UNTIL JUSTICE BE DONE

A well-respected scholar of racial issues in 19th-century America offers a history of “the first civil rights revolution.”

Masur, a professor of history at Northwestern, chronicles the efforts by Black and White Americans, from the Revolution through the 1870s, to end slavery and racial discrimination. Following An Example for All the Land (2010), which looked at Reconstruction in Washington, D.C., the author expands her study to the entire U.S. She introduces a broad coalition of people, with women and African Americans as much in the forefront as White males, who, working to capture political force, eventually gained their victory through the young Republican Party. Though Masur focuses on the Old Northwest, she does not exclude major nodes of activism such as Missouri and Massachusetts. Her major interpretive innovation is to locate the roots of the legal fetters on Black Americans not just in slavery, but also in enduring Colonial laws regarding poverty, vagrancy, and local taxes. The prejudice hidden under the cover of local ordinance proved to be as difficult to overcome as White Americans’ heedlessness toward their Black neighbors. Facing such realities, reformers used petitions, court suits, and political action to gain their objectives through a bloody civil conflict and passage of the 14th Amendment. Masur fittingly closes with a sobering lesson for today—i.e., that the gains of constitutionalized manumission and equal rights were reversed by the Supreme Court starting in 1873 and ending in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson. It required a second civil rights movement decades later to reignite Americans to further work. The author could have provided more on the role of religion in awakening Americans to racial injustices as well as on the general context of social reform in antebellum America. Nonetheless, her book joins Manisha Sinha’s The Slave’s Cause (2016) in providing authoritative historical coverage of its subject.

A fine history of the first phase of the nation’s most enduring moral reform effort.