No Taint of Compromise: Crusaders in Antislavery Politics

No Taint of Compromise highlights the motives and actions of those who played instrumental if not central roles in antislavery politics – those who undertook the yeoman’s work of organising parties, holding conventions, editing newspapers, and generally animating and agitating the discussion of issues related to slavery. They were a small but critical number of voices who, beginning in the late 1830s, battled the institution of slavery through political activism. Frederick J. Blue provides an in-depth account of the trials and accomplishments of eleven men and women who, in the face of great odds and powerful opposition, insisted that emancipation and racial equality could only be achieved through the political process: Alvan Stewart, a Liberty party organiser from New York; John Greenleaf Whittier, a Massachusetts poet, journalist, and Liberty activist; Charles Henry Langston, an Ohio African American educator; Owen Lovejoy, a congressman from Illinois; Sherman Booth, a journalist and Liberty organiser in Wisconsin; Jane Grey Swisshelm, a journalist in Pennsylvania and later Minnesota; George W. Julian, a congressman from Indiana; David Wilmot, a congressman from Pennsylvania; Benjamin and Edward Wade, a senator and a congressman, respectively, from Ohio; and Jessie Benton Fremont of Missouri and California, wife of the Republican presidential nominee. Their stories, brought together in this comparative biographical study, enrich our understanding of the political crisis over slavery that led to the Civil War.