Between Freedom and Bondage: Race, Party, and Voting Rights in the Antebellum North (review)

The matter of race has a curious history in the academy. It was largely ignored by white scholars across the disciplinary landscape, and historians in particular, before the birth of the Civil Rights Movement. The long silence was broken when in 1961 Leon F. Litwack published his groundbreaking book North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860. It was shattered and transformed completely when in 1991 David Roediger published his magisterial book, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Where Litwack uncovered pervasive racism rooted in economic conditions, religion, and politics, Roediger directed attention to the psychological and linguistic discourse of race—or what he called "whiteness—that accompanied the formation of the industrial working class. Roediger's "whiteness" caught on, so much so that scholars from a variety of disciplines first applied it to Irish and Jewish immigrants and then to nearly everyone else. Then about five years ago a reaction to "whiteness" began to take shape starting with the work on the antebellum period by Jonathan H. Earle, Frederick J. Blue, and the author of this review, who it should be added picked up on the pioneering if neglected work on the politics of race in the North by Eric Foner and Richard H. Sewell. This revisionist body of work shifted focus from language and culture to politics and also identified multiple racial discourses, not a single one. In Between Freedom and Bondage: Race, Party, and Voting Rights in the Antebellum North, Christopher Malone chimes in with an important revisionist analysis of race as reflected in the question of voting rights for African Americans in the antebellum era.

It must be said at the outset that a book as significant as this one surely deserved better editorial care from the publisher. Malone lays out his conceptual scheme over and over again, and repeatedly uses metadiscourse verbs and phraseology. His later chapters are poorly organized. Proper editing would have made for a more enjoyable read and arguably for the wider audience this book certainly deserves.

Malone puts forth an inventive multicontextual frame of reference to explain two competing racial discourses, or paternalism, on the one hand, and racial ascription, on the other. The first, which stemmed from Enlightenment ideals of racial equality, was posed in a language of paternalism that considered African Americans inferior to whites but amenable to uplift and improvement, if not complete social and civil equality. The second, which was embedded in emergent notions of "science" (and I would add orthodox Protestantism) considered African Americans to be racially inferior and beyond redemption. Racial ascription was emergent and then the dominant, eclipsing the older discourse of paternalism. But Malone is not content to identify these racial discourses, significant thought that is. He instead seeks to explain their origins and development by arguing that they were conditioned by social, economic, and demographic facts on the ground, including the density of the black population, and by competition between the parties. Rapid economic and demographic change (European immigration and deepening industrialism) in a context of tough partisan competition set the stage for politicians, first Democratic-Republicans and then Democrats, to develop and exploit the discourse of racial ascription. Several patterns took hold. Jeffersonian New York conditioned the black franchise; Jacksonian Pennsylvania ended it; and Rhode Island stripped it away but then restored it during the Dorr Rebellion. Massachusetts alone stood against the ascriptive tide. Paternalism in the Bay State prevailed, and not only prevented disenfranchisement; it also extended the frontiers of civil rights for African Americans. Malone concludes with a heroic if necessarily schematic long view in which he makes a strong case for the enduring significance of paternalism and racial ascription through the First and Second Reconstructions.

The analysis has some glaring flaws. Malone does not apply his conditions consistently. He convincingly maintains, for instance, that job competition between the races, which was exacerbated by the advent of...