Book Description

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).