David Grant's volume comes at an opportune moment. As he argues, twenty-first-century historiographical developments have given us good reason to approach Republicanism from the perspective of literary studies – and vice versa. Recent studies have challenged the view that radical abolitionists were more effective (or purer) than those engaged in anti-slavery politics. Grant devotes six chapters to works in which the rhetoric of anti-slavery informs literary dynamics, providing new readings of individual texts, and more broadly considering the importance of Free Labor in the literature of the period, the relationship between home and marketplace, and the enduring American trope of generational rededication to founding principles. A short review cannot do full justice to the power and complexity of Grant's readings, which deploy an extensive knowledge of Republican rhetoric and provide substantial discussions of individual works by Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Greenleaf Whittier (“The Panorama”) Whitman (Leaves of Grass), Nathaniel Parker Willis (Paul Fane) and Republican campaign poetry. To take Stowe as an example, however, is to reveal the kinds of revisionist emphasis implicit throughout. While the overwhelming consensus in Stowe scholarship links her work to abolitionist representations, a shift has already begun towards exploring her sources in political anti-slavery discourse as of equal importance. Women writers do tend to be seen as apolitical, motivated by moral or religious fervour, and alien to the daily grubbiness and practicality of politics. Grant, however, provides a cogent reading of Uncle Tom's Cabin as one of three works (including Leaves of Grass and “The Panorama”) which satirize the arguments of those who advocated compromise with slavery. Uncle Tom's Cabin emerged from the consensus of compromise in the 1850s, in which self-restraint was glorified as a model for national reconciliation.

In contrast, the political anti-slavery movement recast agitation of the feelings as the life-blood of the republic's survival, a vitality which was essential to the nation. The pro-compromise citizen was repeatedly portrayed as hollowed out, empty of feeling or moral energy. Stowe's Ophelia, chilly, restrained and northern, exemplifying the dignity of labour but compromising with her slave-owning cousin, offers an explicit critique of the citizen who follows the empty forms of a once vigorous New England background without tapping into the spirit of her forebears. In the novel, however, she evolves from adherence to lifeless, abstract principles to a state of passionate, focussed outrage. Dred (a self-consciously historical novel) borrows from the rhetoric surrounding the crisis of Bleeding Kansas for its figurative building blocks of expansion and growth, trespass and occupation, in a narrative bound up with the dominant plot of three slowly reviving heirs to the energies and initiatives of their ancestors. The plot focusses upon the development and expansion of slavery, via the three variously legitimate heirs to the ancestral plantation, whose development forms the basis of plot, character and symbolism, as the novel reduces the South's choices to slavery's death or its hegemony. The causal links of the story (often seen as muddled by past critics) actually obey the inner logic of the slave system's progress. Along the way Grant demonstrates that what used to be thought of as Stowe's use of the domestic sphere as a withdrawal from the marketplace may be more persuasively understood in the context of the opposition to slavery on economic grounds. The part played by the home in political rhetoric is carefully and subtly analysed, not least in the thousands of Republican campaign poems of 1856, in which Jessie Benton Fremont was almost as important as her husband, as a guarantor for a potential free home in the West. Reservations? Inevitably the focus on American party politics neglects the extent to which writers were tapping into international networks of opposition to slavery, along with their different rhetorical toolkits. Grant, for example, reads Stowe's passionate Henrique in terms of Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, later a Republican source. But the character derives from one of the first anti-slavery novels, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda's Sab (1841), set in Cuba, which, despite its Latin American setting, offers precise parallels to this chapter of Stowe's novel. Writers lift their weapons from a variety of sources, none more so than Stowe. Just as novels link to other novels so the campaigns against slavery offered a web of rhetorical connections across the globe.