Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy by Kyle G. Volk (review)

Kyle Volk’s innovative book recasts antebellum political history by introducing the category of moral minority into the narrative of the making of American democracy. With an emphasis on the antebellum North, the author illustrates how moral minorities—variously, opponents of Sunday laws, prohibitions on alcohol, and the regulation of marriage, schools, and public conveyances on the basis of race—battled their counterparts in the broadly construed moral majority.

Because of the diverse actors who constituted moral minorities in antebellum America, Volk intersects with and indirectly challenges the work of numerous historians, an exercise conducted almost exclusively in the notes. For example, the author’s account of moral minorities challenges the paean to majority rule presented by Sean Wilentz as much as it supports W. Caleb McDaniel’s recent book on democracy and slavery. Volk’s focus on the dichotomy engendered between minorities and majorities also contributes to the intellectual history of political thought in antebellum America.

Volk conceives of these disparate groups of moral minorities as sharing two unifying characteristics. First, they found “themselves on the wrong side of a purported moral norm enshrined in public policy,” and second, they remained committed to “resisting those norms” (4). This definition stems in large part from the author’s selection of evidence—he focuses on “only those struggles in which I discovered that the ideas of majority tyranny and minority rights played an explicit and significant role” (223n13). The moral minorities presented here are thus less interesting for their specific moral causes than for the discursive methods and tools used in their defense.

Always opposing these moral minorities were the equally committed moral majorities. To start, Volk presents the history of the antebellum moral majority and lays the foundation for the later conflicts of the 1840s and 1850s. He next considers the seemingly opposite groups of Seventh Day Baptists and Jews, both of whom dissented from the prevalent Sunday laws. The author reviews several important court cases, including Specht v. Commonwealth (1848), the case argued before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that “cemented” Thaddeus Stevens’s commitment to defending minority rights (60). In a chapter on governmental efforts to require licenses for the sale of alcohol, Volk argues that the conflict over the local option became the “premier site where Americans began grappling with direct democracy” (70). In Delaware, for example, liquor dealers employed Senator John Clayton and prominent attorney James A. Bayard to initiate a test case to challenge the local option law. The subsequent successful outcome in Rice v. Foster (1847) reveals the real possibilities for extrapolitical action through judicial rulings in the highly partisan era of the 1840s.

Volk next turns his attention to the struggles to obtain various kinds of race-based rights. He studies those moral minorities who opposed bans on mixed-race marriages and “motley schools” (racially integrated classrooms) and effectively connects these two seemingly unrelated struggles through the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Volk argues that “varied groups” of opponents to segregated public conveyances “would bestow the essential institutions of modern democratic politics” unto future activists (134). He follows the development of race-based rights associations in New York City, supplementing his analysis with a look at earlier efforts in Massachusetts and one case from Detroit, and charts the practical victories gained by African American leaders such as James McCune Smith and James W. C. Pennington. In these battles, Volk finds models, guides, and examples for future struggles.

In a final chapter on the efforts to overturn early prohibition laws, Volk comes full circle and returns to the debates over Sunday laws. Here, the antiprohibitionists emerge as moral heroes. As before, the author uses relatively obscure figures as the mouthpieces for his argument, including the Seventh Day Baptist leader William B. Maxson. In so doing, he moves beyond the traditional story of the second party system and gestures toward the extraparty practice of later minority rights’ activism. Likewise, a...