall an environmental crisis. James S. Finley addresses this understudied intersection of US antislavery and environmental politics in the two decades before the Civil War, arguing that the debate over free soil—what it should look like and who should have access to this land—was an under-recognized precursor of modern American environmentalist movements. Through the work of a group of Black writers and thinkers, the Free Soil movement’s white supremacist underpinnings were challenged by an eco-social vision that centered democratic communities and sustainable labor. By analyzing the output of authors who advocated for truly free soil, such as Frederick Douglass and Henry Highland Garnet, Finley finds commonalities in their attempts to reenvision communal relations between individuals and the land with contemporary movements for racial and environmental justice.

"Among the first books to offer a nineteenth-century genealogy of environmental justice--a movement that scholars and writers tend to see as originating in the 1980s. I have been in search of scholarship that sheds light on this history, and Finley's book offers us just that."--Abby L. Goode, author of Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability

James S. Finley is associate professor of English at Texas A&M University-San Antonio and teaches classes on early and nineteenth-century American literature, environmental literature, English Language Arts pedagogy, and disability studies. He is the author of Abolition and the Rise of US Environmentalism: The Literature and Politics of Free Soil (University of North Carolina Press, 2026) and editor of Henry David Thoreau in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2017). With Kristen Case, he is editing The Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau. He received his B.A. in English from Grinnell College and his MA & PhD from the University of New Hampshire.

Registration is free, though donations are welcome. Only registrants will receive the Zoom link.