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WORK TITLE: Liberty Power
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Baltimore
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/author/B/C/au21933760.html * https://www.ycp.edu/academics/academic-departments/history-and-political-science/faculty/brooks-corey.html * https://thewayofimprovement.com/2016/01/21/the-authors-corner-with-corey-m-brooks/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:University of Pennsylvania, B.A., 2003; University of California, Berkeley, M.A., 2005, Ph.D., 2010.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. York College of Pennsylvania, York, assistant professor.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to publications, including the Journal of the Early Republic.
SIDELIGHTS
Corey M. Brooks is a writer and educator based in Baltimore, Maryland. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania and both a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Brooks serves as an assistant professor of history at York College of Pennsylvania. He has written and edited books. He has also written articles that have appeared in publications, including the Journal of the Early Republic.
Their Patriotic Duty
Brooks collaborated with Robert F. Engs to edit the 2007 book Their Patriotic Duty: The Civil War Letters of the Evans Family of Brown County, Ohio. The book contains excerpts from the 273 letters Andrew Evans and his son Sam wrote to each other while Sam was serving in the Civil War, as well as other letters between members of the Evans family.
The Evans boys were raised on a homestead in Brown County, Ohio, near the Ohio River. Each of the three agreed to write to Andrew, but Sam was the most prolific of the bunch. Andrew and Sam discuss mundane topics, including the weather. However, they also comment on more important things, including their views on abolition. Andrew tells Sam about planting vegetables on the farm and delicately mentions the difficulties he is facing working the land without the help of his sons. Sam tells Andrew about marching with his fellow troops and his fear of dying in battle. Though both men initially have mildly racist views, they leave those behind to support the Union side. Over time, their views on racial differences evolve. Ultimately, they discuss the positive aspects of equality for people of all colors.
Liberty Power
In his 2016 book, Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics, Brooks highlights the activities and influence of third parties in the fight for the abolition of slavery in the United States. He notes that there are three groups that were highly interested in the way the government recognized African Americans in the 1850s: the slaveholders, the antislavery moderates, and the political abolitionists. Abolitionists began focusing on persuading members of Congress to support their cause. However, they faced heavy opposition from congressmen who represented slaveholders. Brooks discusses the split that occurred in the abolitionist movement. In the 1830s, members of the movement began disagreeing on the subject of women’s rights, and part of the group broke away. Brooks comments on the emergence of the Liberty Party during the 1840s. That group was strongly abolitionist. When the Whig Party dissolved, the Republican Party emerged. Brooks profiles important political figures of the era, including Nathaniel P. Banks.
In an interview with John Fea, contributor to the Way of Improvement Leads Home, Brooks stated: “Liberty Power shows how a radical social movement encountered, identified, and triumphed over grave structural political obstacles. … Liberty Power helps us better understand both the coming of the Civil War and the nature of American abolitionism, but it is also suggestive of how we might think about the broader history of political change in America and the potential impact of a third party. Readers of Liberty Power will see how intelligent and passionate political activists overcame daunting odds to reshape American politics.”
Writing in the Journal of Southern History, John H. Matsui commented: “Liberty Power misses an opportunity to contribute to the historiography of antislavery politics in a transnational context by not paying more attention to trends in British politics from 1833, but then it would not be the book that Brooks promises his readers.” “Brooks … has written an excellent study that forces readers to consider the historiographic consensus that surrounds … political abolitionism,” asserted K.M. Gannon in Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, August, 2016, K.M. Gannon, review of Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics, p. 1832.
Journal of Southern History, August, 2017, John H. Matsui, review of Liberty Power, p. 678.
Reference & Research Book News, May, 2008, review of Their Patriotic Duty: The Civil War Letters of the Evans Family of Brown County, Ohio.
ONLINE
University of Chicago Press Website, http://press.uchicago.edu/ (January 11, 2018), author profile.
Way of Improvement Leads Home, https://thewayofimprovement.com/ (January 21, 2016), John Fea, author interview.
York College of Pennsylvania Website, https://www.ycp.edu/ (January 11, 2018), author faculty profile.
QUOTED: "Liberty Power shows how a radical social movement encountered, identified, and triumphed over grave structural political obstacles. ... Liberty Power helps us better understand both the coming of the Civil War and the nature of American abolitionism, but it is also suggestive of how we might think about the broader history of political change in America and the potential impact of a third party. Readers of Liberty Power will see how intelligent and passionate political activists overcame daunting odds to reshape American politics."
