ebooks Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago by Eric Klinenberg in History

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Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party was the first party built on opposition to slavery to win on the national stage—but its victory was rooted in the earlier efforts of under-appreciated antislavery third parties. Liberty Power tells the story of how abolitionist activists built the most transformative third-party movement in American history and effectively reshaped political structures in the decades leading up to the Civil War. As Corey M. Brooks explains; abolitionist trailblazers who organized first the Liberty Party and later the more moderate Free Soil Party confronted formidable opposition from a two-party system expressly constructed to suppress disputes over slavery. Identifying the Whigs and Democrats as the mainstays of the southern Slave Power’s national supremacy; savvy abolitionists insisted that only a party independent of slaveholder influence could wrest the federal government from its grip. A series of shrewd electoral; lobbying; and legislative tactics enabled these antislavery third parties to wield influence far beyond their numbers. In the process; these parties transformed the national political debate and laid the groundwork for the success of the Republican Party and the end of American slavery.