Michael J. McManus. Political Abolitionism in Wisconsin, 1840-1861. Kent, Ohio and London,
England: Kent State University Press, 1998. xiv + 288 pp. $39.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-87338601-2.
Reviewed by Michael Pierson (Department of History, University of Massachusetts, Lowell)
Published on H-SHEAR (January, 2000)
It Was About Slavery
Arguably the most important political event in Wisconsin in the antebellum period was the “Booth case”,
when veteran antislavery editor and politico Sherman
Booth was arrested in 1854 for helping Joshua Glover,
a fugitive slave, escape from U.S. custody. The ensuing
court fights commanded national attention. Happily, McManus provides readers with a superb, understandable
summary of the intricate legal debates raised by Booth
and his attorney, Byron Paine. Essentially, Booth and
Paine used states’ rights doctrines to try to blunt the
ability of the federal government to enforce the Fugitive
Slave Law. As McManus traces the legal proceedings during the crucial five year period from 1854 to 1859 when
the Republican party was forming its partisan identity, it
becomes clear that states’ rights became a vibrant part of
their political culture. While this sounds odd, especially
to neo-Confederates who would like to believe that secessionists sought to protect states’ rights, not slavery,
McManus’s careful retracing of this case highlights how
actively Republicans debated the nature of federalism.
(They disliked Calhoun’s brand of nullification, but liked
the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions.)
While the radical abolitionist movement has generated much historiographic attention, the political wing
of the antislavery coalition has produced relatively few
studies. Of course, many of these are edging their way
towards “classic” status if they are not there already, including Eric Foner’s Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men and
Richard Sewell’s Ballots for Freedom. Both of those works
portray the antislavery parties as deeply committed to
the ultimate extinction of the peculiar institution. Recently, William Gienapp and Tyler Anbinder have debated whether antislavery agitation or ethnic and cultural tensions at the state level caused the demise of the
northern Whig party and the subsequent rise of the Third
Party System. Michael J. McManus thus enters into a
promising field of debate with a detailed examination of
antislavery politics in Wisconsin.[1]
Michael McManus essentially agrees with Foner and
Sewell, arguing that “while the emphasis changed and
the moral character of original political abolitionism lessened, what stands out most is the endurance of Liberty
party principles as Free Soilers and their Republican successors adapted them” (x). By stressing the importance
of antislavery sentiment in these parties, McManus also
argues that ethnocultural factors “did not bring down the
second-party system” (xi). Having clearly laid out his
conclusions, McManus traces the political fortunes and
partisan skirmishes of antislavery politicians in Wisconsin from territorial days to the election of Abraham Lincoln. Along the way, he develops a number of subsidiary
ideas that warrant considerable attention.
That the majority of Wisconsin Republicans should
embrace states’ rights sheds light on an argument that
McManus develops about the earlier Liberty and Free Soil
parties. In what is his most significant addition to the
study of antislavery political ideology, McManus argues
that the parties valued their antislavery principles more
than the Union itself. As he phrases it, they thought
that “preserving American freedom and republican in1
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stitutions took precedence over preserving the American Union” (187). This conditional Unionism made the
Republicans unwilling to compromise their antislavery
principles even in the face of secession during the winter of 1860-1861. While some historians have argued that
Lincoln and other Republicans mistakenly dismissed secessionist rhetoric as empty threats, McManus states that
“even had Republicans foreseen the coming tragedy, they
would not have acted differently” (189). Together with
their commitment to states’ rights, the Republican’s conditional Unionism makes them seem less like a band of
avid federalists and more like a group of principled supporters of liberty and civil rights. This view of antislavery
politics demands our further investigation.
new Free Soil party in 1848. McManus, I think, underestimates the degree to which the Liberty party believed
that the federal government had the legal right to end
slavery in the states where it already existed. According
to McManus, “Liberty dogma equated abolishing slavery
[only] with the withdrawal of federal sustenance from it”
(40). In fact, the Liberty party’s constitutional ideas about
the abolition of slavery were too numerous and dispirit to
be dogmatic. Sherman Booth himself advanced far more
radical approaches to abolition than what the Free Soil
party finally settled for. In other words, McManus may
have found it necessary to lower the Liberty party’s commitment to radical, immediate abolition in order to make
the subsequent Free Soil position look like a legitimate
successor. I should also state, however, that McManus’s
interpretation is well within the mainstream of historical
literature on this subject; scholars interested in my divergent reading of the Liberty party can consult my article
on the subject.[2]
But what of McManus’s main point? Does he succeed in convincing the reader of the parties’ antislavery commitment? In part, yes. The book stands as a
useful corrective to the studies of Republican racial politics, many of which stem from an overemphasis on Lincoln and Illinois, which downplay the party’s antislavery credentials. McManus finds considerable evidence of
a refreshingly egalitarian streak within the antislavery
parties. Wisconsin Republicans, for example, advocated
black suffrage in 1857 by praising the accomplishments
and social worth of black Americans with a gusto that
would prove largely absent in Lincoln’s speeches a year
later (153-54). While whites and their black allies, whose
efforts are also chronicled here, were not ultimately successful in gaining Wisconsin blacks the right to vote until
1866, McManus recaptures a vocal and persistent string
of suffrage campaigns starting in the 1840s that could
only have happened if a large number of antislavery rank
and file activists supported full black political rights.
McManus’s investigation of Wisconsin’s antislavery
politics, then, arrives at several interesting interpretations and delivers a very useful recounting of the Booth
case. Undergraduates and non-academics will also find
enough background information about events such as the
Dred Scott case or the sack of Lawrence to help orient
themselves. In short, this is a solid contribution to our
ongoing study of the ideological origins of the Republican party.
Notes
[1]. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Richard H. Sewell,
Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United
States, 1837-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1976); William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1987); Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992).
But there is a part of McManus’s thesis that is left undeveloped. McManus’s dismissal of ethnocultural factors
in determining voting patterns remains unproven. For
example, McManus writes that “Ethnocultural concerns
probably won the Democrats few votes in 1856” (122),
but then states on the next page that “counties with large
foreign-born populations went overwhelmingly Democratic. Counties with native-born populations turned in
equally disproportionate majorities for Fremont” (123).
While McManus may be right about the depth of antislavery feeling among Liberty party men and their successors, people who place more emphasis on cultural issues will not be talked out of their views by this book.
[2]. Michael D. Pierson, “Gender and Party Ideologies: The Constitutional Thought of Women and Men in
American Anti-Slavery Politics,” Slavery and Abolition 19
(December 1998): 46-67.
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I also disagree with McManus’s contention that the
Liberty party’s principles were carried over intact to the
2
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Citation: Michael Pierson. Review of McManus, Michael J., Political Abolitionism in Wisconsin, 1840-1861. H-SHEAR,
H-Net Reviews. January, 2000.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=3738
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