Abolitionist Politics Research Articles

Reimagining ‘justice’ in environmental justice: Radical ecologies, decolonial thought, and the Black Radical Tradition

In this article, we rethink the spatial and racial politics of the environmental justice movement in the United States by linking it to abolitionist theories that have emerged from the Black Radical Tradition, to critical theories of urban ecology, and to decolonial epistemologies rooted in the geopolitics of Las Americas. More specifically, we argue that environmental justice organizing among multi-racial groups is an extension of the Black Radical Tradition's epistemic legacy and historical commitment to racial justice. The article is divided into two parts. First, we review how this remapping of environmental justice through the lens of the Black Radical Tradition and decolonial border thinking reshapes our understanding of anti-racist organizing. Part of our remapping includes an examination of African American and Latinx social movement organizing to reveal how such geographies of interracial solidarity can reframe abolitionist politics to take nature and space seriously. In the second part of the article, we present a series of maps that illustrate the geography, temporality, and inter-racial solidarity between Chicanx social movement organizations and the Black Radical Tradition. Our mapping includes identifying sites of interracial convergence that have explicitly and implicitly deployed abolitionist imaginaries to combat the production of racialized capitalist space. We use environmental justice to argue for a model of abolitionist social movement organizing that invites interracial convergence by imagining urban political ecologies that are free of the death-dealing spaces necessary for racial capitalism to thrive.

Resisting ‘progressive’ carceral expansion: lessons for abolitionists from anti-colonial resistance

This article documents a government-led strategy to more closely integrate policing with community-based ‘crime prevention’ programming in the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. These initiatives have targeted neighborhoods with large Indigenous populations. In this article I illustrate how community-level conflicts over responses to ‘crime’ are also sites of settler colonial conflict, and how settler colonial governance is reproduced and resisted through the governance of crime. Interviews with politicians, policy-makers, bureaucrats in the crime prevention branch of the provincial government, and directors and employees at community-based organizations suggest that the pursuit of the government strategy of integrated crime prevention and suppression has been more a project of attempting to ‘manage’ urban Indigenous people than serve their interests. As a contribution to abolitionist thought and theory, this article profiles sites of conflict between community police and community-based organizations over definitions of the ‘crime’ problem in city-center Winnipeg. These examples highlight a kinship between carceral abolitionist and decolonial politics.

“A Relatively New Discovery in the Modern West”: #BlackLivesMatter and the Evolution of Black Humanism

Prompted by the current debate and cognitive dissonance surrounding the #BlackLivesMatter protest campaign’s desired goals of securing freedom, justice, equality, and human dignity for people of African descent in the United States, this article addresses this social movement as an extension of Black humanism. This claim is a direct result of the #BlackLivesMatter movement’s sui generis origin and evolution beyond any identifiable Black religious institution. Robin D. G. Kelley reminds us that “insisting that we are human and productive members of [American] society has been a first principle of Black abolitionist politics since at least the eighteenth century.” Thus it is important to recognize the contemporary significance of #BlackLivesMatter by placing it within a broader historical context that resonates with many tenets of the traditional Black freedom struggle yet also charts future directions, including nontheistic thought and praxis such as atheism, agnosticism, humanism, and other expressions of unbelief as part of the broader African American experience. In 2009, Pew Research Center data on religious pluralism in the United States revealed that more than 12 percent of African Americans nationwide readily self-identified as being unaffiliated with any particular religion. This group of Black nonbelievers constitutes the third largest cohort within African American religious life—a major development in the history of African American faith and culture that ought to be more fully explored and explained. Scholars have discussed the origins and varied nature of Black humanism at considerable length; this article builds upon that existing research by examining the origins and nature of Black humanism within the history of the Black freedom struggle.

No Pride in Prisons on Abolitionist Politics


 Warwick Tie interviews Emilie Rākete, Ti Lamusse and Sophie Morgan, members of the queer and transgender activist collective No Pride In Prisons, to learn how penal politics has become, for them, a site of radical activism.

