Reconstruction Politics in a Deep South State

Reconstruction Politics in a Deep South State
Author: William Warren Rogers
Publisher: University Alabama Press
Total Pages: 456
Release: 2021-03-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0817320741

Recounts in detail the volatile political period in Alabama following the end of the Civil War Following the end of the Civil War, white Southerners were forced to concede equal rights to those who had been enslaved, ushering in a new and ruthless brand of politics. Suddenly, the status and place of some four million former slaves dominated the national and regional political dialogue. In Alabama, the Republican Party established itself quickly and powerfully with the participation of a newly freed constituency, firmly aligned against the Democratic Party that had long dictated the governance of the state. Well-heeled planters, merchants, and bankers, joined by yeoman farmers, staged a counterrevolution by gravitating strongly to the Democratic Party and its unabashedly white supremacist measures. The ensuing power struggle in the birthplace of the Confederacy is at the heart of Reconstruction Politics in a Deep South State: Alabama, 1865–1874. What emerges in William Warren Rogers Jr.’s comprehensive study of the era is a detailed examination of Reconstruction politics, particularly in Alabama. This book explores an explosive and unpredictable political environment that a few years earlier would have been inconceivable. A vivid picture emerges of courthouse rallies and bitter infighting in legislative circles. Rogers’s narrative ventures into darker places as well: to the Tennessee Valley and the Black Belt regions of Alabama, where Klan nightriders used violence against an enemy and ideology they could not abide. The attempt to capture and account for the unforgiving political landscape created by the extraordinary circumstances of Reconstruction constitutes this study’s most central contribution. Rogers often quotes black and white citizens, Democrats and Republicans. Drawn from newspapers, correspondence, and various federal investigations, these firsthand voices are passionate, unvarnished, and filled with conviction. They offer a startling immediacy and illustrate the temper—or distemper—of the times. Readers are treated to a panoramic unveiling of Reconstruction Alabama politics that provides a sense of what was truly at stake: the values by which a region and the nation as a whole would chart its future for the century to come. .

The Union League Movement in the Deep South

The Union League Movement in the Deep South
Author: Michael W. Fitzgerald
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2000-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780807126332

Led by a coalition of blacks and whites with funding from congressional radicals, the Union League was a secret society whose express purpose was to bring freedmen into the political arena after the Civil War. Angry and resentful of the lingering vestiges of the plantation system, freedmen responded to the League’s appeals with alacrity, and hundreds of thousands joined local chapters, speaking and acting collectively to undermine the residual trappings of slavery in plantation society. League actions nurtured instability in the work force, which eventually compelled white planters to relinquish direct control over blacks, encouraging the evolution from gang labor to decentralized tenancy in the southern agricultural system as well as the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan. In this impressive work—the first full-scale study of the effect the Union League had on the politicization of black freedmen—Michael W. Fitzgerald explores the League’s influence in Alabama and Mississippi and offers a fresh and original treatment of an important and heretofore largely misunderstood aspect of Reconstruction history.

Southern Politics and the Second Reconstruction

Southern Politics and the Second Reconstruction
Author: Numan Bartley
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2019-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1421435195

Originally published in 1975. This is a history of southern political life since the New Deal and World War II, encompassing a crucial epoch: an attempted Second Reconstruction of the South. The authors focus on the electoral response to candidates and issues. The authors contend that, despite the nationalizing and homogenizing forces that eroded much of the South's distinctiveness during the postwar years, the region's historical legacy perpetuated its distinctive patterns of cultural and political life. Further, the authors contend that despite the virtual destruction of the South's four inherited institutions of political sectionalism during the years of the Second Reconstruction—disenfranchisement, malapportionment, a one-party system, and de jure racial segregation—the new southern politics maintained a deep racial division that has militated against class coalitions, especially across racial lines, and has permitted government by relatively insulated elites.

Reconstructing Democracy

Reconstructing Democracy
Author: Justin Behrend
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2015
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0820340332

Within a few short years after emancipation, freedpeople of the Natchez District created a new democracy in the Reconstruction era, replacing the oligarchic rule of slaveholders and Confederates with a grassroots democracy that transformed the South after the Civil War.

Reconstruction's Ragged Edge

Reconstruction's Ragged Edge
Author: Steven E. Nash
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2016-01-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 146962625X

In this illuminating study, Steven E. Nash chronicles the history of Reconstruction as it unfolded in the mountains of western North Carolina. Nash presents a complex story of the region's grappling with the war's aftermath, examining the persistent wartime loyalties that informed bitter power struggles between factions of white mountaineers determined to rule. For a brief period, an influx of federal governmental power enabled white anti-Confederates to ally with former slaves in order to lift the Republican Party to power locally and in the state as a whole. Republican success led to a violent response from a transformed class of elites, however, who claimed legitimacy from the antebellum period while pushing for greater integration into the market-oriented New South. Focusing on a region that is still underrepresented in the Reconstruction historiography, Nash illuminates the diversity and complexity of Appalachian political and economic machinations, while bringing to light the broad and complicated issues the era posed to the South and the nation as a whole.

Declarations of Dependence

Declarations of Dependence
Author: Gregory P. Downs
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2011
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807834440

In this highly original study, Gregory Downs argues that the most American of wars, the Civil War, created a seemingly un-American popular politics, rooted not in independence but in voluntary claims of dependence. Through an examination of the pleas and

But There Was No Peace

But There Was No Peace
Author: George C. Rable
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN: 0820330116

This is a comprehensive examination of the use of violence by conservative southerners in the post-Civil War South to subvert Federal Reconstruction policies, overthrow Republican state governments, restore Democratic power, and reestablish white racial hegemony. Historians have often stressed the limited and even conservative nature of Federal policy in the Reconstruction South. However, George C. Rable argues, white southerners saw the intent and the results of that policy as revolutionary. Violence therefore became a counterrevolutionary instrument, placing the South in a pattern familiar to students of world revolution.

Black Over White

Black Over White
Author: Thomas Holt
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 1979
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780252007750

In this prize-winning book Thomas Holt is concerned not only with the identities of the black politicians who gained power in South Carolina during Reconstruction, but also with the question of how they functioned within the political system. Thus, as one reviewer has commented, "he penetrates the superficial preoccupations over whether black politicians were venal or gullible to see whether they wielded power and influence and, if they did, how and to what ends and against what obstacles." "Well crafted and well written, it not only broadens our knowledge of the period, but also deepens it, something that recent books on Reconstruction have too often failed to do." -- Michael Perman, American Historical Review. . . . a valuable study of post-Civil War black leaders in a state where Negro control came closest to realization during Reconstruction. . . . Effectively merging the techniques of quantitative analysis with those of narrative history, Holt shatters a number of myths and misconceptions. . . . It should be on the reading list of all students of Reconstruction and nineteenth-century black history." -- William C. Harris, Journal of Southern History "Holt presents his work modestly as a state study of reconstruction politics. But this should not obscure a significant intellectual achievement and a contribution of fundamental importance, demonstrating the value of social-class analysis in understanding the politics of the black community." -- Jonathan M. Wiener, Journal of American History.

Stories of the South

Stories of the South
Author: K. Stephen Prince
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2014
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469614189

In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the North assumed significant power to redefine the South, imagining a region rebuilt and modeled on northern society. The white South actively resisted these efforts, battling the legal strictures of Reconstruction on the ground. Meanwhile, white southern storytellers worked to recast the South's image, romanticizing the Lost Cause and heralding the birth of a New South. Prince argues that this cultural production was as important as political competition and economic striving in turning the South and the nation away from the egalitarian promises of Reconstruction and toward Jim Crow.