Forlorn Hope of Freedom: The Liberty Party in the Old Northwest, 1838-1848 (review)

74CIVIL WAR HISTORY trade, Leavitt severed his Whig ties and identified his political goals with the principles of the Democratic party. "Northern Democrats," Leavitt wrote in 1840, "have never been able to set forth their fundamental principles of 'Equal Rights, Equal Laws, and Equal Justice,' without using the very language of abolition" (quoted, 174). By 1848, when the antislavery-Democratic coalitions that Leavitt favored began to take shape, his voice suddenly grew faint. The less temperamental Gamaliel Bailey assumed editorship of the National Era in Washington, D.C., a new antislavery journal which quickly eclipsed the already weakened Emancipator. Cut adrift, Leavitt accepted a subordinate position with the New York Independent, founded by Lewis Tappan's son-in-law as the respectable voice of Congregational and Presbyterian moral reform. In this capacity, Leavitt took an active role in the affairs of the American Free Trade League and in a defense of the Monroe Doctrine. On this last point, Leavitt deserves more credit than Davis gives him. As Thomas D. Schoonover demonstrated in Dollars over Dominion (1978), Leavitt expressed the conviction of American Liberals that the Franco-Maximilianists in Mexico intended to join with the Confederate rebels in the southern United States. As "aristocratic, agrarian conservatives," these two groups "intended to destroy republicanism ... in the New World" (Schoonover, xix). As Leavitt's final crusades demonstrated, he had pursued abolitionism within a broad and aggressive liberal reform project. Louis S. Gerteis University of Missouri-St. Louis Forlorn Hope of Freedom: The Liberty Party in the Old Northwest, 1838-1848. By Vernon L. Volpe. (Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 1990. Pp. 236. $24.00.) Despite the apparently narrow focus of this book on the Liberty party in the Old Northwest, the author, an assistant professor of history at Kearney State College, conceives his topic broadly, commenting learnedly on both the antislavery movement and antebellum politics generally. He seeks to show that current theories linking the reform impulse to modernization fail to explain the occurrence of Liberty voting in relatively stagnant villages. Taking religious values seriously, he argues that antislavery activism originated in intradenominational quarrels over the moral issue of slavery. The trauma of these quarrels, which led to the formation of such breakaway groups as the Wesleyan Methodists and Free Will Baptists, created solidarity in antislavery congregations on political as well as religious matters. As morally based partisans, Liberty men remained indifferent to pleas based on expediency rather than principle. Volpe devotes much of his book to showing how the intricate manipulation BOOK REVIEWS75 of issues during campaigns by Liberty leaders and their opponents had little impact on actual Liberty voting. He reiterates the warning of new political historians that newspaper analysis of what transpired in an election are frequently deliberately misleading. Despite the regional focus of his book, Volpe also argues that the notion of a western variant of antislavery is incorrect. He argues that "western" abolition was itself divided among Quaker, Wesleyan Methodist , and other religious variants of antislavery. The appearance to the contrary has been created by assuming that a few leaders like Salmon P. Chase and Gamaliel Bailey spoke for the entire West. Volpe also breaks with tradition in suggesting that the Free-Soil and Republican parties were not extensions of the Liberty party permitting part of its goal to triumph. The party and its egalitarian principles died, he argues, because its moral views were simply rejected by most Americans. Volpe's often thoughtful analyses are suggestive and stimulating; however , some of his conclusions remain weakly supported. Although analysis of the Liberty rank and file represents the heart of his study, Volpe neither explains what voting data he had available or why he chose to analyze them as he did. Tables are scarce and one cannot even find what the Liberty totals and percentages were in the elections of the 1840s in each state. Interpretations of Liberty support with which Volpe disagrees are dismissed on the basis of limited statistical analysis, a simple correlation or two with variables of Volpe's choice. John L. Hammond's multivariate analysis of the Ohio Liberty vote in The Politics of Benevolence (1979), which showed strong relationships with New England birth...