Free Soil Party Research Articles

Certain Concealments: Poe, Hawthorne, and Early Nineteenth-Century Abortion

Certain Concealments: Poe, Hawthorne, and Early Nineteenth-Century Abortion

Partisanship and Racial Attitudes in U.S. Civil War Enlistment

AbstractIn this article, we investigate why millions of northern white men volunteered to fight in the Civil War. Prior studies have found that Republican partisanship played a significant role in boosting Union enlistment but do not test the competing hypothesis that views about slavery and race motivated them instead. Such views were highly salient among party elites before and during the war, which was sparked by a presidential election between parties divided over the expansion of Black enslavement. However, among the white mass public, we argue that partisanship rather than race-related attitudes explains patterns of war mobilization. Linking Union war participation records with election returns, we show that county-level war participation is better explained by Republican partisanship rather than views about the status of Black Americans (as measured by support for equal suffrage referenda and the Free Soil party). Analyzing a sample of partisan newspaper issues, we further show that Republican elites de-emphasized slavery as they sought to mobilize mass war participation while antiwar Democrats emphasized antiabolition and white supremacy, suggesting each party’s elites saw antislavery messaging as ineffective or even detrimental in mobilizing mass enlistment. This analysis offers additional evidence on the power of partisanship in producing mass violence and sheds more light on political behavior during a critical period in the history of U.S. racial politics.

Grand Army of Labor: Workers, Veterans, and the Meaning of the Civil War by Matthew E. Stanley

Reviewed by: Grand Army of Labor: Workers, Veterans, and the Meaning of the Civil War by Matthew E. Stanley Jillian Marie Jacklin (bio) Grand Army of Labor: Workers, Veterans, and the Meaning of the Civil War. By Matthew E. Stanley. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021. Pp. 297. Cloth, $110.00; paper, $30.00.) More than twenty years have passed since the publication of David Blight's important monograph Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001). Yet collective understandings of the sectional quarrel remain contested in the popular imagination, as heated debates over how the U.S. public should remember the war and its aftermath continue to fuel ongoing divisions between North and South, as well as heightened polarity in both the local and nationwide electorate. Meanwhile, Matthew E. Stanley's Grand Army of Labor sheds significant light on the working-class origins of the complicated disagreements over the "official" history of the military conflict and its outcomes. Through his deep and thorough investigation of a broad and diverse set of primary texts and artifacts, Stanley effectively convinces his readers that the story of laborers and their daily struggles provides essential context for comprehending the distinct but always overlapping layers of the post–Civil War political landscape. Indeed, he compellingly argues that "memory was … an enrollment tool" (7), which defined the parameters of freedom in the United States, and, as his analysis suggests, historical representations continue to influence the complex cultural atmosphere that exists within the contemporary nation-state. Stanley's sweeping and timely work provides a lesson on [End Page 401] the need to recognize how the practice of celebrating a collective military identity rooted in white patriarchy gained momentum during the postwar era, as well as how it endures in ways that continue to restrict access to American citizenship today. An ambitious endeavor, Stanley's project commences in the antebellum period, in which he begins his discussion of the antislavery movement and the emerging language of emancipation that coincided with efforts to promote Black liberation from chattel bondage. He then traces the role of these developments in shaping working-class cultural politics and labor organizing from the Civil War to the Progressive Era. Marching through an analysis of the platforms of the Free Soil Party, the Readjusters, the Knights of Labor, the Populists, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the American Federation of Labor, among others, Stanley claims that, at times, each of these political parties and worker associations equated the status of wage workers to that of enslaved African Americans in the antebellum South. Drawing on the speeches of partisan leaders and the literature that left-wing activists produced to promote worker solidarity and justice, Grand Army of Labor highlights the complex aspirations that these groups had—which existed along a cultural spectrum—and demonstrates the radical possibilities of electoral campaigning as well as the social ideologies that accompanied these organizing activities. Likewise, through this extensive exploration, Stanley references the conservative philosophies and discriminatory elements that undermined success during these opportune moments, when there were evident possibilities for destroying the untrammeled dominance of the two-party system in the United States. He also highlights the international aspects of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century labor movement, which ardent political repression had erased and continues to overshadow. Ultimately, as he persuasively indicates, an investment in white male supremacy and patriarchy, alongside the heightened nationalism rooted in military service, devastated more liberatory elements embedded in working-class activism. Thus Grand Army of Labor is a testament to the broad-based, though also exclusionary, terrain of struggle that participation in the Civil War created for veterans and their communities. Having a shared past in their physical efforts to eradicate slavery, former soldiers linked Black freedom and abolitionism to a language of emancipation for all people, regardless of faith, trade, gender, or race, which would support the needs and realities of everyday workers (though in most cases these were white male workers of western and northern Euro-American descent, especially those who had [End Page 402] direct links to Anglo-Saxonism). As Stanley's study highlights, antislavery did not equate to an erasure of racism, and...

Horace Greeley: Print, Politics, and the Failure of American Nationhood by James M. Lundberg

