John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry represented both a beginning and an end. It constituted a new phase of anti-slavery struggle in the United States and was itself the product of a long and self-conscious radical continuity, the logical outgrowth of decades of pressure by a rising political left. Brown quite rationally sensed the limitations of law and process, or what Mark A. Lause describes as “the unwillingness of the power structure to acknowledge the necessity of history” (189). The old man of Osawatomie was no “lone nut.” In fact, Brown was bound not only to militant abolitionism, but also, however loosely and by degrees, to women's rights advocacy, trade unionism, land reform, freethought, socialism, spiritualism, Indian rights, and radical democratic societies, all of whom had slowly converged around the anti-slavery enterprise before mourning his execution in 1859.

Lause's The Long Road to Harpers Ferry: The Rise of the First American Left surveys the seven-decades-long buildup to Brown's revolt by charting the genealogy of reformers, utopians, rights rebels, and activists who challenged the standard vision of a “white republic” and “embraced a more expansive version of liberty and equality” (4). A prolific scholar of nineteenth-century radical history, Lause has always been at his best when animating the “hidden history” of the US left, whether it be uncovering secret societies, tri-racial Union armies in the trans-Mississippi West, or cattle worker militancy. In The Long Road to Harpers Ferry he once again brings to life a host of fascinating and neglected players, tracing individuals and institutions through various political eras. In doing so, Lause demonstrates how “noncapitalists” (if not anticapitalists) rejected the market and property assumptions of the Euroamerican economic power structure. These cadres, vanguards, and movements came to find a common agenda in which land reform and early (non-Marxist) socialism penetrated an increasingly militant abolitionism, creating the “first American left.”

Born out of the Revolutionary era, radical agrarianism followed the lead of Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin and others by challenging the logic of absolute property rights and proposing a more egalitarian definition of “liberty.” Early critics of capitalism grounded their praxis in religious and communitarian frameworks; craft unions infused it with class consciousness and notions of worker cooperation. The homestead movement, which gained traction throughout the 1830s and 1840s, helped popularize the idea that independent proprietorship – “free labor” through “free soil” – might replace both southern chattel bondage and northern “wage slavery.” Established by trade union veterans in 1844, the National Reform Association petitioned Congress for free public lands in the West (84). At the same time, the brutality of antebellum US Indian policy led many abolitionists to adopt the cause of Indigenous land and/or political rights.

“Free-soil” ideology fused land reform with antislavery. The Liberty Party first brought free-soil concepts into the national electoral arena, and soon moved away from the “one-idea” politics of abolition to speak to a new type of solidarity politics, or what George Henry Evans termed the “different grades of slavery” involving Indians, women, and wage workers (98). Infused with a greater sense of internationalism with the influx of European revolutionists after 1848, Free Democrats (radicals estranged from the Free Soil Party) and city-wide federations including the New York City Industrial Congress left their “red republican” stamp on the emerging Republican Party and provided a framework for postbellum labor radicalism. The broad platform of electoral radicalism soon came to include planks such as the ten-hour workday, free homes, land limitation, free schools, an elected judiciary, and equal rights for women.

But electoral politics had its impediments, circumscribing radical definitions of universalism. For instance, popular notions of “free soil” not only were divorced from Indigenous rights, but also came to entail the wholesale displacement or extermination of Native people. Though Radicals remained skeptical of Republican Party shortcomings, by the middle of the Civil War the Republican Party had adopted a progressive monetary and tax policy, land reform (though shorn of its most egalitarian features), and a proclamation that would help ensure the destruction of chattel slavery. As Lause argues, “the very power structure that had found it convenient to treat Harpers Ferry as the work of lunatics embraced that very ‘lunacy’ as a national policy” (195). Despite the war's limitations (the continuation of “wage slavery” and the eventual collapse of Radical Reconstruction), Lause maintains that the conflict marked a qualitative shift in American radical history, inspiring anticapitalist activism through the remainder of the century.

In perhaps a lesson for today's leftists, Lause concludes by positing that the most effective radicalism “does not try to pull a movement out of thin air or build it to a blueprint” (198). Rather, it moves toward the people it seeks to serve, which often involves actors and organizations taking their struggles toward movements around other issues in much the same way land reformers and women's rights advocates merged within the broader antislavery movement.

To be sure, The Long Road to Harpers Ferry is highly recommended for any reader interested in radical politics, the origins of the anticapitalist left, or the creation of the modern working class. Other scholars have shadowed the legacy of the American Revolution through antebellum abolitionism, or tracked women's rights or political antislavery to their apotheoses at Seneca Falls or the presidential election of 1860. Lause successfully braids these threads while also adding crucial insights and analysis. The result is a synthesis that also lends fresh perspective and a remarkable history from below.