What's Up? Michigan, William Seward and Free Soil

El V arrived home safely.

Get ready, Michigan,  here he comes!

At Western Michigan University:

Tuesday, November 5  U.S. Election Day
Literary reading  - excerpts from ""The American Slave Coast, Ned Sublette, 2028 Brown Hall, 7 to 9 p.m. Free.

Among other activities el V will be playing the Old Dog in Kalamazoo November 9th as part of the WMU Music Therapy Showcase and Fundraiser Applying their talents and raising money for class trip to New York / Chicago. Rock / pop. Cover charge: $5

After that is East Lansing for the Atlantic World Slave Database conference, where there are going to be world-class demographers, including Gwendolyn Midlo Hall.

There is also a tour of Detroit during this visit to Michigan.

I am studying William Seward.

Perhaps all the figures who took over the national stage at the period of the Great Compromise of 1850, aren't as entirely fascinating as so many of those who dominated it between the War of 1812 and 1850. For one thing, among them there aren't Great Monsters such as Calhoun and Jackson. Nor is 5' 4''  Stephen A. Douglas any match for the towering stature of Henry Clay.

Nevertheless I am fascinated with them.  It's in their personal and political lives we see the vast political change overtake the nation, that ends the decades of Jacksonian proslavery, anti-bank, anti-government dominance.

The poor white southerner -- poor, thus excluded from running for political office in most slavery states even at a local level -- these southern Jacksonian Democrats see the Democrats with their intractable demands that slavery be expanded into all the public, government lands, as personal obstacles to their ever getting ahead.

These Are Martin Van Buren and Charles Adams - Yes! the grandson of John Adams - on the Free Soil Ticket

Thus they become a bridge between North and South Free Soil movement and the short-lived Free Soil party, which morphed into the Republican party, that rang the death knell for the Democrats in the country outside the slaveholding states. In this case they mean literally free soil, available from the government lands for nominal prices. By this point all the lands suitable for agriculture in the South are in the hands of the ever shrinking numbers of the huge slaveowning power elite, as they alone have the credit to take over failed plantations, make loans and buy ever more negroes at ever higher prices.

Just because we've finished writing The American Slave Coast, doesn't mean we've finished studying.  Or writing, for that matter.  :)  What a wonderful privilege this has been, to live so immersed in our history.  I'm so glad I get to continue doing it until publication. Then there will be the year of promoting it.