Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American PoliticsAbraham Lincoln’s Republican Party was the first party built on opposition to slavery to win on the national stage—but its victory was rooted in the earlier efforts of under-appreciated antislavery third parties. Liberty Power tells the story of how abolitionist activists built the most transformative third-party movement in American history and effectively reshaped political structures in the decades leading up to the Civil War. As Corey M. Brooks explains, abolitionist trailblazers who organized first the Liberty Party and later the more moderate Free Soil Party confronted formidable opposition from a two-party system expressly constructed to suppress disputes over slavery. Identifying the Whigs and Democrats as the mainstays of the southern Slave Power’s national supremacy, savvy abolitionists insisted that only a party independent of slaveholder influence could wrest the federal government from its grip. A series of shrewd electoral, lobbying, and legislative tactics enabled these antislavery third parties to wield influence far beyond their numbers. In the process, these parties transformed the national political debate and laid the groundwork for the success of the Republican Party and the end of American slavery. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Chapter One Political Abolition and the Slave Power Argument 18351840 | 15 |
Northern Whigs Slavery and the Speakership 1839 | 43 |
Abolitionist Lobbying and Antislavery Alliances 18361844 | 47 |
Antislavery Whig Dissidents in the 1841 Speakership Contest | 73 |
Chapter Three Building ThirdParty Electoral Power 18411846 | 77 |
The Wilmot Proviso Debates and the Widening Sectional Divide 18461848 | 105 |
Conscience Whig Insurgency and the 1847 Speakership Election | 125 |
Chapter Six Free Soil Politics and the Twilight of the Second Party System 18491853 | 161 |
Chapter Seven The Nebraska Outrage and the Advent of the Republican Party 18531855 | 187 |
The Longest Speakership Contest in American History and the First Republican National Victory 18551856 | 207 |
Conclusion | 213 |
Acknowledgments | 227 |
Abbreviations | 231 |
Notes | 233 |
| 291 | |
Chapter Five Liberty Men and the Creation of an AntiSlave Power Coalition 18461849 | 129 |
The Free Soil Balance of Power 1849 | 155 |
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