Reviewed by: Horace Greeley: Print, Politics, and the Failure of American Nationhood by James M. Lundberg Michael E. Woods (bio) Horace Greeley: Print, Politics, and the Failure of American Nationhood. By James M. Lundberg. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Pp. 231. Cloth, $34.95.) Clad in his signature white coat, Horace Greeley strode into celebrityhood as editor of the New-York Tribune. Yet the meaning of his career remains elusive. As James M. Lundberg points out in this perceptive book, Greeley “has been eluding his biographers” ever since James Parton, better known for his sprawling Life of Andrew Jackson (1860), penned a heroic account in 1854 (2). More recently, scholars have cast Greeley variously as a quintessential Whig reformer, a socialist, a liberal nationalist, and a personification of New York City in the age of capital.1 Greeley defies categorization because of his zeal for everything from Sylvester Graham’s dietary regimen to Albert Brisbane’s adaptation of Fourierism, as well as his propensity for hairpin political turns. How do we classify a man who denounced the slave power and later posted bail for Jefferson Davis? Lundberg takes a different approach in Horace Greeley: Print, Politics, and the Failure of American Nationhood. By attending both to Greeley’s towering influence and his jarring setbacks, Lundberg identifies a thread of consistency running through Greeley’s eccentric career. Determined to [End Page 111] rally a fractious country behind his ambitious vision of progress, Greeley repeatedly collided with reality. Only after his disastrous 1872 presidential bid did Greeley, who had only weeks to live, seem to realize that he “embodied the inherent problems of American nationhood, rather than its transcendent harmony” (11). Less focused on Greeley’s philosophical gymnastics than on his overriding ambition to play the role of heroic genius, Horace Greeley successfully explores the theme of failure. Lundberg sketches Greeley’s hardscrabble New England upbringing before delving into his public career in the nation’s publishing capital of New York. Greeley’s labors on a series of literary journals and Whig newspapers informed his long tenure as editor of the New-York Tribune, established in 1841. Inspired by the wide circulation of penny newspapers but disgusted by their prurient and sensational content, Greeley believed fervently in the power of print—and in his own destiny to wield that power for good. Mingling an Enlightenment faith in progress with a Romantic fascination for heroic geniuses (such as himself) and a strong dose of nationalism, Greeley resolved to make the Tribune “a force for social harmony, consensus, reform, and even mass instruction” (27). Greeley’s pursuit of this dream shaped his three-decade career with the Tribune and helps explain his puzzling twists and turns. He first embraced the Whig Party, relishing its commitment to social reform and economic uplift. Although convinced that slavery and its defenders were stumbling blocks in the path of national progress, Greeley initially eschewed sectional confrontation and reluctantly supported the Whigs over the Free Soil Party in the 1848 election. Six years later, however, the Kansas-Nebraska Act prompted him to take a stronger stand against the slave power. While he hoped that the emerging Republican Party would attract white southern nonslaveholders, Greeley became a sectional spokesman whose blueprint for national progress reflected decidedly northern ideals. Thus the aspiring peacemaker stoked the fires of sectionalism. Throughout the Civil War, Greeley remained both a Republican and a Lincoln administration gadfly. He shifted from conciliator to all-out warrior and from impatient emancipationist to self-appointed peace negotiator; but Lundberg argues that throughout the conflict, Greeley continually sought to extract a higher purpose—national redemption—from the carnage. Alas, the war refused to follow his script. During Reconstruction, Greeley still longed to serve as national unifier, and while he offered some support for African American civil rights, it was reconciliation among whites that mattered to him most. Hence did he aid Jefferson Davis, critique Radical Republicans, and attempt to wrest the presidency from Ulysses S. Grant in 1872. Like his antebellum and wartime crusades, [End Page 112] Greeley’s postwar quest to restore national harmony was “bold, optimistic, and wildly unsuccessful” (146). Lundberg’s crisply written account makes a...

Making an Antislavery Nation: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Battle over Freedom by Graham A. Peck

Reviewed by: Making an Antislavery Nation: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Battle over Freedom by Graham A. Peck Evan C. Rothera (bio) Making an Antislavery Nation: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Battle over Freedom. By Graham A. Peck. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017. Pp. 280. Cloth, $34.95.) For Graham A. Peck, Abraham Lincoln's election as president in 1860 is "perhaps the single-most vital story about freedom's preservation in America" (2). In order to explain the rise and triumph of the Republican Party and antislavery politics, Peck focuses on antebellum Illinois as a state that offers a unique view of a national conflict between slavery and freedom. In his focus on this single state, Peck claims to offer a sweeping reinterpretation of the rise of antislavery politics in the early United States. Scholars of the subject, however, likely will find Peck's study a well-written account of the triumph of antislavery nationalism if not a cutting-edge monograph that reshapes the field. Peck posits that Illinois "reproduced the nation's problem with slavery in miniature" (17). From the beginning, however, Peck overemphasizes the love of Illinois settlers for liberty. Illinois voters famously defeated a proslavery constitutional convention referendum in 1824. However, despite 57 percent of the voters rejecting the referendum, victory was not easy. One wonders whether Peck allows genuine antislavery reformers like Edward Coles to stand in for the average Illinoisan. Some Illinoisans considered slavery a threat to their freedom and embraced an incipient free-soil critique of slavery. However, antislavery sentiment had shallow roots. A shift of fewer than 850 votes would have returned a proslavery result. This is salient because Peck attributes the victory to a last-minute surge in migration by settlers to Northern Illinois. The "love of liberty" among settlers was, at best, a superficial love, as Elijah P. Lovejoy discovered (18). Moving into the Second Party System, Peck contends that Illinois [End Page 602] Democratic politicians' "ardent advocacy of national expansion helped rekindle the nation's battle over freedom" (54). While Illinois Democrats supported Mr. Polk's War, many resented Polk for compromising on Oregon. Peck utilizes John Wentworth to highlight the growing anti-southern sentiments of northern Illinois Democrats. While this was true, it took Wentworth, and others, a long time to leave the Democratic Party. One famous northern Illinois Democrat, Stephen A. Douglas, never did. Peck makes a particularly problematic assertion that Illinois Democrats shared a "preference for freedom, even if they rarely expressed antislavery sentiment" (69). How he can say this with a straight face is puzzling. In claiming that the Free Soil Party "commenced a struggle over the meaning of freedom in the nation," he undercuts his argument about a lengthier politics of slavery and overlooks the fact that the struggle over the meaning of freedom began long before 1848 (71). Peck also contradicts himself when he argues that Illinois Democrats "had little choice but to challenge the emerging northern understanding of freedom" after the rise of the Free Soil Party (72). In fact, Illinois Democrats had a choice: fusion with Free Soilers. Leading Democrat Martin Van Buren himself chose cooperation. If anything, Illinois Democrats validated the strength of party loyalties and how people thought about other issues besides slavery. Peck concludes that the presidential election of 1848 demonstrated that the Democrats "would have a difficult time resolving the antagonism between slavery and freedom" (95). This difficulty was not great enough to prevent them from winning in 1852. Peck brings Lincoln and Douglas into focus in the final three chapters. In his telling, the crisis of Union in 1850 made Douglas believe expansion was the best issue to unify the Democratic Party. His tolerance of slavery led Douglas to risk the possibility of slavery's expansion and caused him to gamble that antislavery sentiment was superficial. However, the Kansas–Nebraska Act, his signature piece of legislation, destroyed popular sovereignty's free-soil reputation and sparked a fierce backlash among many northerners. The emergence of the Republican Party, in addition, forced Douglas into a defensive position. He had to defend popular sovereignty, which was now irrevocably linked to slavery, and navigate unceasing proslavery demands from the southern wing...

