East Baton Rouge Parish Library

Reconstruction in Alabama, from Civil War to redemption in the cotton South, Michael W. Fitzgerald

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 415-442) and index

government publication of a state province territory dependency etc

mapsillustrations

index present

non fiction

Reconstruction in Alabama

bibliography

953843029

Michael W. Fitzgerald

from Civil War to redemption in the cotton South

The civil rights revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s transformed the literature on Reconstruction in America by emphasizing the social history of emancipation and the hope that reunification would bring equality. Much of the revisionist work served to counter and correct the racist and pro-Confederate accounts of Reconstruction written in the early twentieth century. While scholars have explored modern revisions for individual states, most are decades old, and Michael W. Fitzgerald's Reconstuction in Alabama presents the first comprehensive reinterpretation of that state's history in over a century. Fitzgerald's work not only revises the existing troubling histories of the era, it aso offers a compelling and innovative new look at the process of rebuilding Alabama following the war. Attending to an array of issues largely ignored until now, Fitzgerald's history begins by analyzing the differences over slavery, secession, and war that divided Alabama's whites, mostly along the lines of region and class. He examines the economic and political implications of defeat, focusing particularly on how freed slaves and their former masters mediated the postwar landscape. For a time, he suggests, whites and freedpeople coexisted mostly peaceably in some parts of the state under the Reconstruction government, as a recovering cotton economy bathed the plantation belt in profit. Later, when charting the rise and fall of the Republican Party, Fitzgerald shows that Alabama's new Republican government implemented an ambitious program of railroad subsidy, characterized by substantial corruption that eventually bankrupted the state and helped end Republican rule. He explains, however, that the state's freedpeople and their preferred leaders were not the major players to this arena: they had other issues that mattered to them far more, including public education, civil rights, voting rights, and resisting the Klan's terrorist violence. After Reconstruction ended, Fitzgerald suggests, the white collective memory of the era fixated on the ideas of black voting, bit government, high taxes, and corruption, all of which buttressed the Jim Crow order in the state. This misguided understanding of the past encouraged Alabama's intrasigence during the later civil rights era. Despite the power of faulty interpretations that united segregationists, Fitzgerald demonstrates that class and regional divisions over economic policy, as much as racial tension, shaped the complex reality of Reconstruction in Alabama. -- from dust jacket

Part I. A mere lapsus : Unionists and conservative dissidents during the Civil War ; The last relicks of barbarism : army, war, and reconstruction ; Presidential Reconstruction : Unionism and the politics of definition ; The premature New South of Governor Robert Patton -- Part II. Black Liberation : freedom and political mobilization ; Implementing Reconstruction : governance and biracial politics ; The difference between whaling a freeman and pounding a slave : terrorism and resistance in the Klan era ; Railroads, race, and Reconstruction : the curious legacy of Governor William H. Smith ; Bipartisan disaster : the advent of Governor Robert Lindsay ; False dawn : the promise of Reconstruction in the early 1870s -- Part III. Beneath the white banner : depression and the overthrow of Reconstruction ; "It only requires a little more figuring" : redemption's aftermath