Bringing Politics Back in . . . to Abolition

Bringing Politics Back in . . . to Abolition Richard Newman (bio) Corey M. Brooks. Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. 336 pp. Notes and index. $45.00. Padraig Riley. Slavery and the Democratic Conscience: Political Life in Jeffersonian America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. 328 pp, Notes and index. $45.00. With some critics worrying about the future of political history—which lags behind social and cultural history—it is rather ironic that the best recent work in antebellum politics comes from scholars studying slavery and freedom. Building on terrific (and variegated) studies by Eric Foner, James Oakes, John Stauffer, Sean Wilentz, and others, many historians now view antislavery struggles as a powerful vehicle for understanding the possibilities and limits of pre–Civil War politics. New books by Padraig Riley and Corey Brooks continue the trend, offering perceptive readings of both the politics of abolition and abolitionist politics in the early republic. These are exemplary books: well written, thoroughly researched, and historiographically ramifying. They are also timely, illuminating antislavery battles in high politics at a time when a new round of contemporary critics (notably Andrew Delbanco) question abolitionists’ aims and accomplishments. Just what did abolitionists really do? Riley shows the formidable hurdles antislavery advocates faced in the Jeffersonian political arena; Brooks studies how political abolitionists overcame such daunting obstacles in antebellum society. Together, they show that it is more critical than ever to reintegrate politics into our understanding of social reform, lest we forget how political power may be mobilized for good as well as ill. Read in tandem, Riley and Brooks chart the creation, and then destruction, of the nineteenth-century political consensus that enshrined slaveholders’ political power. The Constitution may have established certain proslavery provisions, but not until the 1800s would a discernible slave power take hold in federal politics. As Paul Finkelman constantly reminds us, historians should never underestimate slaveholders’ constitutional power. The three-fifths clause alone [End Page 57] gave masters and their allies enough extra voting strength to secure slavery’s expansion into Missouri, Texas, and the Kansas-Nebraska Territories, as well as to pass a stronger Fugitive Slave Law in 1850. Yet as Riley’s book expertly shows, slaveholders’ power came not merely as a result of a hellish constitutional compromise. Rather it flowed from a longstanding cross-sectional alliance of Democratic Republicans that privileged white democracy over antislavery. As Riley sees it, Jefferson’s election was truly a “victory for slaveholders” (pp. 8–9). Before 1800, Federalists mitigated masters’ reach; after 1800, a Jeffersonian coalition “promoted democracy in the North but also protected the prerogatives of slaveholders in the South” (p. 9). This coalition created, in effect, a second grand bargain on bondage. Though building on studies by Matt Mason, David Waldstreicher, Craig Hammond, and others who have traced slavery’s contested role in the early Republic, Riley explains the muscular development of the Jeffersonian coalition perhaps better than anyone else. He demonstrates that the origins of the Jeffersonian coalition were diverse, with both Northerners and Southerners defining its key ideological as well as political dimensions. In New England, Republicans like Elbridge Gerry and Abraham Bishop backed the Jeffersonian cause because it “championed political freedom for ordinary white men” (p. 16). Indeed, hoping to form a national alliance that would vanquish aristocratic Federalists, they and other Northern politicians agreed to “provide American slaveholders with what they needed most: tacit majority consent” (p. 49). Slave power consensus wasn’t a machine that would go of itself; it needed constant lubrication from Northerners. This became clear in Pennsylvania, the nation’s keystone state, for its consistent support of the Jeffersonian cause. Yet it was also gradual abolition’s organizational base. Riley points out that Republican political supporters like William Duane and Thomas Branagan explained away any seeming contradictions by labeling Jefferson both a champion of white liberty and an “antislavery stalwart” (p. 90). Given time, Jefferson’s America would shed its slaveholding skin, providing an emancipatory pathway to “the benumbed minds of the enslaved, the wretched, the degraded sons of Europe, Asia, and Africa” (p. 90). For Virginians and other Southern Republicans who became increasingly...

