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This chapter demonstrates how Liberty Party coalitionists like Gamaliel Bailey, Salmon Chase, and Henry B. Stanton paved the way for a broadened anti-Slave Power coalition before and during the election of 1848 presidential campaign. Carefully cultivating contacts with antislavery Conscience Whigs like Joshua Giddings and Charles Sumner, as well as with New York’s Democratic Barnburners, a cadre of savvy Liberty managers prepared the ground for an eventual coalition following the anticipated proslavery results of the major-party nominating conventions. When antislavery Democrats and Whigs were finally ripe for the plucking, Liberty coalitionists had already put plans in motion for the founding of the Free Soil Party, which adopted Chase’s platform resolutions emphasizing opposition to the Slave Power. The chapter concludes by showing how the Free Soil Party’s presidential defeat was nonetheless accompanied by the election of a substantial Free Soil congressional bloc, including the selection of Salmon Chase to serve as a Free Soil United States senator.

This chapter highlights the role Free Soil Party politicians like Salmon Chase and John P. Hale played in heated debates over the Compromise of 1850 and then Free Soilers’ efforts to rouse opposition to new legislation. Targeting the Fugitive Slave Act especially, political abolitionists in the Free Soil Party worked to ensure continued attention to the Slave Power’s control over both major parties. Simultaneously, in several northern states, Free Soil managers experimented with coalition politics, often collaborating with Democrats at the state level but with mixed results. While these coalitions typically ended in disillusionment, Massachusetts Free Soilers succeeded in electing Charles Sumner to the United States Senate, where he would become perhaps the most noted antislavery firebrand in national politics. The immediate results of the presidential election of 1852 proved deeply disappointing, seemingly signalling national consensus on the recent sectional compromise, but Free Soilers remained confident that as old issues differentiating the major parties receded into the background, impending new slavery controversies would force the partisan reorganization political abolitionists had long sought.

Chapter Two traces the rise of the political antislavery movement. It shows how three pioneering leaders—Joshua Giddings, Salmon P. Chase, and Charles Sumner—continued the struggle to “denationalize” slavery. They would abolish it in the District of Columbia, prevent its spread to new territories, exempt the federal government from responsibility for fugitive slaves, limit the interstate slave trade, and bar new slave states from entering the Union. But the quest for electoral success created pressures to pull back from a broad-focus antislavery agenda. The rise of the Republican Party in the mid-1850s widened the appeal of antislavery politics, but Republicans toned down the antislavery stances taken by the Liberty Party and the Free Soil Party in the 1840s and early 1850s.

In 1848, most Americans did not believe their own country needed the kind of revolution Continental Europe was having. Their reactions to the revolutions nevertheless reveal much about their own society, their political culture, and their prejudices. This chapter looks at the way people in the United States responded to the European revolutions of 1848. It seeks to take account not only of diplomatic history but also of American domestic politics, social structure, and legal institutions. It is also an examination of American public opinion. The United States had a paradoxical relationship to the revolutions of 1848. On one hand, the nation had been born out of a revolution, and it disposed them to welcome the European revolutions in 1848. On the other hand, the issues involved in the European revolutions did not seem to be live political issues in the United States.

This chapter describes how Americans in the late 1700s to the mid-1800s connected land use with what people at the time called “republicanism.” Republicanism held that in order to have a small central government, citizens needed to be virtuous and orderly. While the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal and the initial critiques of slavery expansion during the Missouri Crisis influenced the Free-Soil and Republican Parties of the 1850s, there were few links between promotion of smallholder settlement and antislavery thought. Though the Northwest Ordinance contained a prohibition of slavery, many supporters of the law only opposed slavery’s restriction from the Old Northwest, where they deemed it to be environmentally inappropriate. Some of the law’s supporters had no problem with the institution expanding to the modern-day states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama—the so-called Old Southwest. The chapter also investigates how, during the second-party system pitting Whigs against Democrats, ideas about proper land use became intertwined with larger questions of national development.

This chapter focuses on how, although the antislavery movement made great strides after the Hutchinson Family Singers went to Europe, the infighting between political abolitionists and moral abolitionists grew. Though they once had mocked him on their sheet music cover, the Hutchinsons probably started liking Clay more in 1847, particularly after southern Whigs pushed General Taylor for president. The Hutchinsons and many other antislavery supporters saw an opportunity for a grand political alliance. The Free Soil Party was the first significant antislavery political party to steer clear of civil rights ideas for African Americans in their platform. The Hutchinsons were always on the side of keeping slavery out. But their own internal divisions were becoming harder to handle.

This vignette describes the disruptive role the Free Soil Party played by controlling a balance of power in the closely divided 31^st House of Representatives. In their refusal to vote for a Democratic or Whig candidate in the 1849 election for Speaker of the House, Free Soilers showcased the influence their new independent antislavery congressional bloc might wield and further mobilized congressional controversy to call attention to the Slave Power’s sway over both major parties. Ultimately, however, a majority of representatives agreed to circumvent traditional majoritarian rules and abide by a plurality vote, thereby enabling the election of slaveholding Democrat Howell Cobb over the incumbent Whig speaker Robert Winthrop.

