Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform

ISBN-13: 9780521605175 / Angielski / Miękka / 2005 / 366 str.

Bruce Laurie

Opis

Why was Massachusetts one of the few Northern states to grant African-American males the right to vote? Why did it pass personal liberty laws, which helped protect fugitive slaves from federal authorities in the two decades immediately preceding the Civil War? Beyond Garrison finds answers to these important questions in unfamiliar and surprising places. Its protagonists are not the noble supporters of American abolitionism grouped around William Lloyd Garrison, but, rather, ordinary men and women in country towns and villages, encouraged by African-American activists throughout the state. Bruce Laurie's approach focuses on the politics of such antislavery advocates and demonstrates their leanings toward third-party politics. Bruce Laurie is currently Professor of History, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is a member of the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association. His articles and reviews have appeared in numerous collections of essays and in Labor History, Journal of Social History and Journal of American History. He is co-editor, with Milton Cantor, of Class, Sex and the Woman Worker (Greenwood Press, 1979) and co-editor with Eric Arnesen and Julie Greene of Labor Histories: Class, Politics, and the Working-Class Experience (University of Illinois Press, 1998). He is also the author of Working People of Philadelphia, 1800-1850 (Temple University Press, 1980), and Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth Century America (Hill & Wang, 1989).

Recenzje

"...a richly detailed local history that describes both the ideological battles and the political horse-trading engaged in by antislavery politicians in antebellum Massachusetts." -Rachel Hope Cleves, JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC

Spis treści

1. An experiment of immense consequences: from moral suasion to politics; 2. The . . . evil from a small party: the rise of the liberty party; 3. Our colored friends: Libertyism and the politics of race; 4. To favor the poorest and the weakest: Libertyism and Labor Reform; 5. Fifty thousand might have assembled: sources of free soilism; 6. Our own time: free soilers and labor reformers; 7. As easy as lying: complications of political reform; 8. Prejudices against us: the limits of paternalism; 9. Epilogue.