On the Edge of Freedom: The Fugitive Slave Issue in South Central Pennsylvania, 1820–1870 by David G. Smith, and: A Self-Evident Lie: Southern Slavery and the Threat to American Freedom by Jeremy J. Tewell (review)

The North was contested ground as abolitionists vied with southern proslavery forces and northerners opposed to radical abolitionism in great propaganda campaigns throughout the antebellum era. Winning over northern public opinion was the strategic goal of these peacetime belligerents in conflicts engaged in the press, public petitions to Congress and state legislatures, and, finally, the political battleground of the electoral process. David Smith’s On the Edge of Freedom examines the impact of the fugitive slave controversy on antislavery activists, Whigs, Republicans, and Democrats in the critical border area of south-central Pennsylvania. This area of Pennsylvania was home to Underground Railroad routes that many of the runaway slaves passed through on their way to freedom. Jeremy Tewell in A Self-Evident Lie explores the contentious national debate over the concept of “universal liberty” (that is, liberty for all human beings) among northern abolitionists, southern proslavery defenders, and antiabolitionist northerners. These thoroughly researched works of antebellum national and local history provide insight into the evolving northern and southern sensibilities on these critical aspects of the slavery question.

The title of Tewell’s book, A Self-Evident Lie, stems from a February 1854 speech in the U. S. Senate by Democratic senator John Petit of Indiana. Petit, an opponent of abolitionism, antislavery activists, and future Republicans, believed the premise upon which they based their arguments rested upon the false premise that “all men are created equal” as espoused in the Declaration of Independence and therefore entitled to liberty. In his speech, Petit denigrated that portion of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence as a “self-evident lie” since the existence of racial and class inequalities clearly disproved that. Stephen A. Douglas, while not throwing out the Declaration of Independence, claimed its meaning applied only to subjects of the British Isles and did not extend equal rights to “inferior races.” Tewell noted that Abraham Lincoln subscribed to Henry Clay’s belief that if African American enslavement were justified on the grounds of inferiority, so could be enslavement of white ethnic groups or classes that supporters of slavery deemed inferior. Republican senator Charles Sumner made a similar point as did Ohio Republican, Benjamin Branton, who said that if it is legal and moral to enslave blacks because they are considered inferior, then it also the same for “a white man” to “enslave another white man who is his inferior” (41). Similarly, Republican senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts posed the question “Is mental inferiority a valid reason for the perpetual oppression of a race?” (42). Republican press organs also harped on this theme, attributing the potential of northern white enslavement to the conspiratorial machinations of the “Slave Power,” the alleged cabal of elite slave-owning territorial expansionists.

Pro-slavery theorists, in defending the peculiar institution, attacked the principle of universal liberty not only from its inapplicability to blacks but also from a historical justification of slavery in classical European civilizations and the theological acceptance of slavery in the biblical world. George Fitzhugh and other pro-slavery writers asserted that southern slaves were better off than free white northern laborers, whom some southern politicians and intellectuals referred to as “wage slaves.” The logical inference of these writers is that some white workers would be better off as slaves. However, this line of reasoning never became a significant part of the pro-slavery defense. Fitzhugh, despite his use of a class based defense of slavery, as Tewell observed, “fully subscribed to the herrenvolk ideal of confining blacks to menial labor” and the accompanying notion...