It's a Riot! Mob Violence in Antebellum America

In 1837 mob violence roiled the usually peaceful community of Elmira in upstate New York. Visiting ministers attending an annual conference of Methodist churches organized an antislavery meeting of over three hundred people. “[W]orthy and respectable citizens,” including Elmira’s leading business and civic leaders, tried to stop the gathering, arguing that it would create a public disturbance. Undeterred, abolitionist forces met in nearby Davis Island. Soon, a “noisy rabble,” armed with “tin horns, . . . pans, . . . rattles . . . and implements of rowdyism and riot,” disrupted the meeting. ¹

Elmirans’ attack against abolitionists was not unique. Anti-abolitionist riots were a regular occurrence in the antebellum United States. So too were riots against prostitution, gambling, and drinking. Crusades against these alleged evils provoked rioting by men determined to keep practicing them. Partisan politics and theatrical performances also sparked mob violence as did conflicts among different class, ethnic, religious, and racial groups. The emergence of an urban youth culture in the early nineteenth century exacerbated rowdyism and rioting.

Historians have made a good start in exploring mob violence in antebellum America. In 1970 Leonard Richards tackled the challenging task of identifying those who mobbed abolitionists in “Gentlemen of Property and Standing”: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America. During the 1970s historians began exploring how class, ethnic, racial, and religious divisions prompted various kinds of rioting in the antebellum United States. Michael Feldberg, for example, authored two books on rioting, The Philadelphia Riots of 1844: A Study in Ethnic Conflict (1975) and The Turbulent Era: Riot and Disorder in Jacksonian America (1980). The violence which characterized this nation in the 1960s and early 1970s whetted historians’ interest in mob violence. So too did the work done by historians of European collective violence such as George Rudé, E.P. Thompson, Natalie Zemon Davis, and Charles Tilly. ²

Scholarship on antebellum mob violence increased steadily during the 1980s and 1990s. Particularly noteworthy were two books by Paul Gilje. The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834 (1987) delineated changes both in the nature of rioting and public attitudes towards it. As riots in New York City became more bloody and threatened social order by exacerbating class, ethnic, and religious divisions, argued Gilje, civil authorities cracked down on them. Gilje’s second book, Rioting in America (1996), offered a good summary of the recent historiography as well as a useful discussion of different types of rioting in the United States from colonial to contemporary times. This book also suggests that the issue of mob violence continues to offer many research opportunities for established historians and graduate students in search of dissertation topics.

David Grimsted’s latest book is a welcome addition to the historiography of antebellum rioting. Based on a study of over twelve hundred riots, American Mobbing offers a comprehensive history of sectional rioting in the antebellum United States. It has three major parts. The first focuses on northern violence, exploring riots against abolitionists as well as those in favor of fugitive slaves. Part II discusses southern mob violence against anyone who dared to express even mild reservations about the institution of slavery. Grimsted also explores how white fears of slave insurrections fueled especially deadly rioting against both free and enslaved blacks and their alleged white conspirators. Part III examines the masculine culture of drinking and brawling that characterized antebellum American politics, especially during election time. Riots between Democrats and Know-Nothings, Protestants and Catholics, also receive attention. Grimsted also discusses how the nativist movement briefly distracted the nation from the brewing sectional conflict over slavery and helped to check proslavery, anti-unionist forces in some parts of the South. His last chapter discusses the mob violence that southern proslavery forces unleashed in Kansas in the 1850s. In his epilogue Grimsted juxtaposes the actions of John Brown and John Wilkes Booth to explore how the violent acts of one individual altered the political trajectory of the United States during the Civil...