Political Abolitionism in Wisconsin, 1840-1861

Michael J. McManus

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780873386012
• eBook ISBN:
  9781612771762
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

Michael J. McManus's study of political abolitionism in Wisconsin demonstrates the overriding importance of slavery-related issues in bringing on the political crisis of the 1850s and the American Civil War. In the years prior to the war, the political struggle to free enslaved blacks and block the "peculiar institution's" spread into the western territories became intertwined with concerns over the future of republican institutions in America and the liberties of northern Whites.

McManus shows that Wisconsin was more radical on slavery and race-related issues than most other northern states, and that slavery, rather than local ethnocultural concerns, was of greatest significance to the state's voters in the prewar years.

CHAPTER ONE

A Redeeming Spirit Is Busily Engaged

WHEN WISCONSIN took its place as the thirtieth state in the American Union in the spring of 1848, the young republic was preparing for a presidential contest. The principal issue at stake, the status of slavery in the territory recently acquired from Mexico, had exposed dangerous sectional rifts within the nation’s two major political parties, the Whigs and the Democrats. Yet it was not the first time that residents of the new state had wrestled with what a Whig journalist once had referred to as “the odious and detestable institution of slavery.”¹ Wisconsin’s Protestant sects, most taking slavery’s immorality for granted, had been quarreling publicly for nearly a decade over the propriety of sermonizing against black bondage from the pulpit, while some itinerant abolitionists, such as the English-born Baptist minister Edward Mathews, bypassed the dispute and established churches pledged to admit only those who disavowed the right of property in man.²

Antislavery views also found expression outside the territory’s churches. In the spring of 1840, the first Wisconsin antislavery society sprang up in the town of Burlington.³ Several months later, E.G. Dyer, a respected physician and a hardworking friend of black fugitives, denounced slavery in a Fourth of July oration delivered to the citizens of Delavan. “American Slavery,” he insisted, “cannot be sustained in a government like ours without trespassing upon the rights of the free.” As evidence of this, Dyer pointed to Northern citizens incarcerated in Southern jails for speaking out against it and to those unfortunate free blacks in the North who were kidnapped and dragged southward to a lifetime of bitter servitude. He viewed America’s future with confidence, however, for “a redeeming spirit… is busily engaged in undermining the strongholds of… domestic slavery, and with perseverance … this foul blot will be wiped from our national escutcheon—the oppressed emancipated—and every fetter severed.”⁴

The link between slavery and the threat it posed to the liberties of freemen would constitute an important element in antislavery thought and rhetoric. Yet when Dyer uttered this sentiment in 1840, few people found it compelling enough to take an active part in the movement to free the nation’s blacks. Most Wisconsinites had little love for slavery, but they were too “busily engaged” in trying to carve a living out of the frontier to trouble themselves about it. And in any event, few believed that agitation would serve a practical purpose.

Ten years before the formation of the Burlington antislavery society and Dyer’s Independence Day speech, only 3,700 non-Indian inhabitants, 700 of whom were military personnel stationed in the territory’s three forts, lived in Wisconsin. The remaining 3,000 people settled primarily in the rich lead region in the southwestern counties or engaged in the far-flung fur trade.⁵ The lead district grew rapidly in the 1830s, as settlers from southern Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia streamed in to work the mineral deposits. A number of Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, and New Englanders joined these Southerners, as did many immigrants from England and Ireland after 1840. A small contingent of Welshmen, Scotsmen, and Canadians and a corporal’s guard of free blacks and slaves, the latter numbering eleven in 1840, rounded out the lead region’s pioneer inhabitants.⁶

Despite the strictures of the Northwest Ordinance, military men assigned to Wisconsin and Southerners looking to take up permanent residence had brought these few slaves into the territory. Some, like Henry Dodge, promised freedom and “40 acres and a yoke of oxen” to bondsmen who accompanied them to the frontier and labored for a specified period of time. Presumably, the auction block was their only alternative. Other slaveholders may have followed the example of James Mitchell, a Methodist clergyman from Virginia, who returned his wife’s two slaves to the South after several years residence in Wisconsin with the couple. Mitchell’s action precipitated a bitter controversy within the territory’s Methodist Conference and eventually led to his suspension as the sect’s district elder. Whatever the means, by 1844 or thereabouts, slavery had vanished from Wisconsin.⁷

In addition to harboring the territory’s few slaves, the newcomers to southwestern Wisconsin discouraged abolitionist agitation. Edward Mathews often faced threats of physical violence on his tours through the lead region. On several occasions, unappreciative audiences made him the target of “an abundance of eggs.” Once, at Mineral Point, William S. Hamilton, the cadaverous son of the great Federalist leader, warned Mathews that a suit of tar and feathers awaited him if he remained in town. In Potosi, Mathews “narrowly escaped a fence rail,” and in Lancaster a drunken mob serenaded him and his hosts with “Negro songs” and very nearly turned a cannon on them. As late as 1849, Ichabod Codding, the renowned Liberty party organizer and abolitionist lecturer, was showered with eggs to prevent him from addressing the citizens of Shullsburg.⁸

