Long Road to Harpers Ferry

Mark A. Lause, a noted scholar of American political radicalism, has produced a useful synthesis of current scholarship that adds, as is his penchant, fascinating and unexpected personalities and connections. Ira Berlin, Manisha Sinha, and Patrick Rael, among many others, bind the American Revolution with the Civil War as one long struggle for African American freedom. Sean Wilentz's Chants Democratic (1984) makes a similar argument for white artisans as does Judith Wellman's The Road to Seneca Falls (2004) for women's battle for equality in that same era. Lause divides the book into three roughly chronological sections. Part 1 covers the eighteenth-century legacies and challenges of liberty, and also comprises the chapters “Equality: The Mandates of Community and the Necessity of Expropriation” and “Solidarity: Coalescing a Mass Resistance.” The second part, “Working Citizens towards a Working Class,” includes the chapters “The Movement Party: Beyond the Failures of Civic Ritual”; “Confronting Race and Empire: Slavery and Mexico”; and “Free Soil: The Electoral Distillation of Radicalism, 1847–8.” Part 3 shows the movement to cadres of an unrelenting radicalism. Chapters discuss the radicalization of the Free Soil movement and the Democratic party, Free Democrats, and radical abolitionists and analyze the small initiatives and mass upheavals from 1856–1860. An epilogue sums up the book's findings

Civil disobedience · Democracy · Injustice · New Left · Political economy · Political radicalism · Political science · Politics · Radicalization · Sociology · Solidarity · White (mutation · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society