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

In No Taint of Compromise, Frederick Blue offers brief biographies of a disparate group of eleven antislavery reformers in "a study of the varieties of American antislavery political leadership" (x). Admirably embracing a broad definition of political antislavery, Blue's subjects include politicians, journalists, clergy, politically active women, and a prominent member of the African American convention movement. Ranging from the comparatively obscure to the familiar, Blue has selected subjects who, he argues, played critical, if not necessarily central, roles in the antislavery movement.

As a collective biography, this book does not so much engage in ongoing debates concerning the complex social and cultural context of antislavery reform. Rather, the work is tightly focused on the individual development of antislavery thought and action among his leaders of the political antislavery movement. To this end he mines familiar sources, including diaries, speeches, and sermons, to ascertain his actors' antislavery motivations. Blue's methodology avoids the reductionism that has plagued some ethno-cultural analyses of antislavery reform as a mere proxy conflict between warring classes and ethnic groups. However, it also strips away some of the aforementioned context that helps explain the rise of antislavery and a host of other reform movements in the antebellum era. The result is a book that scholars of antislavery and antebellum politics will find most useful in its detailed reconstruction of the development of individual antislavery thought among crucial actors in the movement, some of whom we previously have known little about.

All this is not to say that this book does not also contribute to ongoing debates concerning the antislavery movement. As the title of this work suggests, Blue implicitly challenges interpretations of political antislavery as a mere temporizing of abolitionist principles. He maintains that the compromising of individual principles in the transition from the radical Liberty party to the more moderate Free Soil and Republican parties did not outweigh the steadfast commitment of his subjects to a political attack on slavery. Although his subjects came to support political antislavery at different times for myriad reasons, their antislavery convictions are largely intellectual, stemming from a shared belief that the moral evil of slavery could be mitigated and eventually blotted out only through political action.

While the shared moral opposition to slavery might be the unifying theme in this book, the collective experience of anti-abolition violence by no fewer than five of the subjects here might prove the most interesting theme. Antislavery activists pointed to such violence as the most extreme manifestations of a sinister Slave Power that, they claimed, sought to squash all criticism of slavery in the North. This is a theme ripe for further explication. Much literature on the Slave Power treats the concept as either a reality, such as in Leonard Richards's The Slave Power (2000), or an exaggeration borne of paranoia, such as in David Brion Davis's The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (1970). However, Saidiya Hartman's Foucaldian analysis of the violence of slavery in Scenes of Subjection (1997) offers another possible view of the Slave Power. Hartman argues that the violence of slavery was omnipresent and multivalent, inhering not merely in physical violence but also in masters' coercion of expressions of contentment and carefree attitudes among slaves. Applying this analysis to anti-abolitionism, we ought to think of how anti-abolitionist assaults and riots were merely one manifestation of a violent hostility that sharply circumscribed early antislavery activity in the North. Such an analysis might go far toward explaining why the Slave Power seemed to so many Northerners to be such a ubiquitous and personal threat. To be fair, though, this is not an avenue that Blue seeks to pursue in this work.

Yet, this book does raise other questions without answering them...