The Author’s Corner with Corey M. Brooks
JANUARY 21, 2016 / AB1519
LibertyPowerCorey M. Brooks is Assistant Professor of History at York College of Pennsylvania. This interview is based on his new book, Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics (American Beginnings, 1500-1900) (University of Chicago Press, 2016).
JF: What led you to write Liberty Power?
CB: I wrote Liberty Power to highlight how political abolitionists transformed national politics in the decades leading up to the Civil War. In traditional texts I had read as a young student of American history, what seemed to me the most important radical American social movement appeared surprisingly disconnected from the greatest political rupture in the nation’s history. In conducting my undergraduate thesis research on John Quincy Adams’s interactions with abolitionists during his post-presidential congressional career, however, I was struck by the forceful, purposeful, and often highly effective efforts of political abolitionists to influence congressional debates. As I delved more deeply into literature on the coming of the Civil War, I found that analyses of American antislavery activism and sectional political conflict were only rarely in dialogue with each other. Liberty Power returns the crucial antislavery third-party politics of Liberty and Free Soil Parties to the center of our national political story.
JF: In 2 sentences, what is the argument of Liberty Power?
CB: Liberty Power illuminates how a relatively small but sophisticated group of abolitionist activists exercised outsized political influence and helped fundamentally destabilize the proslavery Second Party System of Whigs and Democrats. In pioneering and popularizing the rhetorically potent and politically critical Slave Power argument, political abolitionists built a countervailing “liberty power” that laid the groundwork for slavery to become the central issue in national politics.
JF: Why do we need to read Liberty Power?
CB: Liberty Power shows how a radical social movement encountered, identified, and triumphed over grave structural political obstacles. This story helps us understand the fundamental role of antislavery in causing the Civil War. Far from being naïve idealists or stumbling into unforeseen controversies, political abolitionists directly and intentionally helped force the nation to confront and resolve the deep conflict between freedom and slavery (even if most couldn’t anticipate the scale of the bloodshed such a resolution would require). Liberty Power helps us better understand both the coming of the Civil War and the nature of American abolitionism, but it is also suggestive of how we might think about the broader history of political change in America and the potential impact of a third party. Readers of Liberty Power will see how intelligent and passionate political activists overcame daunting odds to reshape American politics. They managed to succeed not only because of their deeply held moral convictions but also because they understood that to transform the national political system they had to become careful, thoughtful students of how American political institutions worked.
JF: When and why did you decide to become an American historian?
CB: As is the case for many historians, inspirational teachers deserve much of the credit. The most important was my undergraduate mentor at Penn, the late Robert F. Engs. A few dedicated high school teachers pushed me to work hard at, and come to love, studying history, so I entered college knowing I would major in history, and I always gravitated to American history in particular out of my desire to understand the evolution of the society, and especially the political system, in which I live. But it was working with Bob Engs as a research assistant annotating a collection of Civil War letters (which we later co-edited and published as Their Patriotic Duty: The Civil War Letters of the Evans Family of Brown County, Ohio [Fordham, 2007]) that convinced me to become a professional historian. Bob, in his characteristically generous, unassuming style, taught me to love the research process, as he presented me with seemingly small, but often surprisingly complex, assignments designed to generate footnotes contextualizing material in the letters. In completing these serial mini-research projects, I came, I presume by Bob’s design, to embrace the many challenges and occasional thrills of historical research.
JF: What is your next project?
CB: I have a couple of long-term projects in development further exploring the intersection of race, social activism, and political institutions in nineteenth-century America, but more immediately, I am working on an article on public memory of Roger Taney in Annapolis, Baltimore, and Washington D.C. In the years just after Taney’s 1864 death, Radical Republican Senator Charles Sumner defeated a congressional effort to memorialize the author of the infamous Dred Scott decision, while the Maryland legislature, by contrast, commissioned a monumental Taney statue to stand (as it still does) in the most prominent place of honor on the statehouse grounds. My project will contribute to the Civil War memory studies literature by encouraging us to also rethink the sculpting (literally and figuratively) of public memory of antebellum conflicts. Historicizing the Taney statue in Annapolis and its replica installed a decade and a half later in Baltimore will shed light on how white Marylanders’ public memory of antebellum conflicts reflected and reinforced the disheartening postbellum racial climate.
