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• The First Reconstruction: Black Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War by Van Gosse
• Aston Gonzalez (bio)

With the publication of The First Reconstruction, scholars now have a more comprehensive resource to study the role that free African American men in some northern states played in voting and contributing to party politics before the Civil War. Time and again, Van Gosse [End Page 181] demonstrates that electoral wins hinged on securing the ballots cast by African American men in several northern city, county, and state elections during the early Republic. Gosse provides abundant evidence that African American men voted and participated in electoral politics. He details how they recorded their own participation and also how white allies and adversaries positioned the promises and perceived perils of Black voters within changing two- and three-party systems that sometimes operated quite differently across state lines. Gosse avoids sectional generalizations and organizes the book according to the four polities of Pennsylvania, upper New England, New York, and Ohio. The contours of Black politics look different in each area, shaped as they were by preexisting laws, specific goals of political parties, diverse legal structures, and other contingent circumstances of the local populations. What comes into focus is how African American voters maneuvered strategically within and between political parties—Federalist, Whig, Democratic, Liberty, Free Soil, and Republican—in an attempt to secure improved outcomes for themselves and to try to elect politicians who supported their interests.

In a strong narrative voice, Gosse argues that these histories of dynamic Black politics in select northern enclaves have been overlooked for several reasons. First, he stridently writes that "we [scholars] have all been Taneyites" (referring to Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney, who wrote the majority opinion in the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision) who have assumed and "insisted that black citizenship barely, rarely, or never existed" before taking aim at scholars' expansive understanding of "politics" to include African American agency beyond the ballot box. This, he argues, results in social history without the "old-style political history" (9). In response, Gosse narrows the scope of what counts as "politics" in order to focus on elections, voting, and political parties. The view presented in the book is exclusively male with a handful of references to Black women's presence. Second, two competing historiographical developments discussed in the book have left little room for African American men's political culture. These two camps—the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian narrative of national progress advanced by Arthur Schlesinger and Gordon Wood and later challenged by Alexander Saxton, David Roediger, and Don E. Fehrenbacher, who identified slavery, anti-Black racism, and Native abuses as foundational to the nation's development—obscured the African American [End Page 182] presence at the ballot and in the history of political parties. Gosse positions himself in neither of these camps and instead focuses on what they overlooked.

Gosse reconstructs a rich and riveting history of Black politics largely by using traditional sources including census data, newspapers, congressional and legislative debates, and state constitutional conventions. Just one example of Gosse's nuanced interpretation of manuscript censuses explains the undercount of Black property value by Democratic census takers as a means to diminish Black Republican voter margins (448). Newspapers, however, serve as the main historical source base for the book, and Gosse's close analysis of the partisan activism contained in their pages reveals an incredibly well-documented play-by-play of electoral politics in upper New England in particular. Gosse largely measures Black men's presence in white newspapers and in later Black newspapers to determine their partisan activity when other source types do not document this. In using this methodological strategy, he also sets aside the anti-Black racism that runs through much of the early nineteenth-century white newspaper articles to access some degree of Black men's participation in party politics. Correspondence about and to Black men becomes more prominent in later chapters. With painstaking detail, Gosse describes the backroom dealings, the strategizing, and the metaphorical chess...

审阅者：

• 第一次重建：从革命到内战的美国黑人政治范·高斯
• 阿斯顿·冈萨雷斯（简介）

随着《第一次重建》的出版，学者们现在有了更全面的资源来研究南北战争前北部一些州的自由非裔美国男子在投票和为政党政治做出贡献方面所发挥的作用。范·高斯（Van Gosse） [完第 181 页]一次又一次地证明，选举的胜利取决于在共和国早期的几个北部城市、县和州选举中确保非裔美国男性所投的选票。戈斯提供了大量证据证明非裔美国男性投票并参与选举政治。他详细介绍了他们如何记录自己的参与，以及白人盟友和对手如何在不断变化的两党和三党制度中定位黑人选民的承诺和感知到的危险，这些制度有时在各州之间的运作方式截然不同。戈斯避免了局部概括，而是根据宾夕法尼亚州、新英格兰北部、纽约州和俄亥俄州的四个政体来组织本书。每个地区的黑人政治轮廓看起来都不同，这是由先前存在的法律、政党的具体目标、不同的法律结构以及当地居民的其他偶然情况所塑造的。关注的焦点是非裔美国选民如何在联邦党、辉格党、民主党、自由党、自由土地党和共和党等政党内部和政党之间进行战略操纵，以期为自己争取更好的结果，并试图选举支持他们利益的政客。

戈斯以强烈的叙述声音指出，由于多种原因，某些北方飞地的这些充满活力的黑人政治历史被忽视了。首先，他尖锐地写道，“我们[学者]都是塔尼派”（指的是最高法院法官罗杰·塔尼，他在 1857 年德雷德·斯科特诉桑福德案的裁决中撰写了多数意见），他们假设并“坚持认为黑人公民身份几乎不属于黑人公民”。在针对学者们对“政治”的广泛理解以将非裔美国人机构纳入投票箱之外之前，“很少或从未存在过”。他认为，这导致了没有“旧式政治史”的社会史（9）。作为回应，戈斯缩小了“政治”的范围，以关注选举、投票和政党。书中提出的观点完全是男性的，其中有一些提到黑人女性的存在。其次，书中讨论的两种相互竞争的史学发展几乎没有为非裔美国男性的政治文化留下什么空间。这两个阵营——由阿瑟·施莱辛格和戈登·伍德提出的关于国家进步的杰斐逊-杰克逊主义叙事，后来受到亚历山大·萨克斯顿、大卫·罗迪格和唐·E·费伦巴赫的挑战，他们认为奴隶制、反黑人种族主义和虐待原住民是国家进步的基础。国家的发展——掩盖了非裔美国人[完第 182 页]在选票和政党历史中的存在。戈斯将自己定位于这两个阵营中的任何一个，而是专注于他们忽视的东西。

戈斯主要利用人口普查数据、报纸、国会和立法辩论以及州制宪会议等传统资料，重建了丰富而引人入胜的黑人政治历史。戈斯对手稿人口普查的细致入微解释的一个例子解释了民主党人口普查员对黑人财产价值的低估，以此作为缩小黑人共和党选民优势的一种手段（448）。然而，报纸是这本书的主要历史来源基础，戈斯对报纸页面中所包含的党派激进主义的仔细分析揭示了特别是在新英格兰北部的选举政治的详细记录。戈斯主要衡量黑人在白人报纸和后来的黑人报纸中的存在，以确定他们的党派活动，而其他来源类型没有记录这一点。在使用这种方法论策略时，他还抛开了贯穿十九世纪早期白人报纸文章大部分的反黑人种族主义，以了解黑人在某种程度上参与政党政治。关于黑人以及与黑人的通信在后面的章节中变得更加突出。戈斯用细致入微的细节描述了幕后交易、战略制定和隐喻性的国际象棋……