Meet A.D. Smith, Forgotten Libertarian Abolitionist Hero and Would-Be President of Canada.

• Author: Comegna, Anthony

RUTH DUNLEY FIRST encountered Abram D. Smith as a barely mentioned bit of trivia in Glyndon Van Deusen's 1959 book The Jacksonian Era. "In September, 1838," Van Deusen wrote, "some 160 Hunters from both sides of the [Canadian] border attended a convention in Cleveland, where they elected one Smith, a resident of that city, President of the Republic of Canada."

Who was this Smith person, and how did he get elected by a bunch of carousing yahoos as president of a neighboring country? Why had she never heard of him before? Surely such a colorful figure should have made it into some textbook somewhere; surely his whole legacy was recorded in an obscure dissertation, some old journal article, or at least a beefy footnote. Something out there must explain this guy and his role in what became a major international affair.

But no--not even close. No one had ever bothered to write this man into history. Now Dunley had a dissertation to write.

The Lost President: A.D. Smith and theHidden History of Radical Democracy in Civil War America is the result of that work. Besides his Canadian adventure, Dunley found, Smith was the Wisconsin Supreme Court justice who struck down the national Fugitive Slave Act in his state in 1854. His name was also briefly floated for the vice presidency on Abraham Lincoln's 1860 ticket. Smith's life would be lost to time but for the efforts of a single historian.

Salvaging the record was no easy task. First off, the phrase "one Smith" from Van Deusen was not much to go on. After checking a variety of Ohio archives, Dunley concluded the man's initials were "A.D." But that made for a bit too much to go on. With 6,294 different necrology files linked to the name, she experienced both ends of the research historian's constant dilemmas: the hopeless dearth of useful evidence and the crushing mountain of clutter. Dunley took hours to comb through baby-naming books for possible combinations, entering them fruitlessly into Google; she checked just about every type of archive; she found suggestions that he may have been a doctor, a lawyer, a politician, but nothing terribly specific; she called on waves of archivists and librarians.

To make matters worse, the election that attracted her attention in the first place was a highly secretive affair, conducted by an underground militia of rowdy radical republicans intent on invading Canada to stir up revolution. These "Brother Hunters" or "Patriots" communicated in secret or by cypher...