The Election of 1860: "A Campaign Fraught with Consequences." by Michael F. Holt

Reviewed by: The Election of 1860: "A Campaign Fraught with Consequences."by Michael F. Holt Adam Chamberlain The Election of 1860: "A Campaign Fraught with Consequences."By Michael F. Holt. American Presidential Elections. ( Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2017. Pp. xvi, 256. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-7006-2487-4.) Michael F. Holt's book sets out to show how slavery, long considered the prime issue in the 1860 election, did not play that prominent a role in the campaign. Instead, the James Buchanan administration's incompetence and corruption were the targets of Republican efforts to win over former Millard Fillmore voters; only among Democrats, specifically in the South, did fears about the end of slavery motivate voting. To make this case, Holt begins with an exploration of the Republican and Democratic Parties in the run-up to nominations. He then launches into very thorough descriptions of the nominating conventions that ultimately selected Stephen A. Douglas, John Bell, Abraham [End Page 695]Lincoln, and John C. Breckinridge. Finally, the last two chapters cover the campaigns, with an emphasis on party messaging in the different regions of the country and how citizens voted. Holt does an excellent job of stressing the lack of importance of slavery to Republican appeals in 1860, while also casting light on southern Democrats' concerns that a Republican victory signaled strong anti-South sentiment throughout the North and an end to southern influence in the national government. The author's use of a variety of newspapers and primary source materials makes clear that Republicans running the campaign were focused more on Buchanan's corruption than on other issues, while Douglas and Breckinridge traded barbs over slavery. Bell's campaign reflected the belief that issues of slavery extension had just recently been settled once more and that a true Union Party, national in scope, was a better option than the Republicans and sectional Democratic candidates. Overall, the argument is well supported by the evidence presented. However, there is a danger in relying too heavily on newspaper articles and campaign rhetoric for understanding how white southerners perceived the Republican Party and how Republican leaders perceived the South. Even if not centerpieces of the campaign, the important roles played by former Liberty Party and Free-Soil Party men in the Republican Party signified that, of any party, it was the one decidedly opposed to slavery. Such a point could be lost on average voters in a campaign, but southern leaders and activists in the Democratic Party were certainly aware of this situation. As such, southerners could still perceive the Republicans as the greatest threat to slavery and the so-called southern way of life. Likewise, Republican Party elites generally understood that nominating a vocal abolitionist, or someone perceived to be one, would not play well with northern audiences. Most leaders were willing to moderate their rhetoric to win an election—a perfectly understandable electoral strategy for any political party. Yet the fact that Republican editors and leaders avoided the discussion of slavery and its extension, and often avoided discussions of southern power, in news reports and private campaign correspondence only shows that their focus was on the issues needed to win the presidential election. Regardless of the abolitionist sentiment of the population, leaders shaped outcomes in politics and led opinion—and if these Republican leaders still harbored concerns about the South and slavery, the ascendance of this regional party meant trouble to Democrats and to southerners. Therefore, slavery was still present in the campaign. Silence on the subject did not indicate that it played a marginal role, as questions of how to treat the subject, and what other issues to engage, shaped the campaign strategies of all political parties. Still, this criticism is more about perspective than content. Holt does an excellent job describing how the Buchanan administration's failings were front and center during the 1860 presidential campaign, and this well-written and well-researched book should appeal to a broad range of scholars. [End Page 696] Adam Chamberlain Coastal Carolina University Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

Benjamin Fagan. The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation.

Benjamin Fagan bases The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation on the primary narrative thread of black chosenness. He defines and defends this premise as a connecting theme present in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century African American newspapers. Working from this standpoint, Fagan pinpoints black newspaper publishers, several of whom were ministers, as the proponents of his black chosenness argument. The author also advances a secondary theme, arguing that a black nation existed within the American nation through the auspices of black newspaper articles and editorials. According to Fagan, the black chosen nation was alternately the New Israel, Babylon, or the wilderness, depending on the timing of the Civil War years (before, during, and after) and the readership of the individual black newspapers. Fagan’s unique text, which includes comparative American literature excerpts and biblical illustrations, primarily focuses on five African American periodicals, four printed in New York and one published in Canada. The author begins his study of black newspapers and black newspapermen by looking at Freedom’s Journal, America’s original African American paper, and its co-founders, the Reverend Samuel Cornish and the abolitionist John Brown Russworm. Fagan argues that the goal of their newspaper was to bring the Lord’s word to black readers by educating them in the social proprieties of white elite society. The author interprets Cornish’s didactic editorials as tutorials on “how to act chosen” (22). Expounding on this idea, Fagan uses biblical passages to suggest that Frederick Douglass’s North Star newspaper had the same intent: promotion of the black chosen nation. The author cites Douglass’s reporting of the French Revolution of 1848 as an example of the renowned abolitionist disagreeing with American exceptionalism but still supporting black chosenness. Fagan deduces that the North Star offered proof of the chosen black prophecy of deliverance, similar to the Israelites fighting against their Egyptian oppressors. The author insists that the North Star showed an interest in successful European revolutionary strategies in France and the British West Indies because it wanted to imitate these uprisings in slave-owning oppressive America. Fagan makes transnational connections throughout the pages of the North Star, including the formatting of newspaper columns and the ancestry of Douglass’s Scottish printer. The author, clarifying his black nation theme with examples of scripture, determines that the North Star had “uncoupled the promise of black chosenness from American identity” (94). Fagan could have strengthened this engaging historical position by situating the North Star’s Rochester newspaper office inside its western New York burned-over district. Free Soil Party newspapers, such as the Seneca County Courier, a paper Douglass supported because of its antislavery, temperance, and pro–woman’s rights stance, could have offered further contemporary interpretations of black chosenness.

