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).

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).

In the only modern study synthesizing nineteenth-century American labor history, Bruce Laurie examines the character of working-class factionalism, plebian expectations of government, and relations between the organized few and the unorganized many. Laurie also examines the republican tradition and the movements that drew on it, from the General Trades Unions in the age of Jackson to the Knights of Labor later in the century.

The image is terrible and familiar. A man sits, his face in profile, his torso exposed. His back is a breathtaking mass of scars, crisscrossing his body and baring the brutality of American slavery. Reproduced as a carte de visite, the image circulated widely throughout abolitionist networks and was featured in Harper's Weekly. Its undeniable power testified to the evils of slavery. But who was this man and how did this image come to be? Bruce Laurie uncovers the people and events that created this seminal image, telling the tale of three men, two Yankee soldiers from western Massachusetts who were serving the Union Army in Louisiana and a man named Peter whose scarred back horrified all who saw it. The two soldiers were so shocked by what had been done to Peter, they sought to capture the image and document slavery's cruelty, the likes of which was all too common among those fleeing bondage in Louisiana. Meticulously researched and briskly told, this short volume unearths the story behind an iconic image.