Abolitionist Politics

Historians have disparaged the Liberty Party, which, during the 1840s, pioneered independent antislavery politics in the United States. In 1887 Theodore Roosevelt, who believed Liberty votes cost his hero Henry Clay the presidency, declared: "The Liberty Party . . . committed a political crime, evil in almost all its consequences. They in no sense . . . helped forward the Anti-slavery cause." In 1933 Gilbert H. Barnes, who concentrated on abolitionism during the 1830s, characterized the Liberty Party as a "most pathetic residue of antislavery organization." In 1973 Aileen S. Kraditor, who admired William Lloyd Garrison's band of social perfectionists, asserted that the Liberty Party had been "conceived in frustration, acted out a farce, and died in betrayal." Eight years later, Lawrence J. Friedman included the Liberty Party in his dismissal of American abolitionists as ineffectual dilettantes. "Sectional conflict, Civil War, and legal emancipation," Friedman wrote, "would probably have occurred even if there had been no active abolition movement."¹

In light of these remarks, one might wonder about the utility of Reinhard O. Johnson's 500-page book on the Liberty Party, a tiny third party that existed for eight years and had (at best) limited success at the polls. One might wonder too that the book could be, as its dust jacket claims, "epic in scope." Johnson employs a topical organization that precludes sweeping narrative and encourages repetition as he approaches the party from different perspectives. His prose is often labored, and there is little drama. It may be that the book is a better Liberty encyclopedia than a history.

Yet Johnson's tome is an impressive accomplishment. It is a monumental account of a little party that—contrary to Roosevelt, Barnes, Kraditor, and Friedman—positively influenced antislavery politics and the North-South struggle. The Liberty Party will stand as the definitive account of the organization. It is thorough, extremely well researched, and in accord with the best scholarship on the antislavery movement. It will especially interest those who study the antislavery movement, antebellum politics, and third parties in the American two-party system.

Johnson is the first to devote an entire book to the Liberty Party. For many years Theodore Clarke Smith's The Liberty and Free Soil Parties in the Northwest, published in 1897 (reprint 1969), provided the only sustained study of Liberty abolitionists, albeit in a single region. Not until 1976 did Richard H. Sewell's Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States, 1837-1860 (1976) place the party in a wider framework and delineate its principal factions. The lacuna between Smith and Sewell explains some of the derogatory comments about the party. Johnson's positive assessment owes a great deal to Sewell, to recent state-level studies, and to biographies of Liberty leaders. One of Johnson's strengths is how carefully he has read these publications. While he acknowledges minor points where he disagrees with the facts they adduce and interpretations they present, his study is to a great degree a synthesis of them.

Johnson portrays the Liberty Party from its formation in April 1840 to its absorption into the Free Soil Party in August 1848. Several themes predominate. First Johnson reminds readers that, after 1840, political abolitionists, rather than Garrisonian agitators, dominated the Northern effort to end slavery in the South. By 1840, Garrisonians constituted a small minority among abolitionists. They differed in ideology and tactics from Liberty abolitionists.

Second, Johnson shows how antislavery politics changed over time. Since the mid-1700s, abolitionists had attempted to influence the political system. Under Garrison's leadership, the American Anti-Slavery Society (organized in 1833) called for "the people of the free states to remove slavery by moral and political action, as prescribed in the constitution of the United States."² But AASS tactics of petitioning Congress, appealing to white conscience, and questioning Whig and Democratic candidates failed to have a positive impact. Instead these tactics provoked proslavery violence, congressional prohibition of antislavery petitions, and denunciation.^3...