The early arrival of native Southerners, the temporary presence of slaves, and antagonism toward abolitionists had stamped southwestern Wisconsin with the flavor of Dixie.⁹ Further east, settlement differed considerably. In 1830, the area contained few whites; a decade later twelve thousand of the territory’s thirty-one thousand residents lived in the southeastern counties of Milwaukee, Racine, and Walworth.¹⁰ Restless Yankees from New England and upstate New York comprised the bulk of the frontiersmen who laid claims to the region’s extensive lakefront properties, took up farms on its fertile prairies, and plied their trades in its growing towns and villages. By 1850, more than one-half of Wisconsin’s adults had been born in New York, leading some to characterize it as the younger sibling of the Empire State.¹¹

Large numbers of foreign-born immigrants, primarily from the various German principalities, but including many Irish, English, Scotch, Welsh, Scandinavian, and other nationalities, joined the Yankees. Foreign immigration swelled in the latter half of the 1840s. As the decade came to a close, 36 percent of Wisconsin’s 305,000 residents claimed a country other than the United States as their place of birth.¹² The greatest proportion of Wisconsin’s foreign-born citizens poured into the lakeshore counties of Milwaukee, Washington, Sheboygan, and Manitowoc. Significant numbers also wandered further south and established homes alongside the suspicious Yankees, while many English-speaking immigrants moved west into the lead region.¹³ By 1850, population density and improved transportation facilities combined to push all elements of this heterogeneous mass into Wisconsin’s interior. There they might make a fresh start on the abundant fertile land awaiting them.¹⁴

Not surprisingly, given Wisconsin’s settlement patterns, antislavery sentiment first found expression in southeastern towns like Burlington and Delavan and within the area’s Protestant churches. Many of the territory’s Yankees had migrated from New York’s “Burnt-Over District,” a region swept by successive waves of religious enthusiasm during the early nineteenth century. This enthusiasm engendered a fervent desire to rid American society of all influences that counteracted man’s innate goodness and frustrated his potential to bring about the physical, social, and moral elevation of mankind. Slavery was among those evils, stripping bondsmen of their humanity, desensitizing slaveowners to human suffering, and preventing both groups from achieving their full capabilities as members of the human family.¹⁵ The problem was how to purge America of that sin.

Prior to 1840, many abolitionists had adopted the tactics of moral suasion and interrogation of prospective officeholders as the best means of undermining support for slavery. But that strategy brought limited success, and increasing numbers of abolitionists questioned its efficacy. Disenchantment finally led to the formation of the Liberty party, the first independent political organization dedicated to slavery’s destruction.¹⁶ The “Burnt-Over District” was especially receptive to the Liberty appeal, and at least some of Wisconsin’s immigrants undoubtedly received their baptism in the political antislavery movement while resident there.¹⁷

The establishment of the Wisconsin Territorial Antislavery Society in June 1842 was a predictable consequence of the growing Yankee population and the emergence of the Liberty party. The Society demonstrated its interest in politics during the spring elections of the following year, when it joined in a “People’s Coalition” with Whigs and disaffected Democrats to elect Edward D. Holton sheriff of Milwaukee County.¹⁸ A New Hampshire native, Holton had arrived in Milwaukee in 1840, and with the help of influential friends and his own industry he rapidly rose in wealth and prominence. A deeply religious man and an ardent abolitionist, he would figure prominently in Wisconsin’s antislavery movement.¹⁹

Encouraged by Holton’s election, the antislavery society held a territorial convention in Madison on September 13, 1843, and nominated Jeduthan Spooner, a Walworth County Whig, for delegate to Congress. Unfortunately, the convention failed to consult with its candidate before making the nomination. During the campaign Spooner strongly exhorted his Whig friends to support the regular party nominee. They did. Out of 8,100 votes cast, Spooner received 153.²⁰

The relative obscurity surrounding the activities of Wisconsin’s antislavery men ended with the fall elections of 1843. Despite the society’s miserable showing, organization quietly went forward. In November, the public was advised without fanfare that a Liberty newspaper soon would be published in the thriving village of Racine.²¹ Ichabod Codding’s arrival during the winter of 1844 provided further evidence that serious organizing was under way. Active in the antislavery movement for nearly a decade, Codding had been instrumental in establishing the Liberty party in Maine and Connecticut. In the wake of the Spooner fiasco, his presence must have buoyed the spirits of his like-minded but woefully inexperienced associates in Wisconsin.²²

