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3 Preserving the Republic while Defeating the Slave Power, 1848–1865 F or two decades, the men who would create the liberal republican movement were in the vanguard of the antislavery fight. As noted in chapter 2, many of them had belonged to the short-lived Free Soil Party, including Free Soil vice-presidential candidate Charles Francis Adams, and they had been instrumental in forming the subsequent antislavery party, the Republicans , in the mid-1850s. Some of the liberal republicans had found political parties too slow in attacking slavery and took more radical steps. In 1856 twentynine -year-old Edward Atkinson helped raise over a thousand dollars to equip John Brown with rifles and ammunition; that same year, twenty-two-year-old Horace White served as assistant secretary for the Chicago branch of the National Kansas Committee, which armed three hundred men sent to defend the free-state Topeka government. Their struggle against slavery put the liberal republicans in the minority during much of the Civil War era, and they often faced political and personal repercussions. Adams, the son and grandson of presidents, lost much of his influence in Massachusetts politics during the early 1850s because of his unwillingness to compromise Free Soil principles. William Cullen Bryant’s antislavery activities hurt his literary career, as Southern editors refused to print favorable notices about his work.1 While many of the liberal republicans opposed slavery for the ethical and religious reasons common to abolitionists, the majority saw slavery primarily as a threat to the survival of republican government in the United States. During a campaign speech for Ulysses S. Grant in 1868, Carl Schurz would explain that the Civil War came about because ‘‘in the South there existed a peculiar interest and institution—namely, slavery and the aristocratic class government inseparable from involuntary labor, which in its very nature was antagonistic to the fundamental principles upon which our democratic system of government rests.’’ Once the Civil War began, the liberal republicans continued to agitate against slavery. During the war Atkinson became secretary of the New England Freedmen’s Aid Society, which assisted recently freed slaves in South Carolina. Both Charles Francis Adams Jr. and William M. Grosvenor commanded African American regiments. Lyman Trumbull wrote the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. Despite the liberal republicans’ commitment to ending slavery , however, and their even stronger dedication to preserving the Union, they 52 The Doom of Reconstruction demonstrated reluctance to support the Republican Party’s war measures, many of which entailed enlarging the federal government and centralizing power in Washington. Traditional republicanism was a primary force in shaping the liberal republicans’ thoughts and actions throughout their two-decadeslong struggle to end slavery.2 Charles Francis Adams addressed the crowd on the first day of the 1848 Free Soil Convention. He described the coming presidential election ‘‘as a contest between truth and falsehood, between the principle of Liberty and the rule of slavery,’’ and insisted that ‘‘the question now before us is one, which involves the proposition whether we shall adhere to the solemn principles of the Declaration of Independence; whether we shall deduce government from the consent of the governed.’’ The crowd, which included several future liberal republicans, responded ‘‘Yes, yes, that’s the question.’’ The issue on which Adams and his fellow Free Soilers agreed was that slaveowners, while only a minority of the population, essentially controlled the federal government. By means of the three-fifths clause in the Constitution—the stipulation that every slave counted as three-fifths of a person in determining representation in Congress—and other intricacies of the antebellum political system, slaveowners held disproportionate power in the United States government, and they used this power to protect slavery. Adams and other Free Soilers considered this ‘‘Slave Power’’ aggressive and tyrannical, willing to destroy republican government in order to preserve the institution of slavery. Though the Free Soil Party was crushed at the polls in 1848, Edward Atkinson wrote to a friend weeks after the election, ‘‘I hope and believe that southern domination is at an end. The North is discovered!!’’3 The North, or more precisely the Republican Party, did eventually discover the idea of the Slave Power in fighting against the South and slavery. Michael F. Holt explains that the ‘‘identification of the enemy as the ‘Slave Power’ had profound ideological ramifications with the electorate because Americans had believed since the era of the American Revolution that power in any form was the mortal enemy...

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