Railroad Subsidies and Black Aspirations: The Politics of Economic Development in Reconstruction Mobile, 1865-1879

Railroad Subsidies and Black Aspirations: The Politics of Economic Development in Reconstruction Mobile, i865-1879 Michael W. Fitzgerald among the less fortunate side effects of the "revisionism" that swept Reconstruction historiography in the 1960s and 1970s was a tendency to overlook issues that interfered with the rehabilitation of Radical Reconstruction . However natural or even necessary as a correction to the racist views previously dominating the field, revisionists deemphasized certain topics stressed by the older Dunning school. For example, only one serious study of government aid for economic development has appeared in decades, a situation Mark W. Summers described as "astonishing."1 The railroad program deserves attention in that it influenced the future of African-American political activity, if only because black and white Republicans received the blame for its shortcomings. It is to such neglected subjects that we must turn for fresh insights into the economic and class issues raised by Reconstruction, rather than the narrowly racial topics that received so much attention from revisionist scholars. An examination of the experience of one city suggests surprising complexity in how development issues unfolded at the local level. In Mobile, Alabama, black political influence, and Reconstruction in general , provided the context rather than the cause of the city's disastrous economic subsidy program. On the surface, it would seem difficult to find a more unlikely candidate for historical rehabilitation than Republican rule in Mobile. During the ReI would like to acknowledge the assistance of Judy Kutulas, Michael Johnson, Jonathan McLeod, Ralph Poore, Lawrence Powell, Peter Rachleff, Mark Summers, Margaret Washington, and especially Jay Higginbotham and the staff of the Mobile Municipal Archives. 1 Mark W. Summers, Railroads, Reconstruction, and the Gospel ofProsperity: Aid under the Radical Republicans, 1865-1877 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984), ix. Civil War History, Vol. XXXIX, No. 3, © 1993 by The Kent State University Press ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN MOBILE24I construction era, and primarily under the "Radical" Republican leadership of Mayor George F. Harrington, a series of railroad bond measures and other projects were funded, resulting in a large increase in municipal debt. The two subsidized railroads failed and went unbuilt for decades, while Mobile itself went bankrupt, forfeited its city charter, and spent the next half century struggling to pay off a scaled-down municipal debt. In the 1870s the Redeemer Democrats, and their Dunning school apologists thereafter, aggressively blamed corrupt black and carpetbagger officials for the city's fiscal downfall . The few scholarly discussions of the episode generally have followed their lead, for example, Don H. Doyle's recent New Men, New Cities, New South reaffirmed the responsibility of the Republicans for the episode. Doyle maintained that "several railroad projects launched during the Radical era" bankrupted Mobile, and "most of these were sullied by corruption." Radical sponsorship, he notes, thus "discredited" future civic improvement programs.2 While such descriptions are factually accurate, they convey a misleading impression of the human agency of these events. The impetus for the subsidy program came from the changing economic situation and how Mobile's business leaders chose to respond to these changes. At the time of the Civil War, Mobile was the fourth largest city in the Confederacy and at the apex of its economic influence. With Appomattox, though, unwelcome changes brought crisis to the city's economy. A devastating ammunition explosion in May 1865 leveled much ofthe downtown warehouse district. More critically for the long run, the expanding postwar railroad network undermined Mobile's geographic dominance of Alabama's river commerce. Interior towns, like Selma and Montgomery, tapped into the cotton trade, which increasingly was diverted via railroad to the east. The "factor" system of cotton merchandising , which had bolstered Mobile's prewar economic power, now unraveled under the strain of these developments. By the end of the 1 860s Mobile's cotton trade had been cut in half, while wartime migration added thousands to the city's population, especially the large numbers of freedmen who settled around the city's expanding periphery. Emancipation and economic decline thus brought labor conflict and social turmoil in their wake, just as Reconstruction clouded the political picture.3 With the advantage of hindsight, it is possible to say that Mobile's economic decline...