For Free Press and Equal Rights: Republican Newspapers in the Reconstruction South (review)

Before his death in 2000, Richard H. Abbott had become a significant historian of the Reconstruction era. Beginning with his 1986 study, The Republican Party and the South, 1855-1877 and ending with this final book, Abbott has provided important insights into the role Republicans—be they politicians, military, or newspaper editors—played during Reconstruction. For Free Press and Equal Rights was almost complete when Abbott passed away. John Quist assumed the important task of seeing that Abbott's work was completed. The book is the first to identify and examine Republican newspapers in the South between 1863 and 1877.

Abbott's study begins with the earliest newspapers published by federal troops in conquered territories and traces the spread and influence of the Republican press throughout the South until 1877. To accomplish this task, Abbott identified more than 430 Republican newspapers published in the post-Civil War South. A list of those newspapers is included in an appendix. Most Republican newspapers had short life spans. Established in counties with a significant black population, the newspapers struggled to survive where freed slaves were too illiterate and too poor to subscribe, and businesses refused to advertise. Abbott's analysis looks at each of the Southern states, year-by-year to show how Reconstruction politics affected the survival of newspapers in individual states.

While the identification of Republican newspapers is a significant contribution to the field, so too is the analysis of the political variations found among those newspapers. Abbott is careful to avoid typecasting either the editors or their newspapers as radical, moderate or conservative except in the most obvious cases. Instead, he describes Republicans—politicians as well as editors—as not only inconsistent in their basic political beliefs, but full of contradictions. For example, a newspaper that supported the radical plan of land confiscation, did not necessarily support black enfranchisement; the newspaper that supported black enfranchisement, probably did not support black office-holding.

Abbott also provides a thorough state-by-state analysis of patronage at both the federal and state levels and its importance in keeping Republican newspapers alive as well as in line with the local, state and federal party. Just as the Republican party's enthusiasm for courting the South began to wane in the early 1870s, so too did the patronage dollars. By the mid-1870s, a newspaper lucky enough to have federal patronage dollars could not survive without state and local patronage. Survival in many cases meant that moderate and conservative newspapers became even more conservative, distancing themselves from the Republican party. Adding to the demise of the Republican press were the escalating printings contracts of Republican state regimes. Some state printing schemes led to scandals that the Democratic press was more than willing to expose as just another example of Republican corruption.

Patronage, however, was a necessary evil for both Democrats and Republicans. In fact, without a broad base of patronage support from both parties the Southern press would have barely existed after the war. During this critical period, the party press promoted political identity, educated citizens in their political responsibilities, and pressed the party line. Abbott concludes that whatever Republicans were able to accomplish during the Reconstruction years was due in great part to the Republican editors who, in the face of violence and economic hardship, managed to keep a party press alive in order to promote economic, racial, and sectional equality.

If there is a fault with this book it is the title. One would expect a book titled For Free Press and Equal Rights to have a heavier emphasis on free press issues. Indeed, a few Republican papers and editors experienced violence, and some newspapers that did...