Book Review

It is not easy to write a book about rioting. If one defines a riot as David Grimsted does, as six or more people using or threatening violence extralegally, then there have been thousands of riots in American history and tens of thousands of rioters, mostly anonymous, inarticulate people. So far, the most extensive effort to make this mass of contradictory detail understandable is Rioting in America (Bloomington, 1996) by Paul Gilje. In that book, Gilje divided American rioting into four eras, with the most dramatic moment coming when ethnic, racial, and political divisions displaced community loyalties in rioters' minds. When that happened, Gilje writes, rioters turned sanguinary.	1
While Gilje proposes a chronological scheme for understanding rioting, Grimsted finds that northerners and southerners had competing "systems" of violence. Southern rioters acted without fear from authorities. "Being a Southern rioter," Grimsted quips, "meant seldom having to say you were sorry" (15). In general, southern rioters killed more often than their northern counterparts. In 1835, northern mobs killed eight while 63 died in southern rioting.	2
Grimsted has amassed formidable evidence to support his contentions. He published an important article on Jacksonian rioting in 1972 ("Rioting in Its Jacksonian Setting," American Historical Review 77 [1972]: 361–97), so he has been working on this topic for at least twenty-seven years. Grimsted mined forty-eight archives, from the Maine Historical Society to the Kansas State Historical Society and the Texas State Library. With such manuscript sources, and a prodigious effort in newspapers, Grimsted documented 1,218 riots, almost certainly more than any other historian. Gilje writes that he found between four and five hundred riots for the same period.	3
Grimsted does not boldly state his thesis, but it seems to be that through his popular sovereignty exhortations Andrew Jackson lit a riotous fuse that led to the Civil War. Part One looks at the North, linking 1830s rioting to Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren. Jackson personally opposed rioting, Grimsted was careful to say in 1972 and again in this book, but northern Democrats saw rioting as a useful means of placating their Southern political allies. As a result, they fomented an environment where a riotous sectional crisis developed, one that served as a preview for what came later. In another chapter, Grimsted credibly argues that northern rioting had the effect of persuading many northerners that slavery should be their concern too.	4
In the remainder of the book, Grimsted seeks to show how southern rioting and violence helped drive the nation to civil war. Part Two examines southern rioting, Finding, First, that southerners had a heightened proclivity to violence. Grimsted then shows that southern rioters mobbed abolitionists to make any thought of dissent impossible. He next narrates southern slave insurrection panics. The final section of the book looks at "Political Affrays and Fraying," arguing that American elections were riotous affairs, a "Manly Sport." In Kansas, the North's "system" of rioting collided with the South's. Kansas forced the Democratic party openly to embrace slavery's cause, converting the Democrats into a sectional party. Northerners' repugnance with the South's more violent style of rioting helps account for their growing distaste for slavery, Grimsted holds.	5
Grimsted's argument seems plausible, but there are problems in his presentation. He begins by informing his reader that this book tells only part of the story and that another book based on "incidents of economic, racial, ethnic, religious, and youth tensions" (ix) will follow, as will a "supplementary work" on theoretical concerns (xiii). Grimsted's decision to use only a portion of his data, saving the rest for another book, saps his narrative of the dynamic a rigorous testing of the hypothesis would have provided. One wonders if the evidence that might lead to a different conclusion will appear in the other book. The reader is left with the impression that Grimsted is not so much testing his hypothesis as searching through his files for stories to prove what he already knows is true.	6
And then there is the issue of quantification. Grimsted evidently finds numbers distasteful, reporting that he began his project determined to "considerize" but never "computerize" his 1,218 riots (xiii). He packs his book with narrative detail, recounting the Nat Turner revolt, the Dorr war, John Brown, and many other more or less familiar episodes. Ironically, after Grimsted found he could not avoid quantification, the most persuasive parts of the book come in his quantified generalizations. In his chapter on southerners' proclivity for violence, Grimsted piles anecdote on anecdote but makes his most original contribution when he numerically summarizes his data, as when he writes that 90 percent of southern rioters never faced legal action (110). But Grimsted never organizes his evidence into tables and there is no appendix explaining how he compiled his list of riots. One assumes, for example, that Grimsted favored larger urban newspapers, leaving out many instances of six rural people acting violently outside the law. A methodological appendix, or at least a bibliography, might have laid such questions to rest.	7
Nonetheless, every scholarly library should have this book. It is encyclopedic and vigorously researched. And while Grimsted's writing is not always clear, he must be correct in arguing that rioting played a major role in driving the nation to civil war.	8
Christopher Waldrep Eastern Illinois University

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