The Risen Phoenix: Black Politics in the Post–Civil War South. by Luis-Alejandro Dinnella-Borrego (review)

Let's accentuate the positive. This is a nuanced work reflecting on black congressmen during Reconstruction and its aftermath. Through an appreciative examination of six leaders, Dinnella-Borrego shows that they disagreed on a lot. But having determined to provide a deromanticized version of what these beleaguered legislators could accomplish, the author could have gone farther.

These six congressmen were relatively prominent. They were James Rapier of Alabama, Josiah Walls of Florida, John Roy Lynch of Mississippi, Robert Smalls of South Carolina, John Mercer Langston of Virginia, and George White of North Carolina. They seem a plausible cross-section of the postwar era's twenty black House members. Still, the author never explains why he chose these individuals, beyond the existence of relatively ample evidence, three of them having written autobiographies.

The tone is upbeat, with the author twice framing the study as an antecedent to the age of Obama. The author dissents from scholars such as Thomas Holt and Steven Hahn who see these leaders as elitists, locked into a political structure that diminished their ability to speak for the impoverished masses. "This critique is largely unjustified," Dinnella-Borrego concludes (6). The author emphasizes the relationship between these leaders and their grassroots constituency, rather than the machinations of Washington power politics. He also demonstrates quite tangibly that black congressmen were not monolithic, that especially after Redemption they differed on issue after issue as the wider political climate chilled.

In general, this study approaches black officeholders with an appreciation of the practical constraints under which they operated. They were locked as junior partners in an interracial Republican Party, but they were not sellouts: "they did their jobs well" and their constituents took pride in them. Though they favored negotiation and compromise in their congressional roles, they also "functioned as national spokesmen for all African Americans" (216). This nuanced emphasis makes Dinnella-Borrego helpfully attentive to real-world constraints. In particular, he highlights the generational conflict between the older Republican officeholders and the younger generation of unelected black activists, like Ida Wells and T. Thomas Fortune, who saw themselves as protest leaders per se. And because this study extends beyond the normal Redemption endpoint of 1877, it enables exploration of the fluid political alignments of the 1880s and 1890s, as agrarian movements challenged the two-party order. This is complicated political terrain, marked by apparent opportunistic shifts, and it is refreshing to see a knowledgeable take on how African American leaders responded.

As should be evident, this book has much to recommend it. The discussion of what black congressmen actually did, and what the institutional constraints were, is refreshingly concrete. That said, having determined on a realist defense of these legislators, the author could have pursued that line more consistently. Dinnella-Borrego notes in his introduction that his subjects fought "for patronage and other government improvements," but he seldom recurs to the topic of government jobs again, once mentioning it in the context of corruption (6). This oversight understates the centrality of patronage, an abiding practical obsession of Reconstruction politics; patronage provided a tangible civil rights demand that tied black activists to the political structure. Nor does the author talk much about the related Reconstruction factional divisions—the Radical-versus-moderate conflicts—that facilitated black leaders' rise to elective office. One might expect discussion of the quadrennial presidential nomination process, which enabled black Republicans to maintain some modest bargaining power even after their party had abandoned Reconstruction. And the opposition Democrats did not "unwittingly" promote black officeholding through racial gerrymandering; they consciously did it to maintain control elsewhere and to hold their restive agrarian constituency in line (151). The book would have profited from a review of the published Ulysses S. Grant papers, especially since the congressmen Dinnella-Borrego examines so often acted as loyal foot soldiers for Republican administration policy. Given the Gilded Age context, and the Republicans...