| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Jacksonian Antislavery & the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854. By Jonathan H. Earle. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xiv, 282 pp. Cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-8078-2888-2. Paper, $22.50, ISBN 0-80785555-3.)

Jonathan H. Earle embarks on a worthy quest indeed to revive scholarly appreciation for the antislavery credentials of certain Jacksonian Democrats, at least those residing north of the Mason and Dixon line. Historical revisionism endorsing abolitionism simultaneously rebuked most Democratic antislavery impulses as self-serving in purpose and essentially racist in nature. Earle takes Democratic antislavery more seriously, in the tradition of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s famous New Deal–era paean to the prolabor mentality of The Age of Jackson (1945). Yet Earle goes still farther than the merely liberal Schlesinger in implying that Jacksonian antislavery ultimately failed to achieve its egalitarian promise to oppose aristocracy in all its forms and to accomplish actual land reform for the needy of all races.

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