The Growth of Third-Party Voting: An Empirical Case Study of Vermont, 1840–55

AbstractThis article seeks to uncover reasons behind the relatively high levels of third-party voting found at the state level in the early- to mid-1800s. I argue that third parties needed to develop localized bases of support from which they could expand. By analyzing Liberty Party gubernatorial voting in Vermont during the 1840s, the article shows that the party developed support in particular towns, maintained this over election cycles, and spread the party message to neighboring towns after the creation of a formal party organization. I also find that towns with strong Liberty Party support in the early 1840s continued to be strong supporters of the Free Soil Party in the 1850s. I then present evidence that early bases of Liberty Party support tended to vote at much higher levels for the Republican Party in 1855, indicating that the geographic development of an abolitionist party in the early 1840s helped in the establishment of Republican success in Vermont. These findings highlight the importance of geographic context in the development of third-party voting in the early- to mid-1800s and its connection to the rise of the Republican Party.

Civil War Senator: William Pitt Fessenden and the Fight to Save the American Republic

William Pitt Fessenden is best known for his vote in the Senate to acquit Andrew Johnson in the impeachment trial of 1868. But Robert J. Cook makes a strong case for Fessenden being important as a leading politician of the Civil War era. In this first biography of Fessenden in more than half a century, Cook describes him as a centrist antislavery Republican who helped guide the Union financial effort and successfully sought moderation in the treatment of the defeated Confederacy after the war. Born in 1806, Fessenden grew up in a Federalist home. He entered local politics as a National Republican and then Whig whose political path bore striking similarities to Abraham Lincoln’s. Both men were attorneys in frontier settings and both endorsed antislavery during the 1840s. Neither joined the Free Soil party and instead accepted Zachary Taylor's 1848 candidacy reluctantly. Both men were pragmatic politicians slow to give up their positions in the Whig party, but after joining the new Republican party, each assumed a dominant place in his state party. At the 1860 Republican convention each had an outside chance for a presidential nomination. Each remained party loyalists until his death.

The Illinois Political Realignment of 1844-1860: Revisiting the Analysis

The Illinois Political Realignment of 1844-1860:Revisiting the Analysis James L. Huston (bio) In Illinois as well as the rest of the nation, parties underwent continuous upheavals between the inaugurations of James K. Polk and Abraham Lincoln. The Free Soil Party flared into existence in 1848, the Know-Nothing Party (American Party) ruled numerous states for several years in the mid-1850s, the northern Democrats confronted a humiliating decline in numbers, and ultimately the Republicans came to dominate the northern landscape. Quantitative political historians between 1962 and 1990—the new political history—investigated this phenomenon extensively, referred to it as the realignment of the second-party system, and offered an interpretation that has since gone statistically uncontested. They argued that by 1850 the major political parties began to look alike on economic issues, and both the Whigs and Democrats underestimated the forces of temperance agitation and immigration that were upsetting the northern public. At the same time, the slavery issue came to a head in the Kansas-Nebraska Act, simultaneous with, to the eternal frustration of historians, the emergence of the American Party. These forces pulled a goodly portion of northern Democrats away from their party, brought new voters into the system, and realigned group party preferences. By 1860, the Republicans had eliminated the Know-Nothings as an alternative opposition party to the Democrats; the Republicans became the party of evangelical/pietists and especially New Englanders, while the Democrats represented immigrants/non-Yankees and liturgical/non-evangelicals—the latter reflecting the famous ethnocultural interpretation of nineteenth-century politics.1 Since 1990, only a few studies using the statistical apparatus of the new political history have appeared, and instead historians have drifted away from quantitative analysis and have focused instead on the multiple ramifications of the slavery issue by using literary sources. Historians have retreated from quantitative analysis too quickly, however, for the interpretation of the realignment of the 1850s had some holes and omissions. This [End Page 506] essay intends to explore those omissions by scrutinizing the experience of the state of Illinois between 1844 and 1856. Interpretation of the events of Illinois's antebellum politics comes in three versions. The first, and the traditional one, is that the slavery issue generated the upheaval of the party system.2 The second comes from the quantitative school in the form of the famous ethnocultural interpretation, most notably propagated by Paul Kleppner. The ethnocultural school belittled issues (e.g., slavery, tariff, internal improvements) and instead insisted that religious affiliation and ethnic identification determined party affiliation—evangelicals versus non-evangelicals, Anglo-Saxons versus Irish.3 The third interpretation of antebellum Illinois politics derives from the works of Stephen Hansen and William E. Gienapp. Hansen's monograph, explicitly rejecting ethnocultural considerations, posited that the state had an especially strong North-South division, and the greatest predictor of party strength was geography: the Democrats' stronghold was in southern counties and waned as politics moved northward; the Republicans were the reverse. Hansen detailed the realignment of the 1850s, and, although he dealt with the sudden appearance of the Know-Nothings, he emphatically emphasized the issue of slavery as the generator of the upheaval. Following ideas worked out by Michael F. Holt, Gienapp offered a different version of the ethnocultural interpretation for northern politics. As one of the molders of the new political history interpretation of the realignment of the 1850s, he held to its central propositions of the decline of economic issues and the emergence of the cultural issues of nativism and temperance. In Illinois Gienapp found a weakened nativist movement, but he held that both nativism and the slavery issue enticed Yankees of New England descent to desert the Democrats and become pillars of the Republican Party by 1856, an outcome that reflected Hansen's North-South party division. However, Gienapp summarized that new and young voters flooded into the Republican ranks and that the gateway to their final destination was the Know-Nothing Party.4 These studies had omissions that deserve attention. First, they failed to investigate the Democrats, focusing most attention on the Republicans and nativists. Second, the analyses commenced in 1848 or 1850, but the timing needs to be extended back...

