No Taint of Compromise: Crusaders in Antislavery Politics (review)

Fredrick Blue's collective biography of ten antislavery activists adds a fresh and important dimension to our understanding of the antislavery movement in the 1840s and 1850s. Focusing on less-prominent figures, Blue greatly enhances our understanding of the antislavery movement generally and the politics of sectionalism in particular. Examining the private and public lives of individuals as diverse as Alvan Stewart and Jessie Benton Frémont and Charles Langston and David Wilmot, Blue analyzes their motivation to become politically active in politics, their antislavery ideology, and their varying commitments to equal rights for African Americans. He places them on a spectrum that ranges from an early commitment to the Liberty Party (Stewart and John Greenleaf Whittier, for example) to those who came to the antislavery movement later with the advent of the Republican Party (Frémont and Benjamin Wade). Each, however, was intensely committed to stopping the expansion of slavery and saw politics as the means to that end.

Common threads bind together the lives of these activists. Central to their commitment to antislavery was a religious background that issued in the conviction that slavery was immoral. This sets them apart from other more conservative—or less enlightened—opponents of slavery who were largely concerned about the institution only as it affected white society and republican politics. These activists found their commitment to antislavery politics a difficult one, occasioned as it was by hostility and threats from those less sympathetic to the plight of the enslaved. Save for David Wilmot, they also distanced themselves but were not entirely free from nineteenth-century racial stereotypes. Although they varied in their commitment to the enfranchisement of blacks, all (again, save for Wilmot) were determined to grant African Americans basic human and political rights.

What most united these ten and set them apart from abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison was their conviction that political activism best served the antislavery movement. And here the Mexican-American War seemed to be a turning point, and an ironic one at that. On the one hand, it raised and made salient the question of slavery extension and thus heightened sectional tensions that focused on the institution. On the other, Wilmot's proviso had the effect (though not the intent) of blunting more radical antislavery activity by shifting its focus to restriction (not abolition) and making politics (not moral suasion) the broad-based grounds on which that contest would be fought. What Blue suggests is that "radical" antislavery activism is less a category than a continuum: if Whittier, Jane Swisshelm, and Owen Lovejoy were less extreme in their attacks on slavery than Garrison or Wendell Phillips, they were certainly no less committed to its elimination and to the advancement of equal rights.

Blue's analysis of this antislavery cohort also illuminates and gives substance to the positions of those radicals and conservatives who opposed them. Thus, he expands and enriches the political landscape of the Middle Period. Separately and together, these biographies begin to map a path by which the moral element of abolitionism intersects with the antislavery politics of Free Soil Democrats and Republicans. Finally, Blue reminds us that abolitionism and the politics of antislavery were deeply personal, intensely felt, and mutually reinforcing. This is the rare collective biography in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.