This chapter covers the rise of the Free-Soil and Republican Parties in the 1850s. While historians have given much scholarly attention to the ideology of the Republicans, citing their promotion of “free labor” and hostility toward the “slave power,” this chapter uncovers the agrarian nature of the Republican appeal. Such an understanding is critical given how popular the Republicans were with farmers. The party believed that civilization and loyalty in the West could only be secured by societies of small farmers practicing scientific land management. Yeomen farmers, Republicans argued, formed the strongest attachments to the Union. The land-use practices of slaveholders served as a foil to the northern ideal. Slave plantations exhausted the soil and caused nature to wither and decay. The slave South’s low literacy rates, barbaric habits, dirty buildings, and lack of economic opportunity reflected its poor treatment of farmland. The immense landholdings produced an aristocracy threatening to the Union. Politicians warned that if permitted in the West, large slave plantations would exhaust the soil, ruining land better utilized by small farmers.

This introduction establishes the book’s argument about the transformative influence of antislavery third-party politics, as practiced first by the abolitionist Liberty Party and then by the Free Soil Party. The introduction situates the book’s argument and research in the broader context of the historiography of both the abolitionist movement and the politics of sectional conflict. The introduction also provides important background on the history of antislavery politics in the era before the mid-1830s.

Black politics matured early in Maine, led by activists like Reuben Ruby, a fixture in Portland’s politics from the 1830s to the 1860s. He worked closely with General Samuel Fessenden, who had been a leading Federalist. The latter became Maine’s leading abolitionist in the 1830s, working with Ruby in the National Republican and then Whig parties (they were both delegates at the latter’s 1834 founding convention). Although they tried to bring black voters into the Liberty Party in the 1840s, Portland’s black electorate remained strong. Whigs, led by Abram W. Niles, who held low-level city jobs and party positions. Repeatedly, these voters garnered national attention, as when the younger William Fessenden defeated Portland’s Democratic congressmen with their votes in 1840; in 1848, efforts to bring them over to the Free Soil Party were also widely publicized. By the later 1850s, the black electorate was incorporated into the Republican Party, with Ruby holding a federal patronage position.

This chapter shows that spiritualism gained its first strong foothold in Washington and began to flourish when Martin Van Buren and kindred politicians trailed back into their Free Soil Party, leaving the antislavery insurgency to the most stalwart radical elements who reorganized as the Free Democratic Party. It explains how these political shifts brought antislavery political leaders to Washington and discusses the growth of spiritualism by 1854–1856 with the rise of sectional tensions. After highlighting the prominence of spiritualists among the Free Democrats, the chapter considers the parallel development and convergence of spiritualism and antislavery politics in New York City. It then examines how the tensions of the spring of 1853–1854 seem to have driven many more people to the spirits and how Kansas became the catalyst for a major shift in Free Democratic circles as well as politics generally. It also explores how spiritualists, particularly in the upper Midwest, made vital decisions that marked the emergence and triumph of a new Republican Party.

This chapter begins with Everett’s return to the U.S. and service as president of Harvard College, and follows his thoughts and actions relative to slavery, race, reform, and the Union through 1852. Highlights and revealing moments in this period include his moves towards potentially admitting Harvard’s first African-American student, Everett’s eulogy for fallen antislavery statesman John Quincy Adams, correspondence with Free Soil Party leaders in the presidential election year of 1848 in relation to a possible vice presidential nomination, and the debates leading to the Compromise of 1850. Everett was deeply uncomfortable with the Fugitive Slave Act as part of that Compromise, but soon thereafter fought on the battlefields of memory to vindicate the Compromise and especially its proponent Daniel Webster.

This conclusion summarizes key arguments from the main narrative of the book, emphasizing the success political abolitionists achieved in promoting and expanding anti-Slave Power politics across the North. The chapter also narrates how those anti-Slave Power arguments shaped Republican Party politics in the late 1850s and influenced the policies that Republican politicians pursued to advance abolition in the midst of the Civil War. In discussing the antislavery politics and policymaking of the pre-war and wartime Republican Party, this conclusion especially focuses on Republicans in the U.S. Congress, among them former Liberty Party and Free Soil Party activists.

By 1860, this chapter argues, white Ohioans and Kentuckians had articulated starkly different purposes for their religious organizations and laws. With Cincinnatians sometimes at the forefront and at other times in tow, Ohioans rendered their faiths and constitution into notably antislavery positions and had begun to undo prejudicial laws afflicting African Americans. As Ohioans injected a “freedom national” philosophy into their most powerful institutions, Kentuckians sensed risk. In reaction, slaveholders there tried to purge the state of its emancipationist sentiments by diminishing Louisvillians’ electoral influence and by restricting the growth of a free black population. Though Ohioans insisted on the immediate rupture of property rights in persons upon contact with its soil, Kentuckians gave new divine clout to those same property rights. Before 1849, these sectional positions had not needed to be staked out so clearly. After that year, this chapter argues, Ohio and Kentucky risked increasing sectional alienation to further their positions on the morality of slavery.

This chapter covers Everett’s time as Daniel Webster’s replacement in the State Department and his brief service as U.S. Senator from Massachusetts. It shows that 1852 and most of 1853 were a time of great optimism and prominence for his political fortunes, thriving in an atmosphere of relative sectional peace. His nationalist statements on issues such as the future of Cuba also helped his popularity. But then the Kansas-Nebraska Act shattered that peace and derailed Everett’s political rise. His effort to forge a conservatively antislavery reaction to Kansas-Nebraska failed to win the support of the Free Soilers and others who would go on to found the Republican Party. And missing the Senate vote on the Act, together with his failing health, spelled the end of his term in the Senate.