Party over Section: The Rough and Ready Presidential Election of 1848 (review)

Reviewed by: Party over Section: The Rough and Ready Presidential Election of 1848 Matthew Isham Party over Section: The Rough and Ready Presidential Election of 1848. By Joel H. Silbey. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009. ISBN: 978-0-7006-1640-3, 224 pp., cloth, $34.95. This slim volume by Joel Silbey marks the first significant historical treatment of the landmark 1848 election in roughly forty years. It is a brisk and cogent analysis of an election campaign that many historians have seen as a harbinger of the breakdown of the two-party system and the coming of the Civil War. Nearly forty years ago, Joseph Rayback hailed the third-party Free Soil campaign of 1848 as the first conscious attempt in American history to found a political party dedicated to the pursuit of human rights. Indeed, the political antislavery movement was akin to democratic revolutions that spread across Europe that same year, before being snuffed out by state power. Free Soilers destabilized the existing party system by changing the terms of the national debate over slavery's expansion. However, Silbey contends that this romanticized view of the election misses the real lessons of 1848. Instead, that election demonstrated the strength and stability of the major parties and the weakness of the nascent political antislavery movement. Silbey dispassionately and incisively concludes, "as in Europe in 1848, in the end, the dominant forces proved not to be the challengers but the more traditional players in the political arena who were able to retain control of the process and the outcome" (153). Those traditional players were the Whigs and Democrats who had defined the second American party system since 1832. Echoing familiar themes of partisan development, Silbey succinctly describes how these parties subsequently became deeply embedded in society, reflecting and reifying the ethno-cultural divisions of an increasingly diverse society. Democrats tended to appeal to a [End Page 179] diverse array of immigrants, faiths (particularly Catholics), small producers and laborers, while Whigs appealed largely to commercially minded, nativeborn Protestants. Both parties fused ethno-cultural appeals with divergent principles and platforms. Through systematic organization and frequent, boisterous campaigning, the parties garnered the deep loyalty of voters who internalized their political principles. Silbey's deft and detailed description of organized electioneering is one of the pleasures of this book, illustrating how the partisan campaigns entertained and edified the electorate, soliciting voters' emotional as well as intellectual investment in the political system. The parties' deep roots in the electorate enabled them to withstand the political storm that erupted over the potential extension of slavery into federal territories gained in the Mexican War. Those who were dissatisfied with the parties' reluctance to restrict slavery from these territories coalesced into the Free Soil Party. However, despite attracting thousands of disaffected Democrats in New York to their standard, the Free Soilers gained few defectors from the major parties. In explaining this result, the book reiterates familiar conclusions from the author's prolific scholarship. Slavery did not supersede the issues that had traditionally divided the major parties, and a significant drop in voter turnout in 1848 suggested that voters preferred to abstain rather than abandon their party when dissatisfied with their electoral options. This low voter turnout, not the Free Soil challenge, determined the outcome of the election in the Whigs' favor. Party over Section is a useful primer on the second-party system, as well as a sharp analysis of traditional partisan strength in the 1848 election. However, one wonders if one campaign can accurately indicate the relative strength or weakness of a political party, or the system in which it operates. Though the Democrats and Whigs turned back the Free Soil challenge relatively easily in 1848, they remained stricken by persistent intra-party factionalism (over economic policy, slavery and host of other issues) in several states. Indeed, this factionalism is a vital factor in assessing the relative health of these organizations. Tightly focused on the election itself (it is part of the American Presidential Elections series by the University Press of Kansas), the book eschews that issue. Despite this concern, this volume will be eminently useful for scholars of this momentous campaign in particular and students...

Party over section: the rough and ready presidential election of 1848

The presidential campaign of 1848 saw the first strong electoral challenge to the expansion of slavery in the United States; most historians consider the appearance of the Free Soil Party in that election a major turning point of the nineteenth century. The three-way race capped a decade of political turmoil that had raised the issue of slavery to unprecedented prominence on the national stage and brought about critical splits in the two major parties. In the first book in four decades devoted to the 1848 election, Joel Silbey clarifies our understanding of a pivotal moment in American history. The election of Whig Zachary Taylor, hero of the Mexican War, over Democrat Lewis Cass and Free Soiler Martin Van Buren followed a particularly bitter contest, a fierce political storm in an already tumultuous year marked by the first significant attempt by antislavery advocates to win the presidency. Silbey describes what occurred during that election and why it turned out as it did, offering a nuanced look at the interaction of the forces shaping the direction of politics in mid-nineteenth century America. He explains how the Free Soilers went about their reform movement and why they failed as they ran up against the tenacious grip that the existing two-party structure had on the political system and the behavior of the nation's voters. For Whigs and Democrats it was politics as usual as they stressed economic, cultural, and ideological issues that had divided the country for the previous twenty years. Silbey describes the new confrontation between the force of tradition and a new and different way of thinking about the political world. He shows that ultimately, when America went to the polls, northerners and southerners alike had more on their minds than slavery. Nevertheless, while Van Buren managed to attract only 10 percent of the vote, his party's presence foreshadowed a more successful challenge in the future. Emphasizing both persistent party commitments and the reformers' lack of political muscle, Silbey expertly delineates the central issues of an election framed by intense partisanship and increasing sectional anger. If 1848 did not yet mark the death rattle of traditional politics, this insightful book shows us its importance as a harbinger of change.

Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform Kristen Tegtmeier Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform. By Bruce Laurie. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. 328. Cloth, $65.00; paper, $23.99.) In Beyond Garrison, Bruce Laurie acknowledges the profound influence the Bay State's famous native son had on shaping the abolitionist movement in New England. Laurie urges us, however, to push through Garrison's apolitical "moral dead end" (5) and accept the claim that "politics had meaning and significance extending beyond Garrison" (9). Laurie's detailed study of the roots of antislavery politics in Massachusetts offers historians a fresh interpretation of the demographic and ideological base of the antislavery movement. Perhaps most important, however, he demonstrates how Bay State politicians linked antislavery concerns with other social reforms, such as the ten-hour movement and temperance, and thus strengthened, rather than weakened, the effectiveness of antislavery politics. Ultimately Laurie argues that "political action was an effective strategy consistent with moral rectitude and not a naïve plunge into a smarmy world of compromise and accommodation" (5). Moving beyond Garrison and his allies, Laurie points to men like Elizur Wright and Lewis Hayden and the "ordinary" citizens who fueled political abolitionism as the most successful leaders of Bay State antislavery activism. Laurie charts the evolution of antislavery politics from its origins in evangelical Protestantism and Garrisonian abolitionism to the rise and fall of the Liberty party, the creation of the Free Soil party and its coalition with Democrats, and the beginnings of the Republican party. Through biographical narratives and a thorough examination of voting behavior and demographics, Laurie demonstrates the importance of men "of the country" from "middling families" who embraced the utility of political action. Elizur Wright, Rev. Joshua Leavitt, and William S. Robinson are just a few of the many politicians, journalists, and activists who Laurie unearths from the ashes of Garrisonian abolitionism; he follows their path toward partisan antislavery vehicles like the Liberty party. He also underscores the importance of free blacks like Lewis Hayden and John Swett Rock in pressing white reformers to enact civil rights legislation. Laurie claims that "black activists were emphatically more combative" than whites [End Page 205] in their resistance to segregation and the fugitive slave law and applauds their rejection of the "non-resistance" abolitionism touted by most Garrisonians and politicos alike (253–54). In addition, Laurie makes the trenchant observation that some of the most effective antislavery politicians opposed "all kinds of slavery, wherever it exist[ed]," referring specifically to labor reform in the textile mills but also referencing the efforts of many Bay Staters to liberate their peers from the liquor bottle (147). Laurie shows that by supporting the ten-hour movement in the 1840s and the Maine Law in 1852, the supposed single-issue antislavery parties actually gained support and widened their political base. He also eschews the predominant view that abolitionism's strength was grounded only in middle-class, educated urbanites who lived in Boston. Instead, he finds some of the movement's most radical champions in industrial centers like Lowell, where working women like Sarah Bagley participated in the "cross-fertilization of abolitionism and labor reform" (145). Laurie reveals one of the weaknesses of his study by highlighting Bagley, however. Laurie features Bagley's courageous leadership of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, but Bagley is only one of the numerous reform-minded women who undoubtedly influenced political abolitionism in the 1840s and 1850s. If Bagley could encourage voters to link wage slavery with plantation slavery, as Laurie says she did, then other women like Abby Kelley and Lydia Maria Child certainly held sway with Liberty and Free Soil men in their home state. But Laurie almost wholly neglects women's antislavery activism, an oversight that could have been forgiven had recent studies by Julie Roy Jeffrey (1998), Melanie Gustafson (2001), and Susan Zaeske (2003) not provided numerous examples of how women participated in sectional politics. While it is true that many political abolitionists eschewed the "woman question," it is not the case that antislavery women were wholly divorced from political action. Although Laurie may have underestimated the significance of female politicos, he did provide...

Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform. By Bruce Laurie. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp 328. Cloth $65.00; paper $23.99.) In Beyond Garrison, Bruce Laurie acknowledges the profound influence the Bay State's famous native son had on shaping the abolitionist movement in New England. However, Laurie urges us to push through Garrison's apolitical "moral dead end" (5) and accept the claim that "Politics had meaning and significance extending beyond Garrison" (9). Laurie's detailed study of the roots and multiple manifestations of antislavery politics in Massachusetts offers historians a fresh interpretation of the demographic and ideological base of the antislavery movement. Perhaps most importantly, however, he demonstrates how Bay State politicians linked antislavery concerns with other social reforms, like the ten-hour movement and temperance, and thus strengthened, rather than weakened, the effectiveness of antislavery politics. Ultimately Laurie argues that "political action was an effective strategy consistent with moral rectitude and not a naïve plunge into a smarmy world of compromise and accommodation" (5). One consequence of the study is to expand the focus from only Garrison and his followers when asking why Massachusetts integrated its common schools in 1855 or why state legislators supported personal liberty laws as early as 1843. Instead, Laurie points to men like Elizur Wright and Lewis Hayden and the "ordinary" men and women who fueled political abolitionism as the most successful leaders of Bay State antislavery activism. Laurie charts the evolution of antislavery politics from its origins in evangelical Protestantism and Garrisonian abolitionism to the rise and fall of the Liberty Party, the creation of the Free Soil party and its coalition with Democrats, and [End Page 100] the beginnings of the Republican party. Through biographical narratives and a thorough examination of voting behavior and demographics, Laurie demonstrates the importance of men "of the country" from "middling families" who embraced the utility of political action. He also highlights the importance of free blacks in pressing white reformers to enact civil rights legislation; he claims that "black activists were emphatically more combative" than white ones in their resistance to segregation and the fugitive slave law and applauds their courage and leadership in their rejection of the "non-resistance" abolitionism touted by most Garrisonians and politicos (253–54). In addition, Laurie makes the trenchant observation that some of the most effective antislavery politicians opposed "all kinds of slavery, wherever it exist[ed]," referring specifically to labor reform in the textile mills but also referencing the efforts of many Bay Staters to liberate their peers from the liquor bottle (147). Laurie shows that by supporting the ten-hour movement in the 1840s and the Maine Law in 1852, the supposed single-issue antislavery parties actually gained support and widened their political base. He also eschews the predominant view that abolitionism's strength was grounded in middle-class urbanites who lived in Boston. Instead, he finds some of the movement's most radical champions in industrial centers like Lowell, where working women like Sarah Bagley participated in the "cross-fertilization of abolitionism and labor reform" (145). Laurie, however, reveals one of the weaknesses of his study by highlighting Bagley. Her story reminds us that women played meaningful roles in the political sphere, even if they could not cast their own ballots. Laurie gives Bagley her historical due as he illustrates her courageous leadership of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association. But Bagley and her Lowell cohorts are only a few of the numerous reform-minded women who undoubtedly influenced political abolitionism in the 1840s and 1850s. If Bagley could encourage voters to link wage slavery with plantation slavery, then other women like Abby Kelley and Lydia Maria Child certainly held sway with Liberty and Free Soil men in their home state. Laurie almost wholly neglects women's antislavery activism, an oversight that could have been forgiven if recent studies by Julie Roy Jeffrey (1998), Melanie Gustafson (2001), and Susan Zaeske (2003) had not provided numerous examples of how women participated in sectional politics. While it is true that many political abolitionists eschewed the "woman question," believing it to be outside the...