Rebels in Paradise: Sketches of Northampton Abolitionists by Bruce Laurie

Reviewed by: Rebels in Paradise: Sketches of Northampton Abolitionists by Bruce Laurie Matthew Mason (bio) Keywords Abolition, Slavery, Antislavery, Massachusetts, David Ruggles Rebels in Paradise: Sketches of Northampton Abolitionists. By Bruce Laurie. (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015. Pp. xi + 178. Cloth, $80.00, Paper, $22.95.) This latest monograph from an established historian of abolition examines five abolitionists from Northampton, Massachusetts. African American abolitionist David Ruggles is the best known of the five, although Laurie posits that the Free Soil and Republican Party politician Erastus Hopkins was the most significant of them. Taken together, these profiles illustrate the greatly varied nature of abolitionism even within one locality. The individual biographical sketches are illuminating, but the reader has to do almost all the work of discerning the larger significance of this collective picture. [End Page 181] Although Laurie apologetically included no women and only one African American in his five subjects, this group features a real socioeconomic assortment, from the wealthy businessman John Payton Williston through the political editor Henry S. Gere to the displaced free black man Ruggles. They also occupied a wide range along the spectrum of antislavery belief and action, disagreeing on questions such as whether to actively aid the Underground Railroad or to support John Brown. They also differed—as was abolitionists’ wont—on the efficacy of political action. In short, what Laurie says of Williston might well be said of his other subjects: He was “a contradictory figure who might give pause to modern-day readers in need of an iconic abolitionist” (84). Laurie’s narrative also highlights the complex context within which antislavery politics operated in antebellum Northampton, interacting with a wide range of other political, moral, and economic issues. His actors took diverse stances on those other questions and assigned them differing levels of priority. Their divergent positions at times rose to the level of conflict. For instance, while Sylvester Judd saw his staunch support for the Working-Men’s movement and his antislavery as “opposite sides of the same antiestablishment coin,” the industrialist Williston fought against child labor reform (23). Laurie’s “fine-grained treatment of the local scene” thus shows that “how antislavery politics played out on the ground” was rarely neat and tidy (3). Laurie is committed to making comparisons and contrasts among his five individuals, and to placing their individual stories within the appropriate contexts of sectional, state, and local politics. But he seems uninterested in explicitly developing the significance of his characters beyond the local. “None of” his figures besides Ruggles, he admits, “has ever figured in a popular or academic account of the abolitionist movement,” and this book never makes it clear why they should (1). Laurie is enough of an academic historian and makes enough historiographical forays that it would be unfair to dismiss this book as an exercise in local antiquarianism. But his historiographical passages are very few and dwell on micro points, rather than developing an argument or intervention in the literature for the book as a whole. The Acknowledgements section makes it clear that Laurie’s editors at University of Massachusetts Press were not inclined to stretch him beyond this posture, when he quotes them as saying that “we like” Northampton abolitionists “and have special affection for locals” (ix). While both producing parties thus seem to have settled for a rather [End Page 182] modest goal, it remains true that they reached it. For this book does provide readers “with a deeper and richer understanding of the meaning of political abolitionism in a particular place and time”—if they are willing to do a fair amount of the heavy intellectual lifting themselves (8). Matthew Mason Matthew Mason is an associate professor of history at Brigham Young University. He is the author of various books and articles on slavery and politics, including Apostle of Union: A Political Biography of Edward Everett (Chapel Hill, NC, 2016). Copyright © 2017 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic

Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics

Mid-twentieth-century revisionism challenged the standard nationalist interpretation of Civil War causation, decrying the role abolitionism played in the unfolding sectional crisis. Civil rights reform brought the abolitionists back into historians' favor while leaving their precise role in the national ordeal somewhat undefined. In these decades opinion swerved between crediting abolitionists for ending slavery and blaming them for the carnage of the Civil War. In Liberty Power Corey M. Brooks advances this enduring debate by promoting the role political abolitionists played in forging the “slave power” theory and thereby helping unravel the second-party system and its penchant to obfuscate the slavery issue. Brooks contends that despite the acclaim recently given to the abolitionist movement, historians of the antebellum era have disassociated political abolitionism from the narrative of the escalating political crisis that generated civil war. In particular, he chastens historians for giving “short shrift” to the relative political success of the antislavery third parties (p. 4). Brooks follows in the footsteps of Theodore Clarke Smith, Dwight Lowell Dumond, and Richard Sewell, scholars who stressed how the Liberty and Free Soil parties led inevitably to Republican electoral success and victory over secession and slavery.

