| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Beyond Party: Cultures of Antipartisanship in Northern Politics before the Civil War. By Mark Voss-Hubbard. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. xiv, 266 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-8018-6940-4.)
Mark Voss-Hubbard describes Beyond Party as a study of mid-nineteenth-century American populism. His focus is on the "forms and styles of political practice that existed outside the ... national two party competition" (p. ix). By examining the Know-Nothing movement in three northern counties, he claims he has located a "deep vein of anti-politician and antiparty sensibilities" (p. x) in the political culture that fueled the crisis of the 1850s.	1
Voss-Hubbard places himself in an emerging school of historiography that rejects the decades-old contention of the new political history that midcentury American life was dominated by a partisan imperative. He joins with those who have concluded instead that many "Americans were indifferent, skeptical, even scornful of politicians and partisan politics" (p. 9). Although antipartyism was rooted in classical republican theory and Protestant evangelicalism, Voss-Hubbard believes that the antipartyism he has identified was less a theory than a response to the actual corruption that many felt characterized the party system. This vernacular antipartyism, as he calls it, formed the basis of the grass-roots activities that for Voss-Hubbard constitute midcentury populism.	. . .

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