Jane Grey Swisshelm: An Unconventional Life, 1815-1884 (review)

Reviewed by: Jane Grey Swisshelm: An Unconventional Life, 1815-1884 Nancy Isenberg (bio) Jane Grey Swisshelm: An Unconventional Life, 1815-1884. By Sylvia D. Hoffert. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). Pp. 255. Illustrations. Cloth, $39.95.) Jane Swisshelm was one of the most important journalists of the nineteenth century. She wrote for the New York Tribune and the New York Times and edited several papers on her own: the Pittsburgh Saturday Visitor, the St. Cloud [Minnesota] Visitor, and The Reconstructionist, in Washington, DC. She is best known as an abolitionist and women's rights reformer, but her "unconventional life" included an unusual marriage, most of which she spent living apart from her husband while pursuing a career. Her Scottish Covenanter religious upbringing gave her a critical view of American society and politics, making her an uncompromising opponent of slavery and a vocal advocate for women's political and economic rights. Whether living in the nation's capital, or publishing a paper on the Minnesota frontier, she saw herself as a radical reformer and critic. Swisshelm remained deeply conscious of the need to preserve her respectability as she challenged social norms. She was not only a journalist, but a working woman as well. She charted new ground by entering a trade dominated by men: newspaper publishing. Sylvia D. Hoffert focuses on how Swisshelm developed a professional code of behavior for women that allowed them to work alongside men. As an editor, a Civil War nurse, and a government clerk, she had enough variety of experience to enable her to conceive of a way for women to succeed: they should be [End Page 513] careful to separate their professional identities from their feminine roles. For women to achieve recognition, they had to appear less like sexual beings. According to Swisshelm's understanding of the workplace, Hoffert writes, women had to leave their feminine ways at home and "separate their identities as workers from their identities as women" (88). Swisshelm was never afraid of entering the contentious world of partisan politics. She endorsed the Free Soil Party in 1848, advocating what she called "Free Democracy," and finally committed herself to the Republican Party. When she moved to St. Cloud, Minnesota, in 1857, to start the St. Cloud Visitor, she left her husband behind. Unable to steer clear of politics, she battled the Democratic Party boss, contributing to his electoral defeat. During the Civil War, she moved to Washington, where she received a patronage position in the federal government. There, in 1865, she started The Reconstructionist, which openly attacked President Andrew Johnson's policies. Hoffert does not sugarcoat Swisshelm's political career. While she remained an ardent abolitionist, supported equal educational opportunities for blacks, and defended the nascent women's rights movement, Swisshelm always saw herself first and foremost as a public critic. So she did not shy even from criticizing the very reformers she endorsed. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton remarked, "she is forever saying something we wish unsaid" (148). Living on the Minnesota frontier as the Civil War opened, Swisshelm developed views of Native Americans that were drastically changed by the Dakota wars of 1862. Initially espousing a kind of romantic racism, idealizing the proud Indian, she quickly took up a virulent kind of fear-mongering, seeking revenge for the murders of white settlers. She supported vigilantism and even the extermination of certain tribes. She wrote that Minnesotans should make sure that "three red skins shall die" for "every white person killed" and that hunting parties should collect scalps to intimidate Indian leaders (153). Her language was harsh, hyperbolic, and racist. Yet Swisshelm never recognized any similarity between her brand of racism and that of the white supremacists whom she ridiculed in antislavery editorials. Swisshelm's life was riddled with contradictions. She claimed that she was defending the institution of marriage, and yet she spent most of her own marriage living apart from her husband. She defended the right of southerners to secede from the Union in terms comparable to the ending of a business partnership or marriage: a state could leave if it "wants to get out," and a contract should be easily "dissolved by mutual consent" [End Page...

Regulating Slavery: Deck-Stacking and Credible Commitment in the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850

In 1850, Congress delegated federal judicial powers to a new bureaucracy that was devoted to capturing escaped slaves in free states and returning them to their owners. The Fugitive Slave Act was an attempt to enhance the credibility of a commitment made in the Constitution`s Article IV § 2, which had gone unenforced for more than half a century. This article demonstrates how Congress engaged in deck-stacking, engineering the administrative structure and judicial procedures of the fugitive slave rendition process in ways that favored slave-holding interests. Analysis of votes by members of Congress on final passage of the act and amendments to the act demonstrate the political influences on choices of process. I demonstrate that regional (free versus slave state), partisan (Whig versus Democrat), and electoral (Free Soil party support) calculations all play a role in determining the likelihood of a legislator voting for the antislavery position. Moreover, political conflict was muted when amendments dealt mainly with structural issues, but was amplified when the amendment's content was procedural.

Regulating Slavery: Deck-Stacking and Credible Commitment in the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850

In 1850, Congress delegated federal judicial powers to a new bureaucracy that was devoted to capturing escaped slaves in free states and returning them to their owners. The Fugitive Slave Act was an attempt to enhance the credibility of a commitment made in the Constitution's Article IV § 2, which had gone unenforced for more than half a century. This article demonstrates how Congress engaged in deck-stacking , engineering the administrative structure and judicial procedures of the fugitive slave rendition process in ways that favored slave-holding interests. Analysis of votes by members of Congress on final passage of the act and amendments to the act demonstrate the political influences on choices of process. I demonstrate that regional (free versus slave state), partisan (Whig versus Democrat), and electoral (Free Soil party support) calculations all play a role in determining the likelihood of a legislator voting for the antislavery position. Moreover, political conflict was muted when amendments dealt mainly with structural issues, but was amplified when the amendment's content was procedural. Copyright 2003, Oxford University Press.

