| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Mark Voss-Hubbard. Beyond Party: Cultures of Antipartisanship in Northern Politics before the Civil War. (Reconfiguring American Political History, number 7.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2002. Pp. xii, 266. Cloth $45.00.
For the cynical, antipartyism is a rhetorical device resorted to by politicians who find themselves in a minority position electorally or who wish to engineer some sort of party realignment. In this most interesting and cogent book, Mark Voss-Hubbard recognizes the pragmatic functions of much antiparty rhetoric but also explains that its cultural power in the mid-nineteenth century derived from more than the longstanding traditions of patriotic republicanism or evangelical communitarianism that Richard Hofstadter and Ronald P. Formisano have emphasized. Antipartyism, he finds, drew on the political engagement that flourished in civic life outside the vigorous two-party system of the "party period," providing means of cooperation, identification, and organization capable of generating popular attachments that could be used to challenge the command of the major parties in electoral politics.	1
These revelations come through a careful study of the Know-Nothing explosion that transformed northern politics in 1854 and 1855 and opened the way for the Republican triumph of 1860. Voss-Hubbard provides excellent brief accounts of politics in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania, sharpened by local studies of one important county in each state—Essex, New London, and Dauphin (embracing Harrisburg), respectively. Although political circumstance and a rapidly changing socioeconomic fabric affected how the nativist revolt evolved in each locality, certain common themes are evident. In each state, rapid economic change—notably the astounding leap in the scale of industrialization—created the opportunity for a social protest movement. The Know-Nothings, however, expressed not so much the dislocations suffered by the new urban working class as the anxieties of aspiring native-born males distressed by new social and economic challenges.	. . .

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