Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics

Abstract

Mid-twentieth-century revisionism challenged the standard nationalist interpretation of Civil War causation, decrying the role abolitionism played in the unfolding sectional crisis. Civil rights reform brought the abolitionists back into historians' favor while leaving their precise role in the national ordeal somewhat undefined. In these decades opinion swerved between crediting abolitionists for ending slavery and blaming them for the carnage of the Civil War. In Liberty Power Corey M. Brooks advances this enduring debate by promoting the role political abolitionists played in forging the “slave power” theory and thereby helping unravel the second-party system and its penchant to obfuscate the slavery issue. Brooks contends that despite the acclaim recently given to the abolitionist movement, historians of the antebellum era have disassociated political abolitionism from the narrative of the escalating political crisis that generated civil war. In particular, he chastens historians for giving “short shrift” to the relative political success of the antislavery third parties (p. 4). Brooks follows in the footsteps of Theodore Clarke Smith, Dwight Lowell Dumond, and Richard Sewell, scholars who stressed how the Liberty and Free Soil parties led inevitably to Republican electoral success and victory over secession and slavery.