The Making of the Ex‐Presidents, 1797–1993: Six Recurrent Models

Historians have long indulged in the exercise of categorizing U.S. presidents into groupings such as great, average, and failures. Given the expanded profiles now enjoyed by retired chief executives, it is perhaps time to subject ex-presidents to similar scrutiny and classification. To date, there have been forty-two presidents, counting the ever-pesky Grover Cleveland twice. Excluding the incumbents, the eight presidents who died in office, and James Polk and Chester Arthur (who lived too brief time after leaving office to considered here), thirty-one presidents remain for our study. Each can appropriately placed into one of the following six categories: Still Ambitious, Exhausted Volcanoes, Political Dabblers, First Citizens, Embracers of Cause, and Seekers of Vindication. This article first describes these categories and the ex-presidents included within them. It then concludes with some summary observations and assessments about the ex-presidency. Still Ambitious The Still Ambitious ex-presidents are those whose appetites for power remained unsated even after serving in the nation's highest political office. Surely, William Herndon's famous description of his law partner's ambition as a little engine that knew no rest(1) applies at least as much to the five ex-presidents in this group as it did to Abraham Lincoln. Few men have left the presidency with as much unfulfilled ambition as did Martin Van Buren. After suffering defeat in his 1840 reelection bid against William Henry Harrison, Van Buren retired to New York. He longed for comeback. As the 1844 Democratic Convention approached, Van Buren seemed the near certain nominee. Then, he and his Whig rival Henry Clay issued simultaneous letters opposing the immediate annexation of slaveholding Texas, ploy to keep this issue out of the upcoming campaign. The maneuver enraged southern Democrats and expansionists, and Van Buren lost the nomination to dark horse candidate Polk. Although Van Buren now claimed he was sincerely and heartily desirous to wear the honors and enjoyments of private life uninterruptedly to the end,(2) his ambition resurfaced in 1848, just as the slavery issue was intensifying sectionalist tensions. That year, his opposition to slavery and support of the Wilmot Proviso secured him the presidential nomination of the Free Soil party. Defeated yet again, Van Buren retired for good. He died in July 1862. After two scandal-ridden terms, Ulysses Grant should have retired from politics in 1877. But he missed the glory and acclaim of the presidency, and in 1880 he allowed his name to go before the Republican Convention. He led on the first thirty-five tallies but ultimately lost the nomination to James Garfield. More misfortune plagued Grant's final years. Bankrupt and diagnosed with terminal throat cancer, he hurriedly completed his memoirs to earn money for his wife. He died in July 1885. want you to take good care of all the furniture and ornaments in the house, for I want to find everything just as it is now when we come back again. So instructed Frances Cleveland to White House servant as the First Lady and her husband, Grover, left to attend the inauguration of Benjamin Harrison, who had defeated Cleveland in 1888. We are coming back just four years from today,(3) Mrs. Cleveland promised. Her husband had won more popular votes than Harrison (but lost in the electoral college), he had been the only Democrat since the Civil War to win the presidency, and no one else of stature was available. Thus, Cleveland's renomination in 1892 was ensured, and this time he won, attaining an unprecedented second, nonconsecutive term. After winning the presidential election of 1904, Theodore Roosevelt pledged never to be candidate for or accept another nomination.(4) Later, he admitted that he would have willingly cut off his right hand not to have uttered that promise. …

Crusaders and Compromisers: Essays on the Relationship of the Antislavery Struggle to the Antebellum Party System (review)

84CIVIL WAR HISTORY Loren Schweninger deserves special mention. He was much more than merely the editor of this book. If there is such a literary figure as a coautobiographer , then he deserves the appellation. He has done a meticulous and masterful job of historical reconstruction, transforming a fragmentary and incomplete manuscript into a significant and comprehensible work of history. By way of extensive footnotes, he has identified every important and nearly every obscure individual mentioned by Thomas. Moreover he has included a fine biographical essay of Thomas's whole life. It is safe to assume that Thomas himself spent less time compiling his account than Schweninger did restoring and enhancing it. William C. Hine South Carolina State College Crusaders and Compromisers: Essays on the Relationship of the Antislavery Struggle to the Antebellum Party System. Edited by Alan M. Kraut. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983. Pp. xii, 286. $35.00.) This collection promises the reader "nine fresh essays on the relationship between abolitionism and politics" and a "conservative perspective on abolitionism that seeks to separate the reformers from the coming of the [Civil] war." It is not entirely successful. Despite brave attempts to cut loose from the baleful influence of the "Civil War synthesis," half the essays conclude with a peroration in which the guns of Sumter can definitely be heard. And while the essays may indeed be "fresh," not all of them break new ground, but rather turn over some turf that has seen the plough before. The book is divided into three uneven parts: the first section (five essays) deals with the mutual relationship between abolitionism and partisanship , the second (one essay) with "anti-abolitionism" in politics, and the third (three essays) with the relationship between reformers and society at large. Both the traditional and the quantitative methodologies are represented, as well as those that gain insight from other disciplines. Those essays that deal with abolitionism and political parties, while comprehensive and well researched, offer the least in terms of originality . The main point in James B. Stewart's essay on the tensions between the antislavery proclivities of most northern Whigs and thepartisan obligations to their fellows in the South were anticipated some time ago in Joel Silbey's The Shrine ofParty. Richard Sewell's discussion ofthe racial attitudes of the Free-Soilers is not unlike that of Eric Foner, who also made a case for the equalitarian tendencies of that party. Phyllis Field uses regression analysis to demonstrate that support for black suffrage in New York was strongest in those counties settled by New Englanders and which had once voted Whig and/or Free-Soil, but this has been said before. John R. McKivigan's discovery that the one-issue politics did not BOOK REVIEWS85 attract many votes after 1844 and that the Free-Soil party appealed to abolitionists and non-abolitionists alike will not surprise many. More intriguing is Alan Kraut's study of the Liberty party's ready acceptance of "modern" campaign methods of barbeques, rallies, and other techniques, while clinging nonetheless to a "traditional" ideological and religious view of the political process. Joel Silbey's essay on the Democrats as the party of antislavery continues and extends his and Lee Benson's analysis of the antebellum political system, and reinforces the view of the Democrats as the most resilient and consistently pluralist political party of the century. The two boldest essays are those by Edward Magdol, who attempts to use antislavery petitions from four cities (three in New York and one in Massachusetts) to understand better the social and economic background of abolitionism; and Nancy Hewitt, who uses the collective biographies of members of competing women's antislavery groups in western New York to learn more about the differences between female moral suasionists and those women who supported political abolitionism and who tended to accept a subordinate status for females generally. Both essays are suggestive only. Magdol belives he has evidence of working-class support for abolition in his four cities and Hewitt argues for differences in occupational, geographic, and religious background between her two groups. But the samples used in each case are not large enough to carry the weight of the questions asked...

The Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier

These letters of a man deeply concerned about his country, directly involved in political action, and torn, as Civil War approached, by conflict between his abolitionist zeal and his Quaker pacifism--letters here collected for first time and many of them hitherto unpublished--shatter stereotype of Whittier as the good gray poet. The many letters to such figures as John Quincy Adams, Charles Sumner, and William Lloyd Garrison form a detailed record of abolitionist movement from its inception to its merging with Free Soil party in 1850s. The first two volumes reproduce all extant letters from 1828 to 1860, with full annotations. The last volume is selective, excluding several thousand perfunctory items and including only historically or biographically interesting letters of last three decades of poet's life.