Bringing Politics Back in . . . to Abolition

With some critics worrying about the future of political history—which lags behind social and cultural history—it is rather ironic that the best recent work in antebellum politics comes from scholars studying slavery and freedom. Building on terrific (and variegated) studies by Eric Foner, James Oakes, John Stauffer, Sean Wilentz, and others, many historians now view antislavery struggles as a powerful vehicle for understanding the possibilities and limits of pre–Civil War politics. New books by Padraig Riley and Corey Brooks continue the trend, offering perceptive readings of both the politics of abolition and abolitionist politics in the early republic. These are exemplary books: well written, thoroughly researched, and historiographically ramifying. They are also timely, illuminating antislavery battles in high politics at a time when a new round of contemporary critics (notably Andrew Delbanco) question abolitionists’ aims and accomplishments. Just what did abolitionists really do? Riley shows the formidable hurdles antislavery advocates faced in the Jeffersonian political arena; Brooks studies how political abolitionists overcame such daunting obstacles in antebellum society. Together, they show that it is more critical than ever to reintegrate politics into our understanding of social reform, lest we forget how political power may be mobilized for good as well as ill.

Read in tandem, Riley and Brooks chart the creation, and then destruction, of the nineteenth-century political consensus that enshrined slaveholders’ political power. The Constitution may have established certain proslavery provisions, but not until the 1800s would a discernible slave power take hold in federal politics. As Paul Finkelman constantly reminds us, historians should never underestimate slaveholders’ constitutional power. The three-fifths clause alone gave masters and their allies enough extra voting strength to secure slavery’s expansion into Missouri, Texas, and the Kansas-Nebraska Territories, as well as to pass a stronger Fugitive Slave Law in 1850.

Yet as Riley’s book expertly shows, slaveholders’ power came not merely as a result of a hellish constitutional compromise. Rather it flowed from a longstanding cross-sectional alliance of Democratic Republicans that privileged white democracy over antislavery. As Riley sees it, Jefferson’s election was truly a “victory for slaveholders” (pp. 8–9). Before 1800, Federalists mitigated masters’ reach; after 1800, a Jeffersonian coalition “promoted democracy in the North but also protected the prerogatives of slaveholders in the South” (p. 9). This coalition created, in effect, a second grand bargain on bondage.

Though building on studies by Matt Mason, David Waldstreicher, Craig Hammond, and others who have traced slavery’s contested role in the early Republic, Riley explains the muscular development of the Jeffersonian coalition perhaps better than anyone else. He demonstrates that the origins of the Jeffersonian coalition were diverse, with both Northerners and Southerners defining its key ideological as well as political dimensions. In New England, Republicans like Elbridge Gerry and Abraham Bishop backed the Jeffersonian cause because it “championed political freedom for ordinary white men” (p. 16). Indeed, hoping to form a national alliance that would vanquish aristocratic Federalists, they and other Northern politicians agreed to “provide American slaveholders with what they needed most: tacit majority consent” (p. 49). Slave power consensus wasn’t a machine that would go of itself; it needed constant lubrication from Northerners.

This became clear in Pennsylvania, the nation’s keystone state, for its consistent support of the Jeffersonian cause. Yet it was also gradual abolition’s organizational base. Riley points out that Republican political supporters like William Duane and Thomas Branagan explained away any seeming contradictions by labeling Jefferson both a champion of white liberty and an “antislavery stalwart” (p. 90). Given time, Jefferson’s America would shed its slaveholding skin, providing an emancipatory pathway to “the benumbed minds of the enslaved, the wretched, the degraded sons of Europe, Asia, and Africa” (p. 90). For Virginians and other Southern Republicans who became increasingly...