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Book Review
| Bruce Laurie, Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. 340. $65 cloth (ISBN 0-521-84408-8); $23.99 paper (ISBN 0-521-60517-2).
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| Examining the twists and turns of political action in antebellum Massachusetts, Bruce Laurie moves beyond heroic views of personalities, principally the indefatigable abolitionist organizer and editor William Lloyd Garrison, to trace contours of a geopolitical landscape irregularly sprouting grassroots collective action. Despite Garrison's uncompromising moral suasion rhetoric of hands-off politics, the Bay State developed an effective political action antislavery strategy, Laurie shows in eight chapters copiously detailing the give-and-take of coalition building that achieved the doable in the here-and-now. As a result, Laurie argues, Massachusetts led the way in antebellum race relations, integrating public facilities and schools and passing personal liberty laws—not unerringly or without difficulties and intolerable African American pain and suffering. Yet antebellum Bay Staters reflected no single racial perspective. In fact, Laurie insists that "there was no single perspective on race either in antebellum Massachusetts or probably anywhere else at the time; instead, there was a spectrum of opinion bound up with the larger context of racism by benign paternalism and militant colonizationism. Different states and regions were situated at different points on the spectrum, with New England located toward the paternalistic end and Massachusetts at the region's forefront" (6). |
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To reach the state's results on black civil rights, Laurie provocatively situates the debate on antislavery and blacks' place in antebellum Massachusetts at the busy intersection of local, statewide, and national politics. Various social configurations that expressed economic class, religious, and regional biases mixed along the broad boulevards leading to and from the intersection. The general direction in which Laurie heads is the development of the state's Republican Party, tracing its antecedents in alliances Liberty partymen and, particularly, Free-Soilers tried to unite the many and varied disaffected. Blacks, countryfolk, economic conservatives, labor reformers, and prohibitionists, for example, could agree on some things but disagree on more. They participated in a politics of alliance that buoyed Bay State Free-Soilers but simultaneously left adrift the party and various reform groups radiating around antislavery. |
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Laurie probes the social composition of Massachusetts antislavery societies and geopolitical patterns in state voting. Massachusetts's county seats, industrial towns, and country towns differed sharply in their views and voting, he explains throughout the text and displays in an eight-table appendix. Applying something of the all-politics-is-local theory, Laurie traces nitty-gritty issues, particularly in the 1850s. Voting on the ten-hour workday, secret ballot, prohibition, personal liberty laws, and reapportionment, for example, demonstrated shifting support on issues from farm to factory. They showed also the power of people varyingly voting their fears rather than their hopes. The 1840s Irish famine influx, for example, pushed open a nativist flood in Massachusetts that crested in the 1854 Know-Nothing election victories. Yet nativism contributed robustly to antislavery with a broad and bold push of economic and social reform. The substantive victories and stylistic substitutes Laurie examines show a politics with and without parties. He reveals a people's politics: voters led, partisans followed. Seldom did any single issue galvanize people long enough to sustain political power. Thus single-issue antislavery faded fast into more popular and effective social reform eclecticism. Its legacy in Massachusetts was a politics of paternalism that fended off partisan Democrat chauvinism spouting vicious racist exclusionism. It blended with popular movements of working people, temperance advocates, and other social reformers with political valences differing with time and place. |
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Laurie's tour of antebellum Bay State politics subtly highlights the impact of industrialization and the tensions it created to compete with and to complement antislavery as a political focus. Rapidly shifting patterns of interpersonal relations strained and, in fact, broke old models. So antislavery developed amid popular scrambling for new social schemes with some Massachusettsites desperately clutching old elements and others reaching for bold new forms. That Laurie shows brilliantly. He opens exciting vistas with impressive research that brims with local lore and biographical insights to connect what he relates essentially as subcultures. His connections between various belief and interest groups are not always easily visible, however. The spillover joining issues is often murky. And the personalities he sets up as guides do not always stand out clearly enough to give direction. So while the several separate issues Laurie treats with evocative historical detail and deft historiographic commentary carry the reader far in understanding them individually, they too frequently lose the reader without any transfer point for traveling between them. As for getting beyond Massachusetts, Laurie insistently rejects discussion of "Massachusetts exceptionalism" as too chauvinistically laden for helpful use. He comments simply that Massachusetts was like and unlike other antebellum northern states. None other was so deeply nativist. At least none other enacted such sweeping proscriptive anti-immigrant legislation or so dogged Catholics, as Massachusetts did. Yet due in notable part to able and aggressive black leaders, it led the nation in racial desegregation efforts. Bridging the state's sometimes apparently polar positions and its representativeness with other states may well require more elaboration of how social reform attitudes and activities traveled from minority third-party positions to capture political majorities that made law. Laurie has pointed the way. |
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| Thomas J. Davis
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| Arizona State University, Tempe |
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