Urban Emancipation: Popular Politics in Reconstruction Mobile, 1860-1890 (review)

In this impressive and richly detailed book, Fitzgerald explores urban politics in the Reconstruction-era South through a study of the port city of Mobile, Alabama, the fourth largest city in the Confederacy. One of Fitzgerald's chief aims is to examine Southern Republicans' endemic factionalism, which historians have long seen as contributing to the failure of Reconstruction, but which few have studied closely at the local level.

In Mobile, Fitzgerald argues, factionalism arose most fundamentally not from differences between white and black Republicans but from social divisions among African-Americans. Within a few years of black men's enfranchisement, two factions of black Republicans quickly coalesced. Prominent in the moderate faction were members of a small group of property-owning black merchants and tradesmen. Many had been free before the Civil War, and some were Creoles who traced their status to the city's Spanish and French colonial origins. The radicals, by comparison, drew their leadership from a larger working class composed mainly of freed slaves, including many rural freedpeople who immigrated to Mobile after 1865. Members of both factions strongly supported black civil rights, but the radicals, according to Fitzgerald, took a more aggressive stand on issues important to the black working class and poor. During the late 1860s and early 1870s, the struggle between moderates and radicals played out in repeated clashes over control of a Republican newspaper, over municipal offices and policy, and especially over federal patronage, which provided jobs and income coveted by many party activists.

For Fitzgerald, the study of patronage and intraracial factionalism is an important corrective to what he sees as the tendency of recent historians to idealize the struggle over civil rights during Reconstruction, and to neglect less inspiring aspects of black politics. That same preoccupation, he argues, has distracted historians from the study of Republican politics after Reconstruction. Although white Democrats regained control of the state and city governments by the mid-1870s, African-Americans in Mobile continued to enjoy federal patronage, and to exert influence at the polls, into the 1880s. By downplaying their own factional differences and exploiting divisions among local Democrats, black Republicans secured some protection against the violence and wholesale abrogation of rights that would follow after 1900.

Fitzgerald acknowledges his debt to Thomas Holt, Black Over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction (Urbana, 1977), which likewise stressed class divisions among black Republicans. In method, however, the two books are strikingly different. Holt made heavy use of analytical and descriptive statistics to identify cohorts among black lawmakers and to argue for their support of different class agendas. Fitzgerald's book is an effective but conventional political narrative with little statistical analysis. Fitzgerald is generally successful in establishing the social profile of factional leaders and in charting their struggles over patronage, but he is not as persuasive in demonstrating their pursuit of distinct class interests or their connection to the black electorate. Indeed, the wider public of freedmen and freedwomen do not receive as much attention as one might wish in a book with a subtitle that promises a study of "popular politics." Nonetheless, Urban Emancipation is a valuable contribution to a neglected area of Reconstruction historiography.