No Taint of Compromise: Crusaders in Antislavery Politics

Looking back on his narrow reelection to the House of Representatives in 1862, George Washington Julian of Indiana remarked proudly that, having held fast to his antislavery position, he had secured a "triumph [with] no taint of compromise." Julian's was one of a small but critical number of voices who, beginning in the late 1830s, battled the institution of slavery through political activism. Those are the voices to which Frederick Blue attends in No Taint of Compromise, an in-depth account of the trials and accomplishments of eleven men and women who insisted that emancipation and racial equality could only be achieved through the political process. The antislavery proponents Blue profiles include Alvan Stewart, John Greenleaf Whittier, Charles Henry Langston, Owen Lovejoy, Sherman Booth, Jane Grey Swisshelm, George W. Julian, David Wilmot, Benjamin and Edward Wade, and Jessie Benton Fremont. Working through the Liberty, Free Soil, Democratic, Whig, and Republican organizations, they represented the full spectrum of opinions on and approaches to abolition. Blue highlights their motives and actions as they undertook the yeoman's work of organizing parties, holding conventions, editing newspapers, and generally animating and agitating the discussion of issues related to slavery. Their stories, brought together for the first time in this comparative biographical study, enrich our understanding of the political crisis over slavery that led to the Civil War.