The Root and the Branch: Working-Class Reform and Antislavery, 1790–1860

In The Root and the Branch, Sean Griffin charts the rise of mass antislavery politics in the United States—not as a linear progression of party development but as a dynamic, contested struggle led by labor reformers, abolitionists, and utopian thinkers. Long before the Republican Party’s founding in 1854 by veterans of the Fourierist movement, these reformers viewed the crisis of territorial expansion as an opportunity to reimagine the terms of American freedom. Rather than tracing the institutional evolution from the Second to the Third Party System, Griffin turns his attention to the dense landscape of civil society associations, third-party experiments, and broad coalitions that, though often short-lived, fundamentally reshaped the political meaning of slavery and liberty. The result is a compelling reinterpretation of antebellum political realignment that places radical reformers at its center.At the heart of the book is the dynamic relationship between labor reformers and abolitionists, characterized by Griffin as “a process of dialectic, rather than discord . . . that would transform both movements” (81). Griffin’s principal figures include labor and land reformer George Henry Evans and his National Reform Association, along with political abolitionists William Goodell and Gerrit Smith, whose work with the Liberty Party drew prominent Black abolitionists into their ranks. His supporting cast underscores the cosmopolitan nature of American reform: Owenite associationists in Workingmen’s Parties; Chartists allied with Anti-Renters in upstate New York; and Garibaldi supporters marching alongside German Forty-Eighters. While this complex narrative may overwhelm the uninitiated, Griffin provides coherence by centering land reform as “the instrument by which the alliance between labor and antislavery . . . was finally if imperfectly cemented” (155).Griffin offers a synthesis of existing scholarship on labor reform and political abolitionism, paired with illuminating archival research—drawing on the records of the National Industrial Congress, the underutilized proceedings of the Colored Conventions, and a wide array of labor and abolitionist periodicals. His work advances a historiographical shift over the past two decades that situates abolitionists in dialogue and collaboration with diverse social reformers. Following Bruce Laurie’s Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (2007), scholars such as Mischa Honeck (2011), W. Caleb McDaniel (2013), and Manisha Sinha (2016) have similarly positioned Garrisonians, Chartists, German Forty-Eighters, and political abolitionists within a lively transatlantic culture of reform.The book opens by tracing a shared genealogy of freedom to the writings of John Locke and Thomas Paine, particularly through the foundational principle of “the right of man to himself” (95). Labor and antislavery reformers drew on Paine’s radical interpretation of Locke’s labor theory of value, asserting that legitimate property relations rested on the principle of self-ownership: Individuals are born free, and it is through their boundless labor that nature becomes productive. Yet this vision was undermined by opposing forces within capitalist society. Rather than abolishing slavery, nineteenth-century global industrial expansion deepened reliance on enslaved labor while simultaneously worsening conditions for the growing wage-working class. Confronted with this unprecedented social unfreedom, labor and antislavery reformers often moved in divergent directions, in “a fundamental disagreement over the meaning of freedom itself” (114). Abolitionists denounced the chattel principle and insisted that former slaves should enter free labor contracts as wage workers, while labor reformers decried the worsening conditions of wage work under capitalism—referring to it as “wage slavery” or, at times, “white slavery.”Griffin addresses this contested terminology by shifting the focus from the linguistic debates emphasized by 1990s whiteness studies scholarship to the political activity and collaboration between reformers. While he notes that many abolitionists bristled at the term wage slavery, fearing it diminished the suffering of enslaved Black Americans, Griffin shows how dialogues with associationists brought into focus a shared concern over the enduring “deprivation of freedom” in an era that claimed to uphold liberty (89). Could these groups forge a common political project grounded in this recognition? To explore this, Griffin moves from tracing a shared intellectual tradition of freedom to examining the imperfect but practical realm of politics—the art of the possible in the age of slavery. In doing so, he extends the work of scholars such as Bruce Laurie and Mark Lause by showing how labor reformers actively contributed to the political struggle against slavery.Among antebellum reformers, visions of agrarian revival often converged with plans for cooperative association. In upstate New York, rebel farmers known as the Anti-Renters and radical artisans pursued independent homesteads through the National Reform Association. By forming Workingmen’s Parties in the late 1820s and early 1830s, agrarians articulated an independent political agenda, while political abolitionists promoted cooperative landholding experiments involving both Black and white farmers, most notably Gerrit Smith’s short-lived Timbucto settlement. Griffin provides one of the most detailed accounts of Smith’s Adirondack experiment (117–24), which was spurred by the political abolitionist’s contentious public exchange with agrarian reformer George Henry Evans. A lifelong political collaboration followed, which brought together Anti-Renters, National Reformers, and Liberty Party supporters into the first “Free Soil Coalition” in October 1846, predating the more widely recognized Buffalo Free Soilers (134–35). Their efforts culminated in the articulation of the political principle of Freedom National, which became the central unifying idea of antislavery politics in the second half of the nineteenth century (167). Rooted in the antislavery constitutionalism of Goodell and Smith, Freedom National asserted that liberty was the natural condition of the United States and that the federal government had both the right and the obligation to prevent the expansion of slavery.This broader perspective clarifies the full scope of Griffin’s contribution: Radical artisans, agrarian reformers, and political abolitionists across the North envisioned a more sweeping transformation of labor and land relations than the dominant Democratic and Whig parties were willing to offer. Both the split within northern producers and the break by reformers from the existing political parties proved necessary for the emergence of mass antislavery politics.When historians like John Ashworth describe social reformers outside party structures as “not a breed apart from the Democrats” or as adopting “the Democratic sic analysis,” they risk distorting the historical narrative by subsuming transformative movements into the framework of existing state institutions (“Agrarians” and “Aristocrats” 1983, 93–97). Griffin restores these reform currents to the vibrant and intellectually dynamic public sphere of nineteenth-century civil society. He portrays them as part of the cosmopolitan networks of organizers and thinkers whose pioneering efforts, as he writes, offer “a glimpse of the alternate routes that fed into the main path of history,” while also “pointing the way for future generations of radicals and reformers” (216). Published in a moment of political realignment and uncertainty, The Root and the Branch offers a hopeful, spirited account of bold experiments in intellectual work and civil society organizing.