The First Reconstruction: Black Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War by Van Gosse (review)

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• The First Reconstruction: Black Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War by Van Gosse
• Aston Gonzalez (bio)

The First Reconstruction: Black Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War
van gosse
University of North Carolina Press, 2021
760 pp.

With the publication of The First Reconstruction, scholars now have a more comprehensive resource to study the role that free African American men in some northern states played in voting and contributing to party politics before the Civil War. Time and again, Van Gosse [End Page 181] demonstrates that electoral wins hinged on securing the ballots cast by African American men in several northern city, county, and state elections during the early Republic. Gosse provides abundant evidence that African American men voted and participated in electoral politics. He details how they recorded their own participation and also how white allies and adversaries positioned the promises and perceived perils of Black voters within changing two- and three-party systems that sometimes operated quite differently across state lines. Gosse avoids sectional generalizations and organizes the book according to the four polities of Pennsylvania, upper New England, New York, and Ohio. The contours of Black politics look different in each area, shaped as they were by preexisting laws, specific goals of political parties, diverse legal structures, and other contingent circumstances of the local populations. What comes into focus is how African American voters maneuvered strategically within and between political parties—Federalist, Whig, Democratic, Liberty, Free Soil, and Republican—in an attempt to secure improved outcomes for themselves and to try to elect politicians who supported their interests.

In a strong narrative voice, Gosse argues that these histories of dynamic Black politics in select northern enclaves have been overlooked for several reasons. First, he stridently writes that "we [scholars] have all been Taneyites" (referring to Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney, who wrote the majority opinion in the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision) who have assumed and "insisted that black citizenship barely, rarely, or never existed" before taking aim at scholars' expansive understanding of "politics" to include African American agency beyond the ballot box. This, he argues, results in social history without the "old-style political history" (9). In response, Gosse narrows the scope of what counts as "politics" in order to focus on elections, voting, and political parties. The view presented in the book is exclusively male with a handful of references to Black women's presence. Second, two competing historiographical developments discussed in the book have left little room for African American men's political culture. These two camps—the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian narrative of national progress advanced by Arthur Schlesinger and Gordon Wood and later challenged by Alexander Saxton, David Roediger, and Don E. Fehrenbacher, who identified slavery, anti-Black racism, and Native abuses as foundational to the nation's development—obscured the African American [End Page 182] presence at the ballot and in the history of political parties. Gosse positions himself in neither of these camps and instead focuses on what they overlooked.

Gosse reconstructs a rich and riveting history of Black politics largely by using traditional sources including census data, newspapers, congressional and legislative debates, and state constitutional conventions. Just one example of Gosse's nuanced interpretation of manuscript censuses explains the undercount of Black property value by Democratic census takers as a means to diminish Black Republican voter margins (448). Newspapers, however, serve as the main historical source base for the book, and Gosse's close analysis of the partisan activism contained in their pages reveals an incredibly well-documented play-by-play of electoral politics in upper New England in particular. Gosse largely measures Black men's presence in white newspapers and in later Black newspapers to determine their partisan activity when other source types do not document this. In using this methodological strategy, he also sets aside the anti-Black racism that runs through much of the early nineteenth-century white newspaper articles to access some degree of Black men's participation in party politics. Correspondence about and to Black men becomes more prominent in later chapters. With painstaking detail, Gosse describes the backroom dealings, the strategizing, and the metaphorical chess...