Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (review)

This study of antislavery politics in antebellum Massachusetts weaves an interesting, intricate narrative of how popular reform movements informed the political process. Though Laurie sees himself following in the wake of previous studies of "rank and file" abolitionists, Beyond Garrison is concerned with the broader story of how the Liberty and Free Soil parties emerged out of temperance, nativism, and antislavery. The book offers something new and difficult: a synthesis of labor, social, and political history, with a good dose of black history as well. In this "ground-up" view, Laurie poses formal politics as the critical arena of contest, in which competing visions of class, race, gender, and region contended to shape the fluid party politics of the day.

His story traces the rise of political antislavery in Massachusetts, from Garrisonian abstainers, through the formation of the Liberty Party in 1840, to the complex battles between Free Soilers and Know Nothings in the 1850s. Throughout, Laurie offers new schemas for understanding the relationship between antislavery, popular feeling, formal politics, and regional culture. For him, the critical division was that between urban places, such as cosmopolitan centers such as Boston as well as large manufacturing towns like Worcester, and what contemporaries termed "the country," or the western and farming districts of the state. Whereas urban for Laurie implied the growing tension between moneyed business elites and swelling ranks of increasingly class-conscious workers, the countryside was home to a more conservative, almost pastoral vision of "Yankeedom" that was deeply regionalist in its outlook.

From the start, rank-and-file antislavers hailed from the middling sort who made up the country. This collection of "lesser men" and "proprietors living above the store" (p. 32) evolved into the Liberty Men, whom Laurie also finds popular among skilled and unskilled manual laborers of the city. The Libertyites' antislavery drew as much from anti-Southern regional prejudices as it did from their own racial paternalism. This pattern of viewing national issues through the lens of an intensely local outlook only intensified when Liberty's successor, the Free Soil Party, confronted the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Laurie confirms a tradition of scholarship emphasizing that, ultimately, political antislavery predicated its claims on a vision of northern society as a transcendent moral ideal.

Throughout, third-party politicians wrestled with formulating political strategies to address a multitude of issues while also building a broad base. "Eclectic" ones such as Elizur Wright envisioned a coalition that included labor reforms, while "single-issue" men considered such concerns distractions from the central moral imperative. Laurie steadfastly champions the eclectics for building a political base powerful enough to broker very real civil rights gains for African Americans, and to envision sweeping measures for labor. If anything, eclecticism was not strong enough, for while labor and antislavery reformers often saw common cause (and crossed lines), the Liberty Party never effectively embraced its minority wing of labor radicals. Free Soilism did a better job, marshaling urban radicals, along with temperance reformers, country Democrats, and anti-Whigs malcontents. Yet this new coalition paid for its breadth in fragility, and Free Soilism never delivered on labor's most hopeful demands. The ascent of nativism (manifest primarily in the form of temperance laws) eclipsed their interest in labor reform, as country politicians and Whigs undermined the drive for a ten-hour workday and the secret ballot. Ultimately, the formal political process reflected popular opinion, sometimes in spite of itself, while it also subtly enforced the primacy of antislavery. With labor radicalism generating little appeal to the country, and temperance offering little for urban workingmen, antislavery presented a common ground for a new coalition.

In stressing the practical political challenges facing antislavery reformers, Laurie hopes to counter longstanding and widespread pictures of an abolitionist movement sprearheaded first and foremost by radical Garrisonians, whose uncompromising moral voice anchored an extreme position allegedly co-opted by cynical party politicians who were driven by expedience and a thirst for advancement. This traditional view has come...