Michael W. Fitzgerald. Reconstruction in Alabama: From Civil War to Redemption in the Cotton South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. 464 pp. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8071-6606-2.
Reviewed by Keith McCall (Rice University)
Published on H-Slavery (March, 2020)
Commissioned by Andrew J. Kettler (University of South Carolina)
Michael W. Fitzgerald’s Reconstruction in Alabama: From Civil War to Redemption in the Cotton South provides an important new perspective on what may seem an older topic. Fitzgerald sets out to update Walter L. Fleming’s Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama, an exhaustive, Dunning-school state history first published in 1905 and, until Fitzgerald's book, the most comprehensive volume on Reconstruction in Alabama. Fleming’s work is marred both by the sympathies and sensibilities of its author and by the century of historiographical innovations since its writing, but it nonetheless provides a useful touchpoint for modern scholarship.
In updating Fleming’s study, Fitzgerald adopts elements of Fleming’s structure and argument. Two of these adoptions are in fact central to Fitzgerald’s work. First, Fleming stressed that the wartime and, to a lesser extent, the antebellum conditions of Alabama shaped the course of Reconstruction in the state. Second, Fleming emphasized the political geography of Alabama, arguing that the “division of the state into ‘white’ counties and ‘black’ counties has almost from the beginning exercised the strongest influence upon the history of its people.”[1] Accordingly, Fitzgerald grounds his study of Reconstruction in Alabama’s “fissures based on prewar politics” and the “class and regional division[s]” that suffused the state (p. 13). Like Fleming, Fitzgerald stresses the differences between the central plantation belt—the so-called black belt—and the upcountry northern counties where small farms and white majorities predominated. Indeed, in Fitzgerald’s telling, class divisions among white Alabamians and the state’s geography of race are key to understanding Reconstruction in the state.[2]
In his emphasis on class tensions, Fitzgerald levels a subtle but serious critique at recent revisionist historians of Reconstruction, noting that their focus on white supremacy has tended to flatten the complicated factionalism that prevailed. “[T]he revisionist emphasis on white unity, on a unified sense of racial grievance,” Fitzgerald argues, “oversimplifies the reality of class divisions” (p. 4). To be sure, Fitzgerald does not ignore the power of race and racism within Alabama’s Reconstruction politics. He certainly acknowledges the role of white supremacist violence and agrees that emancipation and the quest for racial equality were the most profound developments of the Reconstruction era. Yet Fitzgerald is more interested in those moments when race did not determine the outcome, as when white Conservatives found common cause with Republicans, or when black belt planters and sharecropping freedpeople settled into a relative peace in the early 1870s. In a Deep South state making the transition from slavery to freedom, most white Alabamans held “common racial beliefs and grievances,” writes Fitzgerald, but a baseline embrace of the principle of white supremacy did not always lead to united action (p. 6). Throughout the book, Fitzgerald explores how ideology and policy priorities divided white Alabamians in ways that, at times, gave freedpeople space to pursue their own visions of freedom and Reconstruction.
The power of Fitzgerald’s book thus lies in updating Fleming’s work with the critical perspectives and methodologies that Reconstruction scholars have been refining since the 1960s, while tempering the recent historiography with a renewed focus on the essential centrality of the topics that Fleming introduced in 1905. The result is a thorough and balanced history of Reconstruction in Alabama, where emancipation and racial violence certainly matter but so too do railroad construction and state fiscal policies. The book moves deftly through the topics, adopting a largely chronological structure presented in three parts comprising twelve chapters plus an introduction. Part 1, containing chapters 1 through 4, considers the political arrangements of antebellum Alabama, the state’s wartime experiences and the role of Union occupation, and the brief period of Presidential Reconstruction. Part 2, covering chapters 5 through 10, focuses on the period of Congressional Reconstruction. It surveys the mobilization of freedpeople, the dynamics of racial violence and the Ku Klux Klan, the state’s ill-advised railroad and fiscal policies, and the transformation of the plantation system as sharecropping took shape during the late 1860s and early 1870s. Part 3, comprising chapters 11 and 12, details the end of Reconstruction in Alabama, as the Panic of 1873 threw the economy into disarray and facilitated Democratic “redemption.” Fitzgerald ends the book with an interesting yet brief discussion of the memory of Reconstruction in Alabama, highlighting how Democratic politicians quickly worked to build a narrative of Republican and African American misgovernment and corruption to legitimize their renewed positions in the state.