In February 1844, at an antislavery convention in Southport (Kenosha), Codding and several other Liberty activists from outside the territory helped found the first branch of the party in Wisconsin. The new political organization promptly proclaimed its independence from the Whig and Democratic parties and vowed to contest for all elective offices, “down to the lowest precinct level,” solely on slavery-related matters.²³ Following Southport’s lead, chapters of the Liberty party soon sprang up throughout the territory, even in the inhospitable west.²⁴

After his successful trip to Southport, Codding moved on to Milwaukee to participate in a meeting of the Territorial Antislavery Society and deliver a series of antislavery lectures. While there, he recruited a valuable new ally, Charles Clark Sholes.²⁵ The conversion of Sholes was a fortunate one. A Connecticut native and an able and experienced newspaper editor, he had helped establish four Democratic newspapers over an eight-year span and was a well-known and respected figure among the territory’s still small journalistic corps.²⁶ President John Tyler’s intention to annex slave-holding Texas prompted Sholes’s movement into the antislavery ranks. “This is a question big with peril to our peaceful relations abroad, and to the perpetuity of our Union at home,” he editorialized in December 1843. The annexation of such an enormous region committed to the use of slave labor would give the South “permanent dominion over the federal government, and fasten the pernicious institution ever more firmly upon the nation.” The Texas question thus transformed slavery from an issue of local concern “to one in which the whole North has immense interests at stake.”²⁷

Codding’s courtship and the annexation of Texas convinced Sholes to sever his ties with the proannexationist Democratic party and to undertake the editorial duties of the promised but as yet unrealized Liberty paper.²⁸ On March 6, 1844, the American Freeman finally made its appearance in Milwaukee. It replaced Sholes’s Milwaukee Democrat and announced its intention to advance the principles and interests of the Liberty party. After a shaky start that forced him to suspend publication of the Freeman for three months, Sholes moved the paper to the more agreeable environs of Prairieville (Waukesha). To bolster its precarious financial position, he sold his entire printing establishment to the newly formed Territorial Liberty Association, a joint stock company that distributed shares for ten dollars apiece. Although the Freeman never flourished financially during the territorial years, the efforts of the Association were sufficient to keep it alive.²⁹

Under the capable management of Sholes and his successors,³⁰ the Freeman gave the Liberty organization public visibility and cohesion. It supplied the party faithful with a coherent and consistently maintained set of principles and policy objectives. As the organ of the only distinct antislavery party in the territory, the Freeman also set a standard Whigs and Democrats would have to consider when seeking votes in southeastern Wisconsin where opposition to slavery was most pronounced. And when some might have been tempted to abandon the Liberty party as a lost cause, it reminded them of the moral and political imperatives that necessitated its creation. In addition, the Freeman kept party members abreast of the antislavery movement in the rest of the country and circulated a wide variety of antislavery literature.³¹ Ultimately, the importance of the Liberty party in Wisconsin lay less in its role as a political association competing for popular favor at the polls than in its ability to broadcast a specific legal and constitutional political program for the destruction of slavery. By advocating a policy that availed itself of existing institutional mechanisms to achieve the group’s goals, Liberty men avoided both the anti-institutional extremism popularly associated with abolitionism and the ad hoc responses to slavery questions the northern wings of the major parties usually proffered.³²

Wisconsin’s Liberty men advocated political ideals developed by their national leaders.³³ They condemned slavery as a moral, social, and political evil, a sin against God and man that “ought to be immediately and forever abolished.” In practical terms, this meant using every legal means available to weaken and ultimately destroy slavery. Although they admitted that complete emancipation might not come during their lifetime, Liberty supporters firmly believed slavery’s days in the United States were numbered. And since moral suasion had failed to work, peaceful and constitutional means of attacking black bondage were advanced to offset the perceived tendency of the federal ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One: A Redeeming Spirit Is Busily Engaged
• Chapter Two: Negro Suffrage Is Antislavery Work
• Chapter Three: This Movement Is More Radical Than the Leaders Themselves Dare Avow
• Chapter Four: A Party Separate and Distinct
• Chapter Five: The Principles of the Free Soil and Whig Parties Are Identical
• Chapter Six: We Must Unite or Be Enslaved
• Chapter Seven: This Thing Called Know Nothingism
• Chapter Eight: Freedom and Liberty First, and the Union Afterwards
• Chapter Nine: The Dangerous Doctrine of Nullification
• Chapter Ten: A Little Matter of Justice
• Chapter Eleven: It Looks Like Civil War Is Inevitable
• Chapter Twelve: The End of the Antislavery Question Has Arrived
• Appendix: Wisconsin Election Tables
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index