New abolition, criminology and a critical carceral studies

Criminology has been slow to open up a conversation about decarceration and abolition in comparison with other disciplines, including history, geography, and gender, race, and critical ethnic studies. Scholars from these areas and actors on the ground—close up to confinement—have done most of the organizing against mass incarceration and theorizing of alternative possibilities. Why those experiences—and the theoretical traditions that inform their work—have been less recognized and developed in criminology is of pivotal concern as more criminologists move forward with the political project of decarceration. The extent to which criminology can sustain an alternative or abolitionist politics remains an open question. Amid growing conversations about decarceration and shifting rhetorics on punishment, we address some of the obstacles that limit criminology as a site from which to engage the abolitionist project, asking where criminologists might turn for interventionist models that move away from imprisonment and the violence of the carceral state. In this article, we advocate for and discuss the contours of critical carceral studies, a growing interdisciplinary movement for engaged scholarly and activist production against the carceral state. We discuss the imperatives for criminological engagement with critical carceral studies and sketch some of the terrain on which the discipline can contribute to the project, including important work to counter criminological discourses and knowledge production that reify and reproduce carceral logics and practices.

Is an Existential Reading of the Fight with Covey Sufficient to Explain Frederick Douglass's Critique of Slavery?

Abstract There are three major items involved in Frederick Douglass's critique of enslavement—moral suasion, political abolitionism, and violent resistance. They are interrelated and comprise his critique. But ever since Angela Davis's use of existential philosophy to interpret Douglass's critique, the focus of existential readings on Douglass has been exclusively and constantly on the item of violent resistance, specifically Douglass's fight with Covey. The three items wholly derive their importance solely from this fight, according to the existential reading. Contrary to that reading, this paper shall argue that a reading of Douglass's critique should endorse a normative coordination, through practical reason, of the three items rather than an existential priority of the fight with Covey over the other two.

Is an Existential Reading of the Fight with Covey Sufficient to Explain Frederick Douglass's Critique of Slavery?

Abstract There are three major items involved in Frederick Douglass's critique of enslavement—moral suasion, political abolitionism, and violent resistance. They are interrelated and comprise his critique. But ever since Angela Davis's use of existential philosophy to interpret Douglass's critique, the focus of existential readings on Douglass has been exclusively and constantly on the item of violent resistance, specifically Douglass's fight with Covey. The three items wholly derive their importance solely from this fight, according to the existential reading. Contrary to that reading, this paper shall argue that a reading of Douglass's critique should endorse a normative coordination, through practical reason, of the three items rather than an existential priority of the fight with Covey over the other two.

To Narrate and Denounce

What political problem can autobiography solve? This article examines the politics of Frederick Douglass’s antebellum personal narratives: his 1845 slave narrative, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, and his 1855 autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, written at the opposite ends of Douglass’s transition from the abolitionist politics of William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips to Douglass’s defense of political action and the Constitution as anti-slavery. Placing the two texts alongside Douglass’s distinction “to narrate wrongs” and “denouncing them,” I argue that Douglass writes My Bondage and My Freedom as a mode of denunciation: an autobiographical critique of injustice that balances analysis of collective oppression with advocacy for communal emancipation. Whereas to narrate wrongs encouraged readers to judge Douglass’s story alongside popular criteria of justice, to denounce wrongs is to implicate readers within the structures that create antebellum subjects on and off the plantation, by revealing the coercions and conditionings of society that make not simply slaves but slaveowners, sympathizers, and abolitionists. This article claims that autobiography is a distinct genre of political theory, one that challenges present relations between the individual and the collective by representing not simply its author but an expanded view of “the people.”