JF: Thanks, Corey!
COREY BROOKS, PH.D.
EDUCATION
B.A., University of Pennsylvania (2003)
M.A., University of California, Berkeley (2005)
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley (2010)
COURSES
American Civilization
Coming of the Civil War
The Civil War and Reconstruction
Race and Racism in American History
History of Alcohol and Drugs in American Life
RESEARCH INTERESTS
19th Century America
Slavery and Antislavery Movements
American Political History
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
Robert F. Engs and Corey M. Brooks, eds. Their Patriotic Duty: The Civil War Letters of the Evans Family of Brown County, Ohio, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007).
Corey M. Brooks, Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2016) Info: http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo21933757.html
Corey M. Brooks, “Stoking the ‘Abolition Fire in the Capitol’: Liberty Party Lobbying and Antislavery in Congress,” Journal of the Early Republic 33, Fall 2013, 523-547.
COREY BROOKS
COREY BROOKS, PH.D.
Associate Professor of History
CONTACT
History and Political Science
Humanities Center, Room 106
717.600.3869
cbrooks4@ycp.edu
About the Author
Corey M. Brooks is assistant professor of history at York College of Pennsylvania. He is coeditor of Their Patriotic Duty: The Civil War Letters of the Evans Family of Brown County, Ohio. He resides in Baltimore.
Affiliation: York College of Pennsylvania
Hometown: Baltimore, MD
BOOKS BY COREY M. BROOKS
Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics Liberty Power
Corey M. Brooks
QUOTED: "Liberty Power misses an opportunity to contribute to the historiography of antislavery politics in a transnational context by not paying more attention to trends in British politics from 1833, but then it would not be the book that Brooks promises his readers."
Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties
and the Transformation of American Politics
John H. Matsui
Journal of Southern History.
83.3 (Aug. 2017): p678+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text:
Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics. By Corey M.
Brooks. American Beginnings, 1500-1900. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp.
[viii], 302. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-226-30728-2.)
Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics sets out to reintegrate
antislavery third parties into the history of antebellum politics. Corey M. Brooks focuses on the decadeslong
campaign of political abolitionists to contest and expose the slave power's control of national politics,
culminating in the birth of the explicitly antislavery Republican Party by the mid-1850s. In analyzing
primary sources on the political wing of the antislavery movement. Brooks sails between the Scylla of
antislavery hagiography and the Charybdis of proslavery screeds. Most crucial to Brooks's thesis among
recent scholarship is James Oakes's Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States,
1861-1865 (New York. 2012). As Oakes notes, by the 1850s three constituencies--political abolitionists,
antislavery moderates, and slaveholders--recognized that if the federal government ceased to treat slaves as
property, voluntary state abolition would follow.
Abolitionists quickly recognized that Congress was the linchpin to fight the slave power; slaveholders'
interests were disproportionately represented in both houses thanks to the three-fifths clause. Even as the
American abolitionist movement fractured in the late 1830s over women's rights and pacifism, the volume
of antislavery voices calling for a purely antislavery third party increased. Although many abolitionist
voters chose to support the Whig Party in 1840, that election saw the birth of the Liberty Party. The Liberty
Party had two potential goals: "achieving national political victory or pressuring one or both of the major
parties to adopt an unequivocally antislavery platform" (p. 78).
The chronology moves forward predictably for historians familiar with antislavery politics. Conscience
Whigs and Liberty men gave way to Free Soilers in the wake of opposition to the invasion of Mexico and
debate over the Wilmot Proviso, followed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) giving birth to the
Republican Party as the Whigs fell apart. Yet Brooks places far more emphasis in Liberty Power on
prominent congressional posts than Richard H. Sewell dedicated to such seats in his foundational text on
antislavery politics, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States, 1837-1860 (New York,
1976). Brooks pays close attention to contests over the speakership of the House of Representatives, a post
that readers of Leonard L. Richards's The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780-
1860 (Baton Rouge, 2009) will know was occupied by slaveholders for two-thirds of the years through
1850. Republican Nathaniel P. Banks's successful campaign for this seat in 1856 thus marked a crucial
12/24/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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moment in antislavery politicians' long war to craft a viable congressional coalition. Banks was a recent
convert to the Republican ranks, and his candidacy united Republicans and nativist Know-Nothings. The
Republican Party embodied the culmination of decades of labor by Liberty men and Free Soilers to found a
voluntary association with millions of members dedicated to thwarting the mastery of slaveholding
politicians over free state voters by "divorcing the federal government from slavery" (p. 211).
