Free Soil Party
- proper noun
:
Partido del Suelo Libre
- The Free Soil Party was formed in 1848 to prevent the spread of slavery into new territories.
Examples
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Members of the Free Soil Party believed in the principle of free land for free men.
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The Free Soil Party played a significant role in American politics during the 1850s.
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In 1845, Hoar chaired the Massachusetts Free Soil Party Convention.
Academic text (2017)
Surface Forms
Morphology
The name is compositional: 'party' clearly signals a political group and 'free soil' can be plausibly understood as land being 'free' (e.g. free from slavery), so a learner who knows the words can infer a political group concerned with free land. However, the precise historical meaning—that it was a specific 1848 U.S. party opposing the expansion of slavery—is background knowledge beyond the literal constituents, so the relation is only partially predictable.
Etymology
Free Soil Party was named to show a simple picture: the words Free and Soil mean land kept 'free of slavery'. That's why the name helps you remember the party's goal: they did not want slavery to spread into new western lands.
