Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia (review)

Civil War History 48.2 (2002) 183-185
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Book Review

Before Jim Crow:
The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia

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Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia. By Jane Dailey. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Pp. 278. $39.95, cloth; $17.95, paper.)

"Faced with the obscenity and scope of the Jim Crow South," writes Jane Dailey in the introduction to this thoroughly researched and well-written book, "it is easy to see white supremacy as irresistible and to pass over attempts at interracial political cooperation between 1877 and 1900. But these attempts mattered just as much, and were often as heroic, as those of our more recent and eulogized past. . . . The white supremacist South was not preordained, and its victory never certain"(6).

Building upon C. Vann Woodward's now-famous warning against a presumptive belief in the inevitability of segregation and disfranchisement, Dailey argues that too many scholarly assessments of the post-emancipation South have adopted a teleological view of white supremacy in which white attitudes appear as "timeless and unchanging"(9). Furthermore, Dailey rejects the accompanying tendency to isolate politics from other social realms and categories, and instead sets out to complicate the narrative by paying attention to the myriad and complex ways in which politics, economics, racial identity, sexual relations, and demands for first-class citizenship all intersected. "White dominance," she concludes, "was continuously re-created rather than a product that was simply perpetuated"(10).

To make her case, Dailey rescues from obscurity the story of Virginia's Readjusters, a motley coalition that she characterizes as "the most successful interracial democratic political movement in the post-war South"(5). Led by former Confederate general and railroad entrepreneur William Mahone, the Readjusters emerged in the 1870s in opposition to the Funders, a name given to the Old Dominion's conservative and deeply entrenched political leadership whose members considered it a matter of honor, not to mention political expedience, to fund the state's substantial debt rather than provide basic public services. Throughout the decade, as the state budget deficit ballooned, the Funders ignored calls to repudiate part of the debt and instead slashed monies earmarked for the nascent and increasingly popular public school system. For many voters, the 1879 legislative elections came down to a referendum that provided a clear choice between funding the debt or the public schools.

Deeply cognizant of the importance of education to their quest for full citizenship, and certain that they had already paid their portion of the debt through years of servitude, African Americans were sympathetic to the Readjuster platform. The Readjusters, for their part, recognized the need to attract black support, but simultaneously limited their outreach efforts as most black voters continued to cast their ballots for the Republican Party. By the late 1870s, Virginia's weakened Republican Party served as little more than a vehicle for federal patronage. In the 1879 election, however, the Republican vote proved decisive. As whites split their votes between the conservative Funders and the Readjusters, Republicans won enough seats to hold the balance of power. Thirteen of these Republicans were African Americans; with their support, the Readjuster coalition took control of both houses of the Virginia legislature. Two years later, the Readjusters put their candidate in the governor's mansion and Mahone himself went to the U.S. Senate.

After an opening chapter that recounts the rise of the Readjuster Party, the heart of Dailey's story follows in four subsequent chapters, which consider the process by which Virginians developed ideas about race and, more specifically, how these ideas functioned within the specific context of the coalition's attempt to consolidate and extend its power. As Dailey notes, William Mahone "never intended to challenge white supremacy"(48). The reality of coalition politics, however, forced Mahone and the Readjusters to address issues of concern to African Americans and to satisfy well-justified expectations for a share of patronage and other spoils of victory. Aware that the appointment of blacks to positions of...