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...