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  • A Scalawag in Georgia: Richard Whiteley and the Politics of Reconstruction
  • Susan E. O'Donovan
A Scalawag in Georgia: Richard Whiteley and the Politics of Reconstruction. By William Warren Rogers Jr. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Pp. xiii, 269. Cloth, $40.)

Political histories of Reconstruction abound. Lately, however, they have focused largely on the experiences of black Republicans, their agendas, their processes of mobilization, and increasingly, their gendered dimensions. But the story of freedpeople is by no means the whole story. Black voters never constituted a majority of the Republican Party. White Republicans, [End Page 525] especially those once decried as scalawags, were critical to the party and its prospects. And as William Warren Rogers Jr. tells us, southern Republicans were also paradoxical Republicans, few more so than Richard Whiteley of southwest Georgia.

Not really a