"Gentlemen of Property and Standing": Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America

by Leonard L. Richards

This book identifies the anti-abolitionists in the northern states and examines what motivated them. In the 1830's riots flared up in many northern cities. In Utica, NY; New York City, Boston, and Cincinnati mobs broke up anti-slavery meetings, tormented free blacks, and razed the Negro quarters. In Illinois, Presbyterian minister and editor of the Alton Observer, Elijah Lovejoy, was killed.

Genres: History, American History

208 pages, Paperback

First published February 15, 1971

About the author

Leonard L. Richards, Ph.D. (University of California, Davis, 1968; A.B., University of California, Berkeley), is Professor Emeritus of History in the College of Humanities & Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, focusing on 19th century United States. He has also taught at San Francisco State College and the University of Hawaii. His The Life and Times of Congressman John Quincy Adams was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1987.

Reviews

[Czarny Pies · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1970 Leonard Richards won the highly prestigious Beveridge Award for Best English Language Book on North American or Latin American history. No one can deny that this award was richly deserved. By examining the court records of trials in several American cities following Anti-Abolition riots, Richard demonstrated that the mobs were almost invariably led by "Men of Property and Standing".

Richards book made a great contribution to the public debate in America during the 1970s when the KKK was still very active and civil rights demonstrators still faced brutal physical intimidation through-out the United States. At that time Northern Liberals believed that the bigots who opposed civil rights came from the lower classes or the "red necks" as they were known. This view was and to continues to be widely held has as can be attested by the enormous popularity that To Kill a Mockingbird has consistently enjoyed since being published in 1969.

Richards findings however suggested that the widespread prejudices amongst liberals with respect to those opposed to the Civil Rights movement may have been highly flawed. If Gentlemen of Property and Standing led the Anti-Aboliton mobs of the 1830s, it seems difficult to believe that they were entirely absent from the groups who opposed the Civil Rights movement.

My limited personal experience supports Leonard. The only KKK members that I ever knew were prosperous, highly educated and widely travelled. None of them were uncivilized rednecks.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

I kept meaning to read this...I saw lots of references to it in books about the antebellum period, and then I found it at the late, lamented Odyssey Bookshop in Montreal. Then it sat on my shelf for a while.
It is a great little social history that addresses a very specific question. Where did these anti-abolitionist mobs come from in the 1830s? Who were these people? Why did they start mobbing seemingly out of nowhere around 1835? In the more general history books, this kind of question just gets glossed over - people were racist, so they hated abolitionists, so they attacked them. But Richards points out that this explanation doesn't really work. Garrison started publishing "The Liberator" years before the mobs started forming, for example. Richards did an admirably thorough job identifying most of the abolitionists and anti-abolitionists that were involved in these incidents, in Utica, Cincinnati, and NYC, using newspapers, city directories, church records, etc. What he found was that this was not a spontaneous mobbing of the racist rabble of society, but rather middle and upper class propertied men, who planned these events carefully. They typically planned ahead, and knew where they were going to meet and what they were going to burn. What they were responding to was a burst of publishing on the part of the abolitionists, who were flooding the mails with cheap newsletters and pamphlets. The abolitionists were also attacking the Colonization Society, and leading to a steep drop in donations - and a lot of these guys were members of that society.
The other fascinating bit was that these "gentlemen of property and standing" were attacking abolitionism as a foreign imposition, as British, as basically our old nemesis Britain trying to split apart and destroy the Republic. That, I did not know. That is fascinating. There is something here that needs to be addressed in American history surveys - something about an American sense of insecurity and paranoia about British people that goes way beyond the end of the War of 1812.

[Chai · Rating 3 out of 5]

I initially read this as a follow up to "Celia, A Slave" as a source fo r information on the abolition movement in her time...