Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics by Corey M. Brooks (review)

The United States’ second party system was organized through the Whig and Democratic Parties, rivals that shared agreement on few matters other than one: the value of suppressing any discussion about slavery. To engage slavery would, for either party, enrage a powerful slaveholding faction and agitate northerners’ moral consciences; it would undo the hard work of organizing a national constituency. How was Congress—a most reluctant institution—therefore repurposed into an instrument for advancing juridical emancipation? Corey M. Brooks’s Liberty Power takes as its subject the third parties who brought public scrutiny to bear on not only slavery but the unseemly political organization underpinning congressional silence. This perceived conspiracy of silence they deemed “Slave Power.”

Brooks credits third-party agitators with recognition that the second party system’s disassembling would be a prerequisite for abolition. He supports this claim by cataloging what, exactly, third parties did. To dramatize slaveholders’ undue political influence, third-party congressmen exploited the House and Senate chambers’ capacity as a stage for antislavery speeches, delayed legislation for the purpose of building public opposition, and sneakily circumvented the notorious gag rule. During elections, third-party abolitionists attempted to win national office but also bargained with major and minor parties to divide tickets, exploited majoritarian electoral systems by scattering votes, and forced repeat reelections that were drawn-out embarrassments for major party politicians. Taken collectively, these techniques pitted a vision of democracy wherein all voices are heard against the status quo vision of democracy wherein the plurality rules.

Liberty Power is organized chronologically around tense moments familiar to historians of the antebellum era, beginning in the 1830s and including the Wilmot Proviso, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the Fugitive Slave Law. As a variety of forces within and without undermined the Whig Party, the outspoken critics of slaveholders’ political influence worked to assure that slavery would become the issue around which party rivals would reorganize. The Republican Party emerged as an outgrowth of decades of antislavery third-party alliance-building, work that brought together Liberty partisans and Conscience Whigs with some Northern Democrats and Know-Nothings.

This chronological framework is punctuated by accounts of five speaker-of-the-house elections, each explored with a short vignette that Brooks calls an “interlude.” Brooks asserts that these moments made visible a third-party tactic that was continually in use, wherein antislavery parties could claim victory by meeting any one of several goals: forcing a major party to advance non-slaveholder candidates, uniting abolition supporters from various parties, or creating a flashpoint that directed public attention to congressional disorganization and thereby exposed Slave Power. Flexibility—on any point, approach, or alliance—was key, so long as an uncompromising emphasis on destroying Slave Power was maintained. This characterization of third-party abolitionists’ strategy is distinct from much of the previous scholarship, which tends to portray antislavery parties as briefly lived and ever vacillating or else categorizes antislavery parties as protest groups with more bluster than political acumen.

Brooks’s assessment of third-party strategy and the success of this strategy is persuasive because it draws deeply from political actors’ correspondence, then contextualizes discussions and debates within a close reading of the Congressional Globe (predecessor to the Congressional Record) and an extensive survey of historical scholarship. While it would be unfair to wish that Brooks had also taken on a second task, there remain lingering questions about how abolitionist third parties related to the broader movement’s ideological imperatives, especially given that some third-party strategies were about rousing constituents to pressure politicians. And in those cases wherein the deft manipulation of congressional procedures temporarily rendered ordinary citizens’ sentiments irrelevant, what was gained and lost by virtue of politicians’ selective indifference to popular opinion?

For Brooks, the Liberty and Free Soil Parties, and their allies in other parties, are characterized by competence and pragmatism. He explains how a vast...