| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Bruce Laurie. Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2005. Pp. xix, 340. Cloth $65.00, paper $23.99.

In this ambitious and complex work on the politicization of abolitionism in antebellum Massachusetts, Bruce Laurie seeks to understand the working-class and "middling" people of the Liberty and Free Soil Parties, and to defend them from what he believes are three unfair appraisals: Garrisonian approaches (historical and contemporary) depicting them as unprincipled politicians; "whiteness studies" scholarship that lumps them together with all the other antebellum white supremacists; and recent arguments that nineteenth-century politics were essentially a superficial pursuit. Laurie responds vigorously through a detailed narrative and analysis of the leadership, organization, ideology, and tactics of Massachusetts's political abolitionists from the late 1830s through the mid 1850s. He argues that the political abolitionists were both pragmatic and principled; that their racism was on the mild, paternalist end of a spectrum of white supremacist positions; and that their political engagement was both passionate and effective—in brief, "that political action was an effective strategy consistent with moral rectitude" (p. 5). In the first four chapters, he confidently presents the story of the emergence and rise to prominence of the political abolitionists in the Liberty Party, paying close attention to their ideological diversity and to their many efforts to ally with labor activists during that decade. In the next four chapters, he turns to the later rise of the Free Soil Party and its uneasy coalition with the state's Democrats. He concludes by charting the ways the politics of these movements would play out in the Know-Nothing and Republican parties, especially in the success of nativist politics.

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