Book Review

Canada and the United States

This book, covering the antebellum years, has been long in the making, but it proves to be well worth the wait. Thanks to careful and extensive research, David Grimsted provides convincing conclusions about the differences between the riots and lawless public conduct in the free states and those in the slave South. The author has relatively little to offer regarding anti-Catholicism and assaults on Irish immigrants and workers. Despite strong ethnic and religious tensions throughout the period, he justly stresses instead the struggle over African-American slavery. Constraints of space and current interest in racial history doubtless explain the choice. In the North, anti-abolitionism often included vicious attacks on free black communities. In the South—no surprise here—defense of bondage quickly brought whites into the streets.

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Although the same sorts of riots might occur in both regions, Grimsted's account finds markedly divergent features in mob action. With 1835 as the sectional dividing line, he shows that the abolitionists' ambitious campaign that summer set the stage for continual conflict. The postal enterprise ignited southern outrage and widespread northern opposition. Thereafter, Grimsted argues, two separate patterns emerged in the increasingly contentious sections. He proposes that the differences consisted of "the distinction between property and person as focus of attack, the number of deaths, the situation of those who died in riot, the actions of officials, and the differing quotients of sadism" (p. 13). Southern riots were responsible for eight times the number of fatalities that occurred in the North. Moreover, the Yankees who met their deaths were most often rioters killed during restorations of order. In the South, however, those who died were generally victims of grisly mob executions.

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