Michael J. McManus - Political Abolitionism in Wisconsin, 1840-1861

IN MARCH 1860, eight months before Abraham Lincoln was elected sixteenth president of the United States, a Republican legislator from Wisconsin matter-of-factly wrote that his party fought the expansion of slavery because it was morally and politically wrong. He maintained further that once slavery was confined within its existing borders, in fulfillment of his partys primary antislavery pledge, it soon would shrivel and die. For that reason, he affirmed, Republican party principles were manifestly abolitionist.

The purpose of this study is to trace the meaning and history of political abolitionism in Wisconsin from territorial days to the outbreak of the Civil War. Employing Liberty party principles as a benchmark, it follows their progress as the states Free Soilers and Republicans shaped those principles to their own needs in response to national and local events and the demands of majoritarian politics. Because supporters of all three antislavery parties held in common the belief that preventing slaverys expansion in due course would destroy it, the terms abolitionist and antislavery in this study generally mean the same thing. Newspaper and manuscript sources, used in conjunction with a statistical method of evaluating election returns, pinpoint the changes in the antislavery appeal and the voting groups that embraced it.

Wisconsin is an appropriate state in which to chart the course of antislavery politics. Along with neighboring Michigan, the Republican party achieved its first electoral success here owing to the determination of its leaders to push their antislavery agenda above all else and to the presence of large numbers of native New Yorkers and New Englanders unequivocally opposed to slavery. But other values and submission to the constitutional and legislative compromises relating to the Souths peculiar institution effectively subordinated antislavery attitudes until the mid-1850s. Then, the press of national and local events merged with the growing conviction that proponents of slavery, in firm control of all branches of the federal government, stood ready to risk the nations republican ideals and institutions to expand and perpetuate black bondage. This fusion of circumstance and belief ultimately created the conditions that led to the triumph of political abolitionism through the agency of the Republican party. And 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.

Antislavery politics in Wisconsin also evinced at least two characteristics of particular interest. One relates to the subordination of Unionism to antislavery policies. From the earliest days of the Republic, the concept of a perpetual Union had vied for supremacy with states rights doctrines. The situation in Wisconsin suggests that as sectional amity deteriorated in the twenty years prior to the outbreak of war, so too did the Unionism of those who embraced the politics of abolitionism. At the very least, loyalty to the Union was somewhat more conditional than traditional interpretations have indicated and surely was present in other Northern states to some degree. Indeed, uncritical Unionism, as much as anything else, distinguished Wisconsins Democrats from Liberty men, Free Soilers, and most Republicans and checked the possibility that they would endorse a political party whose avowed object was the eventual destruction of slavery. It was the Souths rejection of the legitimate outcome of the presidential election of 1860, Abraham Lincolns steadfast adherence to the Union, and the outbreak of war that led Republicans finally to adopt the Unionism most often attributed to them.

In company with their growing disenchantment with the Union and the proslavery policies of the federal government, most Wisconsin Republicans also advocated an extreme brand of states rights principles. Upheld in defense of individual liberty and basic civil rights, these differed from the states rights doctrines advocated by the South to safeguard slavery. In fact, until the eve of the Civil War, support for states rights became a test of party loyalty and a requirement for political advancement that nearly shattered the Republican coalition.

One final note. Historians of antebellum America in recent years have come to a greater understanding and appreciation of the richness and complexity of the nations politics and political system. It was not too long ago that scholars focused almost exclusively on the importance of national issues, and especially presidential contests, in shaping the political identity of nineteenth-century voters. Today, so-called new political historians have called attention to the significance that cultural differences, particularly those rooted in ethnic and religious backgrounds, have had in determining the ways in which Americans responded to their political world. Indeed, many argue that ethnocultural issues, most often played out in local and state political contests, caused the destruction of the Jacksonian party system and forced the partisan realignment of the 1850s.

I assume that ethnocultural issues played a role in the formation of political loyalties, but they did not bring down the second-party system. Prior to 1850, the political concerns that traditionally had divided the Democratic and Whig parties had been settled to the satisfaction of most Americans, while the bitter debates over slaverys expansion in the 1840s and the provisions of the Compromise of 1850 had exposed the grave danger that divisions over slavery posed to the Union. Both major parties responded by discouraging discussions about slavery, and, with long-standing national issues either dead or circumvented from 1850 to 1854, the nations political system was thrown into a state of extreme confusion. In the midst of this turmoil, nativist fears aroused by the flood of Irish and German immigrants gave birth to the Know Nothing party, which in many locales temporarily filled the void left by a decaying political order. But it was the renewal of the slavery controversy, prompted by the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, that produced the enduring political realignment that took shape between 1854 and 1856 and led to the Republican triumph in 1860. Unwilling to submit to Republican rule, the slaveholding South instead chose secession and bloody civil war.