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  • Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics by Corey M. Brooks
  • James L. Huston (bio)
Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics. By Corey M. Brooks. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. 302. Cloth, $45.00.)

The names of the great abolitionists of antebellum America—Benjamin Lundy, Lewis Tappan, Henry B. Stanton, Joshua Leavitt, John Greenleaf Whittier, Theodore Dwight Weld, Alvan Stewart, Elizur Wright, William Goodell, Amos A. Phelps, Myron Holley, Gamaliel Bailey, and James G. Birney—along with those of famous antislavery politicians—William Slade, John Quincy Adams, Thomas Morris, Joshua Giddings, and Charles Sumner—are familiar to historians of reform and politics in the antebellum decade. Indeed, most of these men have biographies written about their exploits. Yet through intensive research, careful dissection of events, and imaginative re-creation of interactions among abolitionists, Corey M. Brooks has wrought something almost entirely new and completely convincing: his book is a powerful retelling of the story of how antislavery politics triumphed in the United States and, unlike almost every other narrative, places the abolitionists in the center of political events. For historians of antebellum America, this is the single most important book to read in 2016.

The central theme of Liberty Power is the obdurate determination of a set of political abolitionists to bring about the downfall of slavery by, in their mode of calculation, divorcing the federal government from all connection with slavery. To accomplish this end, they had to convince contemporaries that the “Slave Power”—a phrase of their making—had so corrupted both Whigs and Democrats that the party system had to be overthrown and a new one put in place that pitted a party of liberty (“Liberty Power”) against the Slave Power. Once a Liberty Power was created, it could interfere with the foreign slave trade, the domestic slave trade, and probably the cotton trade, and thereby injure slavery economically; it could then cultivate an antislavery party within the South to bring about the eradication of the peculiar institution. As slavery died, they believed, so would racial discrimination; equality would finally be the reality that the Declaration of Independence had promised.

Unlike other historians, Brooks painstakingly details how the Liberty Party men—they are center stage in this history—worked together by design to sow the seeds of the Slave Power image in northern minds. The principle way they did so was by “establish[ing] a lobbying presence at the capital” (52). These lobbyists would supply antislavery politicians with information and arguments; they would constantly harangue everyone about [End Page 597] the power of slavery over national politics and how both parties, because of their bisectional nature, were incapable of controlling the Slave Power. From their activities, Brooks derives two novel and important interpretations. First, the arguments used by northerners in the Wilmot Proviso debate drew directly from the pronouncements of the Liberty Party. Second, the Liberty Party adherents were the prime movers in bringing together the elements that became the Free Soil Party in 1848—and Brooks’s discussion of the origins of the Free Soil Party is one of the best in print.

An important idea that Brooks promotes is that the Liberty Party abolitionists were single-minded in their activities, demanding that northerners realize the existence of the Slave Power and understand that the only way to elude its grasp was to end all connection between the federal government and slavery. They used every issue that came their way to build a coalition in the North, all the time believing that if they were successful, slavery was destined to perish and racism would collapse along with it. Among the more interesting views of political abolitionism Brooks offers is that the political abolitionists’ plunge into reform activity, especially temperance in 1852–53, was motivated not because they were absorbed in that particular idea, but because they expected to manipulate the issue to bring attention to the cruelties of the Slave Power.

Brooks writes this book in powerful language and uses a literary device that is in its own right worthy of note. He has interludes in which he discusses House Speakership fights (1839...

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