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American Mobbing, 1828-1861: Toward Civil War

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American mobbing is a difficult, but ultimately fulfilling read. The author's prose it a bit dense and verges on haughty at many points, but the scholarship is very high quality. The book deals with riots large and small in the years before the Civil War. The most important part of the book takes up the first two thirds of the volume, with the last third covering topics (political violence including bleeding Kansas) written about heavily elsewhere.

The first two parts of the book deal with northern and southern riots that involved slavery in some way. While northern anti-abolition riots did flare in the mid-1830s they were much less deadly than southern riots. Furthermore, southern riot victims of "anti-abolition" mobs were hardly abolitionists. Usually victims had merely failed to praise slavery to the extent the mob demanded. Most of the materials that the author used in his accounts of the riots come from personal letters, as southern newspapers often repressed details of violent riots. The social ideal behind southern riots was indeed primarily concerned with suppression of dissent and the establishment of a society (white and black) unquestioning of the slave-system. The author notes that while most southern anti-abolition riots were not directed at actual abolitionists, riots against alleged black uprising fomenters, was also questionably directed. That while the southern legal system worked reasonable well in the face of actual insurrections (Nat Turn, John Brown), mob riots against blacks were often based on nothing more than unsubstantiated rumor. Victims in these situations (with rioters often assisted by authorities) could number more than one hundred.
American Mobbing is an important work that any Civil War specialist should read.