Coalitions without Compromise: Reconsidering the Political Abolitionists

In 1848, Representative David Wilmot of Pennsylvania explained why he opposed the expansion of slavery into the United States' western territories. Slavery, he argued, brought "dishonor and degradation upon the poor white man" by placing him "in close contact with the servile labor of the black."¹ Historians have long found statements such as Wilmot's to be revealing. His testimony demonstrates that the emergence of a political antislavery movement in the mid-nineteenth-century United States had its origins in concerns distinct from moral objections to slavery or sympathy toward African Americans. Students of American abolition generally portray antislavery's foray into politics as a story of decline. Their studies chart the movement's descent from the Liberty Party's principles of abolition and racial equality to the Free Soil and Republican Parties' calls for the protection of free white labor through the non-extension of slavery.² Specialists in antebellum politics, who rarely acknowledge a connection between abolition and political antislavery, locate the movement's origins in northern resentment of southern political power or in the racism of the North's electorate.³ Studies published in the 1990s, by shifting historians' attention to the issue of white privilege within antebellum society, have intensified the sense that the demand for Free Soil was, at bottom, an inherently racist form of antislavery. In their hardest variants, these accounts examine the way in which the developing status of "whiteness" was invested with an array of privileges that were denied to people of color and which provided a form of psychological compensation to "white" workers in exchange for their subordination within the capitalist market.⁴ Statements like Wilmot's demonstrated that Free Soil represented a part of this larger cultural project.

Bruce Laurie's Beyond Garrison offers an impressive challenge to these unflattering portrayals of political antislavery. In an argument akin to ones recently advanced in studies of the Democratic Party by Daniel Feller, Sean Wilentz, and most notably Jonathan H. Earle, Laurie concludes that a genuine and widespread commitment to antislavery—and not racism—accounted for the triumph of Free Soil in the antebellum North.⁵ Laurie, however, advances this line of argument by focusing on the Whig-dominated state of Massachusetts and by drawing on his background as a labor and social historian to provide a more textured view of race and class relations as well as the cultural assumptions that shaped antislavery as it emerged as a major political force within the state and nation. In a way paralleled by no other study, Beyond Garrison tracks the series of coalitions and alliances in which rather Whiggish political abolitionists participated as they moved from the Liberty Party in the early 1840s through the Free Soil and nativist Know-Nothing Parties in the early 1850s and finally into the Republican Party late in the decade. Although his subjects worked with a wide array of allies—ranging from labor reformers, temperance reformers, ballot reformers, nativists, and even relatively prosouthern Democrats for a while—Laurie finds little evidence of moral declension within the antislavery ranks. Indeed, Massachusetts's Free Soilers, contrary to the impression conveyed by whiteness studies, fought to advance the rights of free blacks, and politically active antislavery advocates successfully guided civil rights legislation through the state legislature in both the 1840s and 1850s. "Political action," Laurie concludes, "was an effective [antislavery] strategy and not a naive plunge into a smarmy world of compromise and accommodation" (p. 5). Laurie's work invites historians to rethink the political implications of white identity, to reexamine the relationship between popular reform movements and political engagement, and to reappraise the significance of political antislavery.

Laurie's account begins with an (admittedly) familiar discussion of abolition's emergence in Massachusetts and the movement's split over William Lloyd Garrison's increasing anti-institutionalism (p. 10). The book then follows the Great Agitator's pro-abolitionist rivals as they move into politics and finds them to be...