make it 5.  of course the mobs have been drinking

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Date: Wed, 28 Jul 1999 10:26:06 -0400
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Subject: Gilje on Grimsted, _American Mobbing, 1828-1861_

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask]  (June, 1999)

David Grimsted.  _American Mobbing, 1828-1861:  Toward Civil War_.
New York:  Oxford University Press, 1998.  xx + 372 pp.
Bibliographical references and index.  $65.00 (cloth), ISBN
0-19-511707-7.

Reviewed for H-SHEAR by Paul Gilje <[log in to unmask]>, University of
Oklahoma

I have waited a long time for this book.  When I began studying
riots as a graduate student in the 1970s, David Grimsted's brilliant
essay "Rioting in Its Jacksonian Setting," _American Historical
Review_ (1972, v. 77, pp. 361-97) stood as a beacon, guiding the
novice historian through the treacherous waters of presentism and
political correctness.  Grimsted unabashedly used the term mob.  He
placed rioters at the heart of Jacksonian America, viewing them as a
window onto a peculiar and democratic national character.  It was
reassuring to know that while I struggled to find riots in the early
republic, Grimsted was working to illuminate the decades that came
after.  The promise implicit in that essay has been a long time in
coming.

_American Mobbing_, however, only partially fulfills that promise.
No one knows more about Jacksonian rioting than David Grimsted.  He
has scoured the countryside visiting archive after archive,
uncovering hundreds of popular disturbances.  He has read countless
newspapers and books published from the era.  And he has put
together a file of 1,218 riots (p. viii).  (By comparison, my own
file contains somewhere between 400 and 500 riots for the same
years).  The research is prodigious and Grimsted's command of
knowledge is impressive.  Yet I was disappointed in this book.

First, after waiting twenty-five years, maybe anything Grimsted
wrote would have fallen short of the promise of 1972.  But, by his
own admission, Grimsted has written only half of his story here.
The Introduction asserts that this volume considers only the
collective violence somehow associated with the origins of the Civil
War and excludes the other half of rioting covering economic,
racial, ethnic, religious, and youth tensions.  Grimsted, however,
promises at least one more book on the subject.  The second book
will cover the material skipped in this first book.  There may even
be a third book considering theories of rioting.  (I am not sure if
he has promised another tome or if he will include the material in
the second book.)

Second, and it pains me to highlight this point in a review, I had
problems with the writing style in the book.  In terms of simple
sentence structure, Grimsted has a penchant for adding a clause or
two too many.  A few examples should be cited:  "The sphinx of
violence has a human face but an animal's body, which often
distinguishes poorly whether saints or sinners, the oppressing or
the oppressed, come within its arena and its maw"  (p. viii); "The
greatness of the debates between Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln
owed most to these candidates' ability and to the depth of the
questions and tensions involved but owed something as well to the
fact that women and families listened in numbers sufficient to
discourage the abusive sportingness of wholly male rituals" (p.
187); and "As Weld had predicted, and as Stephen Douglas understood
so sharply in the debate as throughout his career, the Democracy
could no longer soothe every Southern outburst and demand without
driving away crucial support in the North, mostly of people who
neither much cared nor cared to think about slavery" (p. 269).  I
found such sentences a mouthful to read and to comprehend.

Third, there are other stylistic problems.  Grimsted writes a bit
too flippantly about serious issues like slavery.  It is clear that
he has no love for the South or slavery.  But it struck me as
inappropriate to joke that "one does lose count"  while quoting the
range of 400 to 1,000 lashes given a thirteen-year-old girl (p.
163).  At times, words seem to have been left out:  "In this way,
the abolitionists less developed than were handed the issues that
assured progress for their movement" (p. ix).  Grimsted also has a
few inside jokes that the average reader will not even begin to
fathom.  In the Introduction he asserts "My research has proved, as
much as anything, that people who love old documents and their fresh
use are more dependably good than those who take the easy way out
and like dogs and children" (p. xvi).  I was equally baffled by the
one word paragraph that ended the book:  "Useless?" (p. 281).

Finally, this book is not really about rioting.  Instead it is about
the origins of the Civil War and the differences between Northern
and Southern culture concerning popular violence.  There is little
effort to place the rioting in this period within a context of
social change, nor is the focus, as it was in the essay of
twenty-five years ago, on what Jacksonian riots mean within the
story of American history.

On this last point, perhaps it is unfair to criticize Grimsted for
not writing a book that I would have liked him to write.  So I will
devote the remainder of the review to what the author has offered
us.  Grimsted argues that the North and the South developed two
different social systems of violence.  Southerners were murderous,
even sadistic.  Northerners destroyed property, and shunned attacks
on people.  Southerners felt justified in every mob action--they
believed that they acted almost in the name of the law.  Northerners
ran into resistance with the development of police forces.  Southern
mobs inflicted casualties; in northern riots the mob more often than
not sustained casualties in the face of law and order.  Southerners
seized upon the slightest whisper of a conspiracy among slaves to
inflict gruesome murder on an impressive scale.  Northerners threw
stones and hollered at abolitionists, broke presses, and
occasionally assaulted a black.

The bulk of the book, then, is on the South.  There is a chapter on
anti-abolitionism in the North and there is some discussion of
northern political rioting.  But the subtext is always in the
comparison with the South.  The analysis on political rioting,
moreover, quickly focuses on the Know Nothing disturbances of the
1850s, the most violent of which occurred in slave state cities like
Baltimore, Louisville, St. Louis, and New Orleans.

Therefore, Grimsted has presented us with the most comprehensive
portrait of southern antebellum mob violence to date.  I wish I had
access to this book when I was writing _Rioting in America_ (Indiana
University Press, 1996).  In that book I underestimated the extent
and extra-legal nature of popular violence against slaves in the
South.  Grimsted has shown that there may have been more
continuity--something I emphasized nationally--before and after the
Civil War in the South in rioting.  Implicit in Grimsted's analysis
is a direct link between the white terror of reconstruction and the
late nineteenth-century lynching South, and the extra-legal violence
against supposed abolitionists and in reaction to feared slave
conspiracies.

Grimsted also argues that the Southerners did not view their
collective violence as extraordinary or out of the bounds of
acceptable behavior.  He explores southern attitudes toward violence
in general, finding Southerners all too willing to attack each other
in the name of honor.  The same ethos explains their willingness to
maim and to kill when in a crowd.  Oddly, Southerners saw their
extra-legal activity as so legitimate that they looked disparagingly
to the North as a land of riot and mayhem.

This book, then, is something less than a study of mobbing in the
years before the Civil War, as implied in the title.  Instead, it is
an effort to use rioting as another method of delineating the
cultural chasm that separated North and South when the guns first
fired on Fort Sumter.  There is little doubt that Grimsted makes a
case for the greater violence in southern riots in this period.  But
I remain unconvinced that northern riots were dramatically less
bellicose in their behavior.  Certainly anti-abolitionist mobs
tended to use less violent means in the North.  But when compared
with the popular disorder that occurred before the Jacksonian era,
both northern and southern riots were violent.  The most violent
southern riots occurred during the slave scares shortly before the
Civil War.  Grimsted only briefly mentions the most violent northern
riots--race riots that occurred throughout the Jacksonian period.
Any consideration of those northern race riots, moreover, should not
end with the beginnings of the Civil War--they should also include
the race riots that occurred during the Civil War when Northerners
cruelly tortured and executed African Americans.  In the final,
analysis David Grimsted offers us an introduction to the wonderful
research that he has carried on for decades.  I anxiously await the
additional volume or volumes.

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