| Review | Journal of Social History, 40.4

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| Review | Journal of Social History, 40.4 | The History Cooperative

REVIEWS

Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform. By Bruce Laurie (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xxiv plus 340 pp.).
This study of antislavery politics in antebellum Massachusetts weaves an interesting, intricate narrative of how popular reform movements informed the political process. Though Laurie sees himself following in the wake of previous studies of "rank and file" abolitionists, Beyond Garrison is concerned with the broader story of how the Liberty and Free Soil parties emerged out of temperance, nativism, and antislavery. The book offers something new and difficult: a synthesis of labor, social, and political history, with a good dose of black history as well. In this "ground-up" view, Laurie poses formal politics as the critical arena of contest, in which competing visions of class, race, gender, and region contended to shape the fluid party politics of the day.	1
His story traces the rise of political antislavery in Massachusetts, from Garrisonian abstainers, through the formation of the Liberty Party in 1840, to the complex battles between Free Soilers and Know Nothings in the 1850s. Throughout, Laurie offers new schemas for understanding the relationship between antislavery, popular feeling, formal politics, and regional culture. For him, the critical division was that between urban places, such as cosmopolitan centers such as Boston as well as large manufacturing towns like Worcester, and what contemporaries termed "the country," or the western and farming districts of the state. Whereas urban for Laurie implied the growing tension between moneyed business elites and swelling ranks of increasingly class-conscious workers, the countryside was home to a more conservative, almost pastoral vision of "Yankeedom" that was deeply regionalist in its outlook.	. . .

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