The Martyrdom of Abolitionist Charles Torrey by E. Fuller Torrey (review)

The Martyrdom of Abolitionist Charles Torrey. By E. Fuller Torrey. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013. Pp. 248. Cloth, $39.95.)Reviewed by Nikki TaylorHistory has waited far too long for a comprehensive biography of abolitionist Charles Torrey, who played an instrumental role in pushing the movement to become more political. Author E. Fuller Torrey has answered that call in The Martyrdom of Abolitionist Charles Torrey. Most who have written about Torrey primarily portray him as one of William Lloyd Garrison's chief nemeses, who helped orchestrate the split in the American Anti-Slavery Society in the 1830s. E. Fuller Torrey not only offers a sympathetic read of Charles Torrey's motivations in that effort but also demonstrates that he actually contributed so much more to the abolitionist cause in his short thirty-two years of life.By stringently rejecting Garrison's moral suasion, Charles Torrey insisted on and then aggressive and radical abolitionism as alternative strategies (183). As practical applications of his beliefs, he helped establish the Liberty Party and managed the Washington, DC, artery of the Underground Railroad. Eventually, political abolitionism and abolitionist editing ceased to satisfy Charles Torrey, so he decided to take his activism to the next level. Unlike most white Underground Railroad operators who did not believe in going into the South to entice African Americans from bondage, Torrey's religious and moral convictions motivated him to do just that. He actively encouraged slaves to abscond from slavery and then transported them to freedom himself. For him, this type of abolitionism was a more direct and decided attack on slaveholding than either his work in the abolitionist press or political abolitionism had been. Torrey's Underground Railroad activism included a brazen plan that centered on wresting the bondspeople from many prominent politicians, to cause political embarrassment and undermine the system in the nation's capital. He was effective enough in this endeavor that he became an enemy to powerful southern congressmen and other politicians, ultimately leading to his arrest, conviction, and imprisonment in 1844 for slave stealing. His death in prison two years later at the age of thirty-two is why Charles Torrey has been considered an abolitionist martyr.The biggest strength of this project is the masterful job of contextualizing Torrey within the world of antebellum abolitionists. The animus between Charles Torrey and William Lloyd Garrison (13-15) is laid bare. The author presents that relationship in terms of the two men's dissimilar class backgrounds, morals, and levels of self-control, as much as their concerns about politics, religion, and abolitionist tactics. …

The Curious Case of Mary Hylas: Wives, Slaves and the Limits of British Abolitionism

The story of Mary Hylas offers a rare opportunity to examine a point of contact between metropolitan reformers and an Afro-Caribbean woman. Archival records related to the obscure case of Hylas v. Newton, heard in 1768, as well as the much more famous case of Somerset v. Stewart, heard in 1772, reveal how metropolitan reformers contended with slavery and marriage during the early years of political abolitionism in the British empire, and particularly how they attempted to contain their reforming rhetoric in order to condone marriage while condemning slavery. The records of Newton plantation, meanwhile, offer a window to the lived experiences of Mary Hylas. Life-long marriage was an unattainable and even undesirable ideal for many Afro-Caribbean women, Mary included.

Douglass Unbound

This essay tests what we might call the racialization-as-secularization thesis through an examination of a year in the intellectual and literary life of Frederick Douglass—from the summer of 1854, when he delivered his commencement address at Western Reserve College, “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered” (his direct response to the American School of Ethnology), to the summer of 1855, when his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, was published. “Claims” reveals that Douglass apprehended in the American School of Ethnology a distillation of the problem of race past internecine contentions about the interpretation of this or that biblical verse or curse to a bottom-line Christian-theistic question: What does the enslaved black body signify within a creationist framework? This confrontation of racial slavery as a theodical problem can help us account for the most salient difference of his second autobiography—its recourse to mythic drama of the sort associated with Romantic titanism. Douglass’s bravura performance of Romantic titanism in My Bondage and My Freedom underscores the extent to which Douglass abandoned the Christian millenarianism of the Garrisonian camp not for a tacitly secularist political abolitionism but rather for what we might call a heretical political-theological abolitionism that provides fruitful fodder for current historical and philosophical debates about secularity, secularism, and immanence.

