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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 30.4 (2000) 706-707



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Book Review

American Mobbing 1828-1861:
Toward Civil War


American Mobbing 1828-1861: Toward Civil War. By David Grimsted (New York, Oxford University Press, 1998) 372 pp. $65.00

Whatever else they may have been, riots in the antebellum United States were political. Whereas most historians are inclined to think of mobs as extra-political, indicative of an immature, flawed, or broken down political system, Grimsted sees them as very much a part of the political system--"a piece of the ongoing process of democratic accommodation, compromise, and uncompromisable tension between groups with different interests" (viii). His may be but a simple shift in perspective, but it opens up a whole new understanding of the politics of slavery.

From 1828 to 1861 there were, by Grimsted's count, at least 1,218 riots. At the heart of half of them lay slavery. The larger anti-abolitionist mobs of the Northeast and insurrection riots of the South, which Grimsted discusses in some detail, are well known. However, he demonstrates how these events, and hundreds of others that are less familiar, helped comprise a national politics of slavery long before the appearance of a Republican Party, a Kansas-Nebraska Bill, or a Wilmot Proviso. Moreover, this politics-out-of-doors showed a distinct regional pattern. Northern rioters attacked property; Southerners targeted people. In the North, death most commonly came at the hands of legal authorities who tried to quell the mob. In the South, death came typically at the hands of the mob itself, which often included legal authorities.

Although in 1834, mobs attacked Catholic nuns, Irish laborers, and blacks in New York, Philadelphia, and elsewhere in the North, and lawlessness seemed to be rampant, condoned, some thought, by none other than President Jackson when he first took on the Bank, 1835 was the crucial year. More people rioted about slavery that year than anything else, making slavery a national political issue after the Missouri Compromise had supposedly settled matters, and before the U.S./ Mexico War reopened debate. Moreover, regional patterns of rioting added fuel to sectional flames. The violence of the 1850s--in Kansas, at Harper's Ferry, Va., and in the Senate chamber--was nothing new. What marked the years just before the War, and the War itself, was that Northern and Southern rioters were at last attacking each other.

The Democratic Party, Grimsted argues, contributed greatly to antebellum mobbing. In the South, it was the outspoken pro-slavery party. Democrats encouraged and joined in violent retribution against anyone who challenged the institution. Violent intimidation--for example, at polling places on election days--was justified as in the interests of pro-slavery, and what Southern voter would dare to disagree? In the North, the party did not spout pro-slavery rhetoric so much as work to silence abolitionism, violently if need be, and at the behest of the party's Southern wing. Violence in defense of slavery, whether under the live oak trees of Mississippi, or under the street lamps of New York City, was the Democratic Party's means of keeping slavery out of Congress. And it worked. All that political opponents could do was respond in [End Page 706] kind, with violent Nativism, a challenge to the Democratic party's pro-slavery constituency without saying so.

Grimsted's is a bold and brilliant argument well supported by observations of hundreds of riots, compiled largely from newspapers, as well as the close analysis of several dozen events about which a wider variety of sources and commentaries is available. However, Grimsted's insights come at a cost. He has little appreciation for the subtleties of local politics, even though riots epitomize local politics. His depiction of the Democratic Party implies a slaveholders' conspiracy. His discussion of the 1835 Mississippi Insurrection Scare is superficial and occasionally mistaken in fact. He reduces Southern honor to bullying, which is only partially true. The Southern position on popular sovereignty, with regard to Kansas, according to Grimsted, amounted to "slavery über alles," an anachronistic reference...

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