One of the more fascinating, and fruitful, aspects of the study is Fitzgerald’s careful attention to geography and space. The focus on regional divisions within the state, for instance, reveals that in the northern upcountry counties, where smaller black populations lived among white farmers and where the plantation economy had not deeply penetrated, Klan-style violence reached its highest pitch. Before the war, this area had been a stronghold of Jacksonian Democrats with Unionist sentiments, but the experience of Union occupation and partisan guerrilla warfare left the region in a state of unrest that anticipated the rise of the Klan. As “nocturnal horsemen” harassed Unionists and slaves fleeing to Union lines, “[n]orthern Alabama became a petri dish of chaos” (p. 176). It was in this region of the state that the Klan emerged earliest and was best organized. By 1867, amid the implementation of Congressional Reconstruction and black suffrage, as well as poor harvests, the Klan was an active force in Alabama, but its reach was limited.
The black belt counties with black majorities remained relatively free of racial violence, especially in years with good harvests and high cotton prices. Planters, though generally Democrats opposed to Radical Republicanism, tolerated freedpeople’s political activity and accepted the move toward civil rights, preferring profits over the disruptions wrought by violence. Between 1870 and 1872, while cotton prices were high, freedpeople and the planter elite found a degree of accommodation that pleased both sides and suggested that Reconstruction could proceed peacefully. Importantly, this period of peace and meaningful black political participation occurred under the governorship of Robert Lindsay, a Democrat. But rather than ushering in the racial retrenchment of Democratic “redemption,” Lindsay’s administration was busy dealing with the state’s fiscal situation and federal anti-KKK legislation and was consequently loath to disrupt the careful balance that had emerged in the plantation region. It would take the chaos of the Panic of 1873, not just a Democratic governor, to end Reconstruction in Alabama, another reminder for Fitzgerald that Alabama's specific financial problems, together with the chaos of the national economy, did more to bring about redemption than white supremacy and racial violence achieved alone.
Fitzgerald’s analysis of black political mobilization in chapter 5 likewise suggests important spatial dimensions to the course of Reconstruction. Like Steven Hahn, Susan O’Donovan, and other recent historians of Reconstruction-era black politics, Fitzgerald argues that “one must start with the centrality of slavery” to understand emancipation (p. 107).[3] He highlights the collective experiences of cotton growing, “common racial oppression,” and a “shared … democratic inclination” among Alabama’s black population but stresses that rural political mobilization only became possible with the advent of Radical Reconstruction (p. 108). In 1865 and 1866, as planters and the Freedmen’s Bureau attempted to structure a postemancipation labor system based on contracts and gang labor, freedpeople struggled to find a collective response. Instead, faced with sporadic violence and white recalcitrance, collective action proved difficult to organize, and they more “often sought individual escape” (p. 123).
Congressional Reconstruction changed things. As the Union League spread through the countryside to organize black voters, it structured a collective response to rural discontent that reworked the plantation economy. Gang labor gave way to tenant farming and sharecropping, which portended “a measure of independence” for freedpeople (p. 130). But Fitzgerald points out that the very success of black political mobilization between 1867 and 1870 weakened the avenues to collective action thereafter. As sharecropping decentralized plantation workforces, it “balkanized” the black belt, distancing black laborers from each other and limiting their ability to organize, which both sapped the energy of collective resistance and “left tenants increasingly vulnerable to night-rider violence” (pp. 131-32). If concentrated black majorities provided a check on racial violence during the high years of the Klan, the development of dispersed sharecropping and tenant farming facilitated local violence against freedpeople. Ultimately, Fitzgerald argues, the very success of black political agitation in the countryside forestalled additional gains for freedpeople. The spatial arrangement of sharecropping helps explain why, and Fitzgerald’s study provides a model for researching how geography and demography shaped Reconstruction in other southern states.
This is a superb book, required for historians of Alabama and of Reconstruction more generally. Despite its survey-like nature, Reconstruction in Alabama is not a synthetic history; Fitzgerald has made his career studying the period, and the book is based on exhaustive primary source research, including collections from forty-one archives and libraries and sixty-six state and national periodicals. The nine-page comprehensive index makes the book as useful as a reference as it is important for its historiographical reframing of the era. My one complaint is that despite numerous maps showing population densities, party voting returns, and racial violence throughout Alabama, there is no map that includes the county names. This complaint is minor, but in a book with careful attention to county-level developments, such a map would aid those unfamiliar with Alabama’s political geography. But given Reconstruction in Alabama’s astounding array of sources, its depth of research and argument, and its intricate narrative that connects the sometimes disparate topics of emancipation, African American politics, railroads, and political factionalism, I can live without that map.
Notes
[1]. Walter L. Fleming, Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1905), vii.
[2]. In his examination of Alabama's antebellum political and geographical divisions, Fitzgerald builds on J. Mills Thornton's Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978).
[3]. Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003); and Susan O'Donovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
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Citation:
Keith McCall. Review of Fitzgerald, Michael W., Reconstruction in Alabama: From Civil War to Redemption in the Cotton South.
H-Slavery, H-Net Reviews.
March, 2020.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54612
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