Vol. 16 No.1 (January 2006), pp.56-58

 

BEYOND GARRISON:  ANTISLAVERY AND SOCIAL REFORM, by Bruce Laurie.  New York:  Cambridge University Press, 2005.  328pp.  Cloth $65.00/£45.00.  ISBN:  0-521-84408-8.  Paper $23.99/£19.99.  ISBN:  0-521-605217-2.

 

Reviewed by Mark Tushnet, Georgetown University Law Center.  E-mail:  tushnet [at] law.georgetown.edu.

 

Historian Bruce Laurie intervenes in a number of discussions among historians about the nature of the ante bellum antislavery movement.  I stress that he is a historian talking primarily to historians, because much of the book has the feel of “inside baseball,” with Laurie assuming that his readers already know a great deal about the people and organizations involved in antislavery in Massachusetts.  For example, Laurie devotes much attention to antislavery organizations in Massachusetts cities and towns other than Boston because, in his view, historians have paid too much attention to Bostonians.  Laurie’s immersion in historians’ debates means that his book will be of limited value to non-specialists.

 

“Limited,” though – not “none.”  For non-specialists, the book is a detailed case study of the ways in which reform movements manage the tension between purity on the issues that most animate their adherents, and the reality that making progress on those issues requires forming coalitions with others who are concerned more with other issues – and therefore requires compromise and at best incremental progress.  “The great question that haunted abolitionists was whether to fight only for emancipation or for emancipation in conjunction with other reforms” (p.287).  Laurie’s argument is “that political action was an effective strategy consistent with moral rectitude and not a naïve plunge into a smarmy world of compromise and accommodation” (p.5).

 

For Laurie, as for other students of antislavery, William Lloyd Garrison represents the purist concerned only with abolition, whose purism limited the direct effects of his advocacy.  Indirectly, of course, Garrison like other purists inspired others who, more willing to compromise, did make progress toward abolition:  “Garrison’s relentless agitation in the name of equal rights shook a nation that needed plenty of shaking.  .  .  .  But while Garrison may have awakened the conscience of some Northerners, he also led his followers into something of a moral dead end” (p.5).  As the subtitle of his first chapter says, Laurie presents a story of the development of antislavery “from moral suasion to politics” (p.17).  In the end, though, politics involved compromise and “difficult” alliances (p.288).  As Laurie puts it, “eclectic reform .  .  . was a mixed blessing, a source of strength and weakness at once” (p.288).

 

The engine of the movement from purity to coalition, Laurie argues, was the involvement of the “middle ground of ordinary people” (p.24) in antislavery politics.  Those people differed from Garrisonian purists because they cared about political issues in addition to antislavery.  Laurie’s story is about the [*57] way in which political antislavery became increasingly influential as its adherents expanded their concerns to include first the rights of labor, and then women’s rights and temperance.  The general impression Laurie leaves is that this expansion was relatively unproblematic for most of those involved; historians, he suggests, have overemphasized the difficulties of an expanded antislavery movement because of their focus on the Garrisonians and (not unrelated) on Bostonians. 

 

This story is told by means of a quite detailed examination of the various antislavery political parties in Massachusetts.  Again, the names of organizations and parties blurred more often than I was comfortable with as a non-specialist:  First there were Garrisonians, then the Liberty Party, then the Free Soil Party, then the Know Nothings, and eventually (outside the period of Laurie’s main focus) the Republican Party.  Because one can easily get lost in the details, I think – but only think – that the dynamic Laurie identifies is one in which an organization becomes a limited coalition, is unable to achieve much of any of its members’ goals, and disappears, to be replaced by another organization that takes its predecessor’s goals as its own and expands those goals to increase the coalition’s size.  The Liberty Party was “not preoccupied with the national question of slavery, as nearly all historians assume.  Though attentive to the national scene, they also figured prominently in the politics of civil rights and labor reform in Massachusetts” (p.83).  Later Laurie again describes the “cross-fertilization of abolitionism and labor reform” (p.145).  By the early 1850s, the end of the period Laurie examines, antislavery had become one of the package of issues around which the leading reform political organizations formed – perhaps the most important issue to many, but not the party’s only goal.

 

The main line of Laurie’s argument deals with the ways in which reformers put together their coalitions.  There is, though, one striking point that political scientists will relish.  At a crucial point the Liberty Party achieved real, though short-term, political success because of the peculiar voting rules in Massachusetts.  The rule in elections in the 1840s was pure majority rule (50% plus 1), in multi-candidate elections without a runoff.  If no candidate achieved a majority, the state legislature chose the governor.  When reform candidates were reasonably attractive (or traditionalists particularly unattractive), they could throw the election into the legislature, where they could then engage in vote-trading to ensure that the new governor would support legislation advancing some of the reformers’ policies.  Laurie devotes several pages to a discussion of the “remarkable and unexpected” (p.111) repeal in 1843 of Massachusetts’ ban on interracial marriage.  He quotes a contemporary who attributed the enactment to several years of petitioning, which were said to have “produced great change in the public mind on this subject during the last twelvemonth” (p.111).  Sensibly enough, though, Laurie points to the decision rule.  Votes in the state’s lower house were decisive, the Senate having supported repeal for several years.  And [*58] those votes were forthcoming because of a “deal .  .  . in which the Democrats agreed to get behind several civil rights measures in return for the Libertyites’ giving Democrats the governorship, the speakership of the House, and control of the Senate” (p.112).  This anecdote might readily be used to illustrate more general propositions about the importance of decision rules for political success, and more specifically about the impact of plurality rather than majority decision rules.

 

I have tried to explain why non-specialists, and particularly scholars in fields other than history, might find Laurie’s work a useful case study.  I should note, though, that there is much more in the book than I have discussed.  One thread running through the work, and particularly prominent is the chapters dealing specifically with “the politics of race” (ch. 3) and “the limits of paternalism” (ch. 8), is an analysis of the ways in which antislavery’s advocates had paternalistic attitudes toward African Americans that, though not viciously racist, limited the degree to which they were willing to support initiatives aimed at reducing discrimination against African Americans even as they did work against some forms of discrimination.

 

In sum, non-specialists can mine Laurie’s work for examples of the way in which reform politics works.  The nuggets are there, but it takes some digging.

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© Copyright 2006 by the author, Mark Tushnet.