Queering Prison Abolition, Now?

We occasionally publish “Currents” in American Quarterly, which are intended as timely forms of writing that contribute and intervene in contemporary issues of importance to scholars in American studies. It is our hope that “Currents” will provide a forum for debates over the directions of the field and how the interdisciplinary field of American studies defines itself and is defined by others. The following is a conversation among the intellectuals and activists Eric A. Stanley, Dean Spade, Andrea J. Ritchie, Joey L. Mogul, and Kay Whitlock, about queer abolitionist politics. The scholars and organizers involved wanted to mark this particular moment as a coalescence of years of organizing, struggling, and building a radically queer abolitionist politics. The piece is written jointly, to highlight how this analysis, and abolition in general, is a collective endeavor. The following conversation was conducted by e-mail in November 2011.

The Art of Intervention: The Humor of Sojourner Truth and the Antebellum Political Cartoon

Over the past fifteen years, scholars Saidiya Hartman to Catherine Toal have addressed the hegemonic tendencies of sentimental identification in white abolitionist politics and literature in the US. They have argued that such identification elides, revises, and appropriates the subjectivities and experiences of African Americans to serve white and often female agendas (Hartman 20; Toal 40). Since Nell Irvin Painter's biography Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (1996), she and other scholars have examined at length appropriations of Sojourner work, in particular by her sentimental amanuenses and by later white feminists. Painter, Carleton Mabee, and Margaret Washington discuss Harriet Beecher Stowe's self-interested portrayal of Truth and the extent of Frances Gage's reworking of speech at the 1851 Akron Women's Rights Convention. (1) Roseann M. Mandziuk and Suzanne Pullon Fitch demonstrate that white women's movements and white feminist scholars have deployed Truth as an icon that reduces her to nothing more than a symbol of their own causes (133). According to Xiomara Santamarina, however, Truth's simultaneously vexed popularity and iconic incongruity do not simply emerge her amanuenses' and auditors' appropriations of the reformer's words and actions (37). Santamarina finds that iconicity arises at least as much out of the difference between working-class persona and middle-class models for ex-slaves in a growing abolitionist movement that favored literacy (39). I invoke Santamarina's intervention in order to inflect it toward the consideration of a different problem entwined with appropriation: how at once to tease out, to contextualize, and to explore practice of humor. iconicity does not emerge simply from her amanuenses' and auditors' appropriations. Because Truth has no choice but to grapple with the discourse that casts her as an incongruous iconic figure, some of the most striking features of her artistic and political practice (re)deploy features of the icon, particularly its pictorial quality and its solicitation of identifications. In certain ways, rhetorical practice of humor must be seen as the inverse side of its appropriation, as it intervenes in the discourse within which it must work. Hence, it is important also to recognize that practice cannot emerge simply its appropriation. (2) In this essay, I sort the subordinations of Truth by those who recount her humor in print her valued and coveted rhetorical practice. This essay probes the tension between the qualities of humor that overlap with the icon--its almost visual imagery, its indexical relation to an abstract value, and its memorability (Tomaselli and Scott 18-21)and the fluid relationships of the audience to Truth herself that her humor is meant to intercept. The much-discussed problem of the appropriation of work arises when hegemonic interests shift qualities of iconicity away oratorical devices honed by Truth to self-serving and decontextualized variations of them and often to Truth herself. In the latter case, those who appropriate words treat her as a site of memory for their cause (Grever 370). I situate pictorial metaphors within a cultural context that differentiates them icons and invites a critical approach that illuminates their density, complexity, and contingency, and hence the ways they exceed both iconicity and appropriation. That context is the burgeoning popularity of political cartoons and racial caricatures in New York City, where Truth lived for sixteen years before her speaking career. The medium of the political cartoon and its conventions of visual metaphor can be employed to illuminate practice of humor. As Bernard Reilly notes, common tropes circulated in stump speeches and cartoons during the antebellum period (148). It is useful to consider briefly the fluctuating social and political field in which rhetoric and the rhetoric of cartoons perform. …

