The Confederate Republic: A Revolution Against Politics (review)

Reviews397 power, not idealism; that compromise was part and parcel of the political game that blacks were learning to play; and that change was more likely to come incrementally than in a giant leap to freedom. More generally, there might have been more emphasis on the consequences of the New Deal—which is barely mentioned—and of World War Two—which is discussed briefly. Not only did these twin phenomena set in motion the economic changes that provided the context for a successful assault on Jim Crow and disenfranchisement throughout the South, they also squeezed out a trickle of tentative white liberalism, even in Mississippi, which Dittmer rather underestimates. This is not to suggest that the relative and frequently ambiguous racial liberalism of Frank Smith, P. D. East, Hazel Brannon Smith, Florence Mars, Turner Catledge, or even Will Campbell in his sojourn at Ole Miss ever posed a serious challenge to white supremacy in Mississippi. Nor is it to deny that most racial liberals fell mute or ducked for cover the moment white racists rallied against an insurgent mass black movement. It is, however, to suggest that the very existence of these racial moderates and, in a world where such voices were once unheard, their public condemnations of racial brutality and support for black advancement within the boundaries of Jim Crow encouraged notions that change might just be possible in Mississippi. After more than a half-century of inertia and stasis, blacks drew strength for their coming struggle from any signs of a thaw in the middle of the racist iceberg that was Mississippi. Just as he fails to pay much attention to white liberalism, Dittmer fails to delineate white society more generally with quite the same subtlety he brings to his analysis of black Mississippi. We have the traditional cast of villains—from Theron Lynd through Ross Barnett to Byron De La Beckwith, the Klan, and the Citizens Councils and State Sovereignty Commission—but the mass of ordinary white Mississippians remains largely anonymous in an account that places so much emphasis on grass-roots affairs. In order to appreciate exactly what blacks and their allies were up against, we need to know even more about the various types of local white people; more about how their support, or at least acquiescence, in the resistance movement was secured; and more about if, when, and how fault lines in the solid rock of Mississippi's white resistance appeared. John Dittmer would, of course, be justified in claiming that this would require another book, and for now we should just be grateful to him for the masterly study that is Local People. The Confederate Republic: A Revolution Against Politics. By George C. Rabie. University of North Carolina Press, 1994. 416 pp. Cloth, $34.95. Reviewed by Lacy K. Ford, Jr., associate professor ofhistory at the University ofSouth Carolina. He is the author ofOrigins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800-1860, and is currently working on a history ofpolitical thought in the Old South. George Rabie has written a balanced, perceptive, and thoroughly researched history of high politics in the Confederacy. His compelling argument is succinctly summarized by the book's subtitle, "A Revolution Against Politics." Rabie maintains that the Confederacy is best understood not as an experiment in southern nationalism but as an attempt by white southerners to regenerate the republican purity of the Founding Fathers' generation with a revolution of their own: a revolution against politics. The Confederacy's revolution 398Southern Cultures against politics promised a rejection of the partisanship, patronage, and electioneering that southerners of virtually all ideological persuasions had practiced vigorously during the antebellum era, but which leading Confederates identified as an important if not decisive factor in the decline and fall of the old Union. To Rabie, the Confederacy was unquestionably a revolutionary experiment, but it was a conservative, restorationist revolution designed to create a republic safe for slavery and free of partisan politics. Ultimately, Rabie concludes, this revolution against politics failed only because the Confederacy itself failed. According to Rabie, both supporters of Jefferson Davis's troubled administration and its bitter opponents accepted the basic tenets of the revolution against politics: antipartyism and a belief...