Political Abolitionism in Wisconsin, 1840-1861.

Political Abolitionism in Wisconsin, 1840-1861. By Michael J. McManus. (Kent, Ohio, and London: Kent State University Press, c. 1998. Pp. xiv, 288. $39.00, ISBN 0-87338-601-9.)

In this study of antebellum Wisconsin, Michael J. McManus reaffirms the contention of his mentor Richard H. Sewell, in Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States, 1837-1860 (New York, 1976), that continuity rather than change characterized antislavery politics before the Civil War. The Republicans, like their Liberty Party and Free Soil predecessors, were morally committed to ending slavery and only secondarily concerned with other issues such as temperance, nativism, or free labor. McManus disputes one prevailing explanation of why men risked their lives so readily in the war and suggests that in Wisconsin the commitment to the Union itself was secondary to the dislike of slavery. Southern fire-eaters who claimed to see abolitionism and commitment to African American citizenship in the political agenda of the Republican Party, therefore, were basically correct. McManus attributes this to the origins of many antislavery Wisconsinites in New England or Yankee-settled western New York. He sees their apparent shifts from abolition to free soil as political maneuvers only.

McManus makes his case through a traditional narrative that describes Wisconsin politics from the state's territorial era through 1860. The story is principally reconstructed from newspaper editorials and political correspondence available at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. The author supplements literary sources with ecological regression analyses of elections and referenda on African American suffrage. His aim is to demonstrate a basically similar level of support for black suffrage by Liberty men, Free Soilers, and Republicans, and a higher level of voter turnout in elections involving slavery-related issues than in other elections. McManus acknowledges the violation of statistical assumptions within the ecological regression model he uses--apparently he is unaware of the improved model offered by Gary King in his A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem: Reconstructing Individual Behavior from Aggregate Data (Princeton, 1997)--and understands his results as impressions of voting behavior that complement the literary sources he prefers.

McManus does not discuss political theory, but implicit in his reconstruction of events is the assumption that partisan polemicists offered coherent and consistent statements of political beliefs that were accepted by their readers. Implicit also is a hierarchy of values that privileged antislavery above all other issues and necessitated expedient manipulation of other political issues, for example, by adopting states' rights doctrine when it was necessary to defend personal liberty laws but abandoning it during the war. Such expediency undermines coherence: when positions shift, how does one determine whether they were being manipulated for principled or unprincipled reasons? Is McManus's narrative the only one that can be reconstructed from the newspapers of the era? It can explain a civil war with the South, but what about the abandonment of African American rights after the war, or the class tensions within the rapidly developing western states? Did rank-and-file voters have the same hierarchy of values as party elites? How did the two interact? The persistence of such questions challenges political historians to continue to rethink traditional political narrative.

PHYLLIS F. FIELD Ohio University