No Taint of Compromise: Crusaders in Antislavery Politics.

No Taint of Compromise: Crusaders in Antislavery Politics. By Frederick J. Blue. Antislavery, Abolition, and the Atlantic World. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. Pp. xvi, 301. $54.95, ISBN 0-8071-2976-3.)

This book is a welcome addition to the historiography of antislavery activism in the antebellum United States. Frederick J. Blue focuses on eleven men and women who campaigned against slavery and the Slave Power. Rejecting the Garrisonian abolitionists' opposition to politics, they helped organize the Liberty, Free Soil, and Republican Parties. Blue wisely avoids focusing on much-studied figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Charles Sumner. Instead he examines "those who undertook the yeoman's work in organizing parties, holding conventions and rallies [and] editing antislavery newspapers ..." (p. 3). This approach enables Blue to illuminate the lives and antislavery work of relatively unknown activists such as Alvan Stewart, a New York attorney and Liberty Party leader, and George Washington Julian, a Radical Republican congressman from Indiana. Blue also explores better known reformers such as John Greenleaf Whittier, Owen Lovejoy (brother of Elijah Lovejoy), and Jessie Benton Fremont. The author makes good use of his subjects' speeches and writings as well as secondary sources to present a succinct, often insightful, collective biography.

Blue suggests important differences between black and white antislavery reformers. Charles Henry Langston, for example, an African American activist, unlike his white counterparts spent as much time campaigning against racial discrimination as he did opposing slavery. Blue's portraits of Jane Swisshelm and Jessie Fremont reinforce what the recent historiography of women abolitionists documents. Female reformers were especially likely to focus on how the institution of slavery destroyed the family structures of both whites and blacks and how it exploited women and children. Focusing on Swisshelm and Fremont, Blue offers good case studies of how women, despite their disenfranchisement, still participated in politics.

Although this is an impressive book, it has shortcomings. Key questions are not adequately explored. For example, why did Blue focus on the particular individuals he discusses and not others who did yeoman service in antislavery politics? The author asserts rather than documents that his group of activists were representative of reformers who mobilized politically against slavery. Blue repeatedly claims that the men and women he profiles never compromised their opposition to slavery. Yet his evidence often undercuts this claim. Antislavery political activists were often pragmatic and willing to accommodate changing political realities. Most left the Liberty Party to support the Free Soil and Republican Parties, even though the latter groups merely sought to contain, not abolish, slavery, and they omitted demands for black civil rights.

A more thematic organization might have enabled Blue to highlight crucial issues that crop up repeatedly, such as the fact that many activists were incensed by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and by Lincoln's revocation of John C. Fremont's order to free the slaves under his command in Missouri in 1861. This reader also hoped that Blue would push further his analysis when he suggested connections among different reform movements. Many of Blue's subjects were opponents of capital punishment and drinking as well as critics of Catholicism (although most opposed the Know Nothing movement). Some also supported women's rights. As works by Robert Abzug, Bruce Dorsey, and other scholars suggest, analysis of seemingly disparate reform issues and how they dovetailed with the antislavery crusade enriches our understanding of motivations of reformers. Although Blue's book sometimes does a better job of raising than answering important questions, it is a work that deserves a wide audience, especially among students of antislavery reform and antebellum politics.

MYRA C. GLENN

Elmira College