No taint of compromise

"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 J. Blue attends in this book, 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 be achieved only through the political process." "The antislavery proponents Blue examines include Alvan Stewart, a Liberty party organizer 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 organizer 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." "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 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."--BOOK JACKET.