Anti-Black Racism, Gender, and Abolitionist Politics

The world over, when it comes to sentencing and incarceration, the focus inevitably is on boys and men. We see in the United States, however, that younger defendants, including girls, are targeted ...

Abolitionist Politics

Abolitionist Politics

Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform Kristen Tegtmeier Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform. By Bruce Laurie. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. 328. Cloth, $65.00; paper, $23.99.) In Beyond Garrison, Bruce Laurie acknowledges the profound influence the Bay State's famous native son had on shaping the abolitionist movement in New England. Laurie urges us, however, to push through Garrison's apolitical "moral dead end" (5) and accept the claim that "politics had meaning and significance extending beyond Garrison" (9). Laurie's detailed study of the roots of antislavery politics in Massachusetts offers historians a fresh interpretation of the demographic and ideological base of the antislavery movement. Perhaps most important, however, he demonstrates how Bay State politicians linked antislavery concerns with other social reforms, such as the ten-hour movement and temperance, and thus strengthened, rather than weakened, the effectiveness of antislavery politics. Ultimately Laurie argues that "political action was an effective strategy consistent with moral rectitude and not a naïve plunge into a smarmy world of compromise and accommodation" (5). Moving beyond Garrison and his allies, Laurie points to men like Elizur Wright and Lewis Hayden and the "ordinary" citizens who fueled political abolitionism as the most successful leaders of Bay State antislavery activism. Laurie charts the evolution of antislavery politics from its origins in evangelical Protestantism and Garrisonian abolitionism to the rise and fall of the Liberty party, the creation of the Free Soil party and its coalition with Democrats, and the beginnings of the Republican party. Through biographical narratives and a thorough examination of voting behavior and demographics, Laurie demonstrates the importance of men "of the country" from "middling families" who embraced the utility of political action. Elizur Wright, Rev. Joshua Leavitt, and William S. Robinson are just a few of the many politicians, journalists, and activists who Laurie unearths from the ashes of Garrisonian abolitionism; he follows their path toward partisan antislavery vehicles like the Liberty party. He also underscores the importance of free blacks like Lewis Hayden and John Swett Rock in pressing white reformers to enact civil rights legislation. Laurie claims that "black activists were emphatically more combative" than whites [End Page 205] in their resistance to segregation and the fugitive slave law and applauds their rejection of the "non-resistance" abolitionism touted by most Garrisonians and politicos alike (253–54). In addition, Laurie makes the trenchant observation that some of the most effective antislavery politicians opposed "all kinds of slavery, wherever it exist[ed]," referring specifically to labor reform in the textile mills but also referencing the efforts of many Bay Staters to liberate their peers from the liquor bottle (147). Laurie shows that by supporting the ten-hour movement in the 1840s and the Maine Law in 1852, the supposed single-issue antislavery parties actually gained support and widened their political base. He also eschews the predominant view that abolitionism's strength was grounded only in middle-class, educated urbanites who lived in Boston. Instead, he finds some of the movement's most radical champions in industrial centers like Lowell, where working women like Sarah Bagley participated in the "cross-fertilization of abolitionism and labor reform" (145). Laurie reveals one of the weaknesses of his study by highlighting Bagley, however. Laurie features Bagley's courageous leadership of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, but Bagley is only one of the numerous reform-minded women who undoubtedly influenced political abolitionism in the 1840s and 1850s. If Bagley could encourage voters to link wage slavery with plantation slavery, as Laurie says she did, then other women like Abby Kelley and Lydia Maria Child certainly held sway with Liberty and Free Soil men in their home state. But Laurie almost wholly neglects women's antislavery activism, an oversight that could have been forgiven had recent studies by Julie Roy Jeffrey (1998), Melanie Gustafson (2001), and Susan Zaeske (2003) not provided numerous examples of how women participated in sectional politics. While it is true that many political abolitionists eschewed the "woman question," it is not the case that antislavery women were wholly divorced from political action. Although Laurie may have underestimated the significance of female politicos, he did provide...

Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform. By Bruce Laurie. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp 328. Cloth $65.00; paper $23.99.) In Beyond Garrison, Bruce Laurie acknowledges the profound influence the Bay State's famous native son had on shaping the abolitionist movement in New England. However, Laurie urges us to push through Garrison's apolitical "moral dead end" (5) and accept the claim that "Politics had meaning and significance extending beyond Garrison" (9). Laurie's detailed study of the roots and multiple manifestations of antislavery politics in Massachusetts offers historians a fresh interpretation of the demographic and ideological base of the antislavery movement. Perhaps most importantly, however, he demonstrates how Bay State politicians linked antislavery concerns with other social reforms, like the ten-hour movement and temperance, and thus strengthened, rather than weakened, the effectiveness of antislavery politics. Ultimately Laurie argues that "political action was an effective strategy consistent with moral rectitude and not a naïve plunge into a smarmy world of compromise and accommodation" (5). One consequence of the study is to expand the focus from only Garrison and his followers when asking why Massachusetts integrated its common schools in 1855 or why state legislators supported personal liberty laws as early as 1843. Instead, Laurie points to men like Elizur Wright and Lewis Hayden and the "ordinary" men and women who fueled political abolitionism as the most successful leaders of Bay State antislavery activism. Laurie charts the evolution of antislavery politics from its origins in evangelical Protestantism and Garrisonian abolitionism to the rise and fall of the Liberty Party, the creation of the Free Soil party and its coalition with Democrats, and [End Page 100] the beginnings of the Republican party. Through biographical narratives and a thorough examination of voting behavior and demographics, Laurie demonstrates the importance of men "of the country" from "middling families" who embraced the utility of political action. He also highlights the importance of free blacks in pressing white reformers to enact civil rights legislation; he claims that "black activists were emphatically more combative" than white ones in their resistance to segregation and the fugitive slave law and applauds their courage and leadership in their rejection of the "non-resistance" abolitionism touted by most Garrisonians and politicos (253–54). In addition, Laurie makes the trenchant observation that some of the most effective antislavery politicians opposed "all kinds of slavery, wherever it exist[ed]," referring specifically to labor reform in the textile mills but also referencing the efforts of many Bay Staters to liberate their peers from the liquor bottle (147). Laurie shows that by supporting the ten-hour movement in the 1840s and the Maine Law in 1852, the supposed single-issue antislavery parties actually gained support and widened their political base. He also eschews the predominant view that abolitionism's strength was grounded in middle-class urbanites who lived in Boston. Instead, he finds some of the movement's most radical champions in industrial centers like Lowell, where working women like Sarah Bagley participated in the "cross-fertilization of abolitionism and labor reform" (145). Laurie, however, reveals one of the weaknesses of his study by highlighting Bagley. Her story reminds us that women played meaningful roles in the political sphere, even if they could not cast their own ballots. Laurie gives Bagley her historical due as he illustrates her courageous leadership of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association. But Bagley and her Lowell cohorts are only a few of the numerous reform-minded women who undoubtedly influenced political abolitionism in the 1840s and 1850s. If Bagley could encourage voters to link wage slavery with plantation slavery, then other women like Abby Kelley and Lydia Maria Child certainly held sway with Liberty and Free Soil men in their home state. Laurie almost wholly neglects women's antislavery activism, an oversight that could have been forgiven if recent studies by Julie Roy Jeffrey (1998), Melanie Gustafson (2001), and Susan Zaeske (2003) had not provided numerous examples of how women participated in sectional politics. While it is true that many political abolitionists eschewed the "woman question," believing it to be outside the...