Coalitions without Compromise: Reconsidering the Political Abolitionists

Abstract

In 1848, Representative David Wilmot of Pennsylvania explained why he opposed the expansion of slavery into the United States' western territories. Slavery, he argued, brought dishonor and degradation upon the poor man by placing him close contact with the servile labor of the black.1 Historians have long found statements such as Wilmot's to be revealing. His testimony demonstrates that the emergence of a political antislavery movement in the mid-nineteenth-century United States had its origins in concerns distinct from moral objections to slavery or sympathy toward African Americans. Students of American abolition generally portray antislavery's foray into politics as a story of decline. Their studies chart the movement's descent from the Liberty Party's principles of abolition and racial equality to the Free Soil and Republican Parties' calls for the protection of free labor through the non-extension of slavery.2 Specialists in antebellum politics, who rarely acknowledge a connection between abolition and political antislavery, locate the movement's origins in northern resentment of southern political power or in the racism of the North's electorate.3 Studies published in the 1990s, by shifting historians' attention to the issue of privilege within antebellum society, have intensified the sense that the demand for Free Soil was, at bottom, an inherently racist form of antislavery. In their hardest variants, these accounts examine the way in which the developing status of whiteness was invested with an array of privileges that were denied to people of color and which provided a form of psychological compensation to white workers in exchange for their subordination within the capitalist market.4 Statements like Wilmot's demonstrated that Free Soil represented a part of this larger cultural project. Bruce Laurie's Beyond Garrison offers an impressive challenge to these unflattering portrayals of political antislavery. In an argument akin to ones recently advanced in studies of the Democratic Party by Daniel Feller, Sean Wilentz,