Left Flank

The following passages, and many more before and after, evoked a complementary chord with some aspect of the current excitement for the apparent presumptive victory of Senator Barack Obama.

The proposed ticket—uniting Andrew Jackson's right-hand man [former President Martin Van Buren] with the son of the man Jackson had overthrown [Charles Francis Adams]—on the general assembly's approval with one more roar, then the assembled marched and celebrated in a torchlight parade, behind a giant banner:

'87 and '48

JEFFERSON AND VAN BUREN

No Compromise

The atmosphere of spiritual as well as political revival had converted even adamant radicals. Before the convention, Joshua Leavitt, the veteran evangelical, immediatist abolitionist, and Liberty Party man, contended dismissively that Van Buren was acting more "to avenge his old quarrel with the Hunkers than for sympathy for the cause" of free soil and antislavery. Near the convention's close, after Van Buren had won his majority, Leavitt obtained the floor and addressed the convention in a voice choked with emotion. "Mr. Chairman," he began, "this is the most solemn experience of my life. I feel as if in the immediate presence of the Divine Spirit." Then h moved that Van Buren's nomination be made unanimous, and concluded with a shout. "The Liberty party is not dead but TRANSLATED."

Between them, Van Buren and Leavitt had aptly summarized the surpassing importance of the Free Soil convention. Although the new nominee flattered the delegates with his exaggerated comparison to the 1787 federal convention, he was correct to see the gathering as an important turn in American politics, the first deliberate effort to create from the grass roots, out of disintegration of old party ties, a new political party that would seriously contend for the presidency. When Van Buren had helped cobble together the Jackson Democracy twenty years earlier, he operated from the top down; the Free Soil Party, by contrast, arose seemingly by spontaneous combustion amid the emergency over slavery in 1848. The Liberty party had taken years to move beyond the political margins; in "translating" those efforts, the Free Soilers represented a wide-ranging political coalition from across the North, with a particularly heavy influx of pro-Wilmot Democrats. Nothing like it had been seen before, the product a great shudder of popular revulsion and democratic organizing that united men who, all their lives, had opposed each other in politics. "The political table is now turning...," one Ohio Free Soiler wrote, "and by a little effort now great changes can be wrought." (Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln, p. 626)

Yet, less than four months later, General Zachary Taylor, a slaveholder running on a vaguely nationalist platform, was elected president.