American Mobbing 1828-1861: Toward the Civil War

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Summer 2000 by Simeone, James

American Mobbing 1828-1861: Toward the Civil War. By David Grimsted. (New York: Oxford University Press. 372 pp., $65.)

David Grimsted is perhaps best known for his early contributions to the history of American theater during the Antebellum period. His Melodrama Unveiled American Theater & Culture 2800-2850 (1968 demonstrates that most early American theater patrons did not distinguish between high and low art. A serious drama or opera would be followed, on the same evening, by a farce or circus act. Whether high or low, however, Americans demanded common domestic settings, pure heroines, purely evil villains, and tearful denouement from dramatists, the pound of flesh for living in a predominantly democratic (lower and uppercase d) society. Thus at William Dunlap's Johns Street Theatre in New York City, Shakespeare's plays were performed along with productions like The Stranger, a story whose pathetic scenes overwhelmed audiences and whose theme reinforced egalitarian values. The vernacular republicanism of that era, like that of today, maintained a blind faith in majoritarian democracy The disapproval and scorn heaped on popular theater by men like Timothy Dwight, a Yale Divinity School professor who was also Dunlap's brother-in-law, only confirmed its value for the majority. In Melodrama Unveiled, Grimsted told the story of the battle for control over American theater. The battle, driven by class antagonism, led in one case to literal class warfare: at New York's Astor Place Opera House in 1849, a perceived slight to America's most popular "Democratic" actor by an "Aristocratic" English competitor spawned a jingoistic campaign against "foreign rule" and eventuated in a riot killing twenty people.

Grimsted later expanded his analysis of the Astor Place Riot in a series of articles on Antebellum mobs and riots. What, he asked, explained the prevalence of rioting during the 1830s, allowing riots to become an accepted part of democracy in America by the end of the decade? His answer: mobs were not challenges to the established order, but extraordinary means of reaffirming it. Majoritarianism was traditional, so to speak, and whenever majority will was perceived to be thwarted in a particularly acute form, rioters took the law into their own hands. Grimsted later expanded this interpretation to include the special case of Antebellum labor riots. These were rare, relative to the later period between 1885 and 1915 (when America produced more labor unrest than any other industrial country) because, ironically, the traditional status of laborers as producer republicans within their local communities was stronger in the former period than in the later during which economic production became nationalized. This argument is stunningly counterintuitive because it suggests that American laborers were more powerful during an era when they were less class conscious.

With this research trajectory as its prelude, American Mobbing has been long awaited by scholars of antebellum social and political history. And, to a great degree, Grimsted does not disappoint. His book has the ambitious purpose of re-telling the story of the coming of the Civil War, this time from the perspective of the growing chasm in sectional attitudes towards anti- slavery and the extra-legal violence it generated. In this sense the title is a misnomer, as the book focuses on "about half the riotous conversations between 1828-1861," only those dealing with slavery, whether directly or indirectly as part of political strategy. The book traces the development of two distinct traditions of mob violence: in the North, violence occurred when authorities failed to protect anti-slavery minorities; in the South, violence occurred mainly when authorities moved to stop anti-slavery speech and activities. During the 1830s and 1840s, when these traditions met at the national level, they were at first kept within rough boundaries by a set of informal agreements between the Democrat and Whig and later Know-Nothing Parties. Grimsted argues that Democratic rhetoric in favor of majoritarianism in crises like Pennsylvania's Buckshot War and Rhode Island's Dorr's Rebellion were, just that, rhetoric; after 1835, the southern wing of the Democrats increasingly made sure that pro-slavery dominated the party's agenda. The book reaches its great climax in the `bleeding majoritarianism" of the Kansas crisis (18541858), when the separate traditions "met, mingled, and mangled" the second party system and the country.

Grimsted thus presents an original and persuasive argument about the forces driving the nation toward civil war. As powerful as this interpretation is, it stands incomplete. It lays the ground work for a grand synthesis of the mobs and political culture of the period, but it leaves for another volume the task of applying this interpretation to the other half of Antebellum mobs, those arising from economic, racial, ethnic, and religious motives. The two volume approach is understandable given the sheer number of incidents, 1,218 in all. The book begins with an especially close look at the mobs occurring in 1835, when by the latest count 147 riots broke out. In the earlier article on Jacksonian riots, published in 1972, a then up-todate count for 1835 listed only 37. Even granting the difficulty of dealing with so many incidents in one volume, this first volume is likely to disappoint Illinois readers. The argument of American Mobbing, applied to Illinois, suggests that its two major Antebellum mobs, against abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy and Mormon Joseph Smith, are unconnected. One was an anti-slavery riot, the other an antiMormon riot motivated by religious and ethnic animosities. Yet, in Illinois, attitudes toward slavery, religion, and ethnicity were all closely related, as is indicated by the 1824 Convention mobs at Vandalia during the movement to make Illinois a slave state.