Brooks's book deserves to be read in tandem with This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of
American Foreign Policy (Cambridge, Mass., 2016) by Matthew Karp. As Karp demonstrates, the
antislavery politicians Brooks studies faced a very confident--not isolationist--group of slaveholding
politicians who had global ambitions. If Britain was an antislavery and antidemocratic empire by 1833, if
not 1807, as is acknowledged in Liberty Power, then the growing global influence of the British empire is
seen as an existential threat to American slavery by the influential southern politicians Karp studies. Liberty
Power misses an opportunity to contribute to the historiography of antislavery politics in a transnational
context by not paying more attention to trends in British politics from 1833, but then it would not be the
book that Brooks promises his readers.
John H. Matsui
Virginia Military Institute
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Matsui, John H. "Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics."
Journal of Southern History, vol. 83, no. 3, 2017, p. 678+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501078135/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d905ca84.
Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A501078135
QUOTED: "Brooks ... has written an excellent study that forces readers to consider the historiographic consensus that surrounds ... political abolitionism."
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Brooks, Corey M.: Liberty power:
antislavery third parties and the
transformation of American politics
K.M. Gannon
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
53.12 (Aug. 2016): p1832.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
[cc] 53-5364
E449
2015-18766 CIP
Brooks, Corey M. Liberty power: antislavery third parties and the transformation of American politics.
Chicago, 2016. 302p index afp ISBN 9780226307282 cloth, $45.00; ISBN 9780226307312 ebook, contact
publisher for price
Brooks (York College) has written an excellent study that forces readers to consider the historiographic
consensus that surrounds the familiar topic of political abolitionism in the antebellum US. He takes issue
with the Garrisonian argument that political abolitionism was morally inferior and ineffective, an argument
that has also colored much of the scholarship on abolitionism. Rather, he argues, political abolitionism--in
particular, the Liberty Party--played a pivotal role in the ultimate success of the movement: emancipation
during the Civil War. By effectively using the partisan tools of the Second Party System, political
abolitionists made themselves a valuable part of important coalitions, which in turn rendered them more
effective agents of antislavery. They provoked the Southern Slave Power politicians into overreacting to
perceived threats to slavery, which had decisive effects on Northern public opinion. Brooks ably
demonstrates that the Free Soil and Republican parties did not arise from a vacuum but emerged from the
effective partisan work of the "liberty power" in US political culture. This well-researched, compelling
study deserves a wide readership. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. All academic levels/ libraries.--
K. M. Gannon, Grand View University
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Gannon, K.M. "Brooks, Corey M.: Liberty power: antislavery third parties and the transformation of
American politics." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Aug. 2016, p. 1832. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A459986404/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=cb193499. Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A459986404
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Their patriotic duty; the Civil War letters of
the Evans family of Brown County, Ohio
Reference & Research Book News.
23.2 (May 2008):
COPYRIGHT 2008 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
Full Text:
9780823227846
Their patriotic duty; the Civil War letters of the Evans family of Brown County, Ohio.
Ed. by Robert F. Engs and Corey M. Brooks.
Fordham University Press
2007
410 pages
$36.95
Hardcover
F497
Andrew Evans sent three sons off to war from his homestead on the Ohio River. They promised to write.
One, Sam, succeeded mightily. The 273 letters between Andrew and Sam describe not only the ways of war
but the battles at home to survive on the banks of a river with the plains all around. Andrew lets Sam know,
just a little, how hard it is to manage without him, they tell each other about the weather, the marches, the
planting of tomatoes, the fear on both sides that death would strike. As they and others of the family write
we find a remarkable change. To various degrees they shed their racism and support the causes of the North,
including a Black soldiery, and in a small amount of utopian reverie they allow themselves to believe equal
rights for all races might be a good idea.
([c]20082005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Their patriotic duty; the Civil War letters of the Evans family of Brown County, Ohio." Reference &
Research Book News, May 2008. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A178635390/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e73a0cdc.
Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A178635390