This is the first comprehensive history of pre-Civil War American radicalism, mapping the journeys of the land reformers, Jacksonian radicals and militant abolitionists on the long road to the failed slave revolt of Harpers Ferry in 1859.This book contains new and fascinating insights into the cast of characters who created a homegrown American socialist movement through the nineteenth century - from Thomas Paine's revolution to Robert Owen's utopianism, from James Macune Smith, the black founder of organised socialism in the US, to Susan B. Anthony, the often overlooked women's rights activist. It also considers the persistent pre-capitalist model of the Native American.Long Road to Harpers Ferry captures the spirit of the times, showing how class solidarity and consciousness became more important to a generation of workers than notions of American citizenship. This is a story that's been hidden from official histories, which must be remembered if we are to harness the latent power of socialism in the United States today.

IntroductionPart I: Working Citizens: From Ideas to Organization1. Liberty: Eighteenth-Century Transatlantic Legacies and Challenges2. Equality: The Mandates of Community and the Necessity of Expropriation3. Solidarity: Coalescing a Mass ResistancePart II: Working Citizens Towards a Working Class: From Organization to a Movement4. The Movement Party: Beyond the Failures of Civic Ritual5. Confronting Race and Empire: Slavery and Mexico6. Free Soil: The Electoral Distillation of Radicalism, 1847-1848Part III: An Unrelenting Radicalism: From Movement to Cadres7. Free Soil Radicalized: The Rise and Course of the Free Democrats 1849-18538. The Pre-Revolutionary Tinderbox: Universal Democratic Republicans, Free Democrats and Radical Abolitionists 1853-18569. The Spark: Small Initiatives and Mass Upheavals 1856-1860Epilogue: Survival and Persistence: The Lineages and Legacies of the Early American MovementNotesIndex