In the United States in the late eighteenth century, African Americans were entitled to vote under the same conditions as whites in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island, yet it was only in Massachusetts that racial equality in exercising the franchise persisted uninterrupted through the Civil War. In New York, black voters were discriminated against by race-based property qualifications from 1821, in Pennsylvania they were disenfranchised entirely in 1838, and in Rhode Island they lost the right to vote in 1822 only to regain it in 1843. Usually explained in terms of distinct political contingencies in each state, Christopher Malone's Between Freedom and Bondage suggests that the divergent developments in black voting rights across the antebellum North were the product of common underlying factors that shaped white racial attitudes. These factors centred on the changing ways in which race was related to economic competition and party affiliation, as well as the evolving narratives about race that were constructed by political parties at both state and national levels.

In each of the three states where black voting rights were restricted, Malone argues that in the antebellum period a transition occurred in white racial attitudes from paternalism to ascriptivism. Whereas black and white Americans were viewed as essentially equal according to the paternalistic race culture that was characteristic of the Revolutionary era, racial ascriptivism depicted African Americans as morally and intellectually inferior. Across the northern states the timing and extent of European immigration was critical to this process. Expansion of the white working-class population resulted in increased economic competition which in turn fuelled racial tensions that were ripe for exploitation by “political actors seeking electoral advantage” (18). In early 1820s New York, Republicans “played the race card” in order to secure the votes of white farmers and labourers and undermine the racially inclusive Federalist coalition. Similarly, in Pennsylvania nearly two decades later Democrats took the lead in abolishing black voting rights when a Whig–anti-Mason coalition began to challenge their political supremacy in the state. Antebellum political dynamics were very different in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, but Malone interprets developments in black voting rights in these states as a consequence of economic, social, and ideological currents similar to those operating in New York and Pennsylvania. In Rhode Island the process of race formation was such that when the struggle of foreign-born and working-class whites to achieve universal white manhood suffrage culminated in the Dorr War of 1843, the state's black community was in a position to regain the suffrage by defending the interests of the racially paternalistic Law and Order (Whig) Party. Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, factors including limited immigration before the 1850s and declining black population density worked to entrench paternalism as the dominant racial ideology and protect black voting rights throughout the era.

Between Bondage and Freedom is an engaging and informative study. Malone is particularly adept at maintaining the coherence of his thesis through what are often complex narratives of state-level politics. Although social, economic, and demographic developments in each of the four states are, despite their centrality to the book's argument, discussed in far less depth, Between Freedom and Bondage nevertheless presents a persuasive case that invites further research into the mechanics of racial formation and the relationship between race, society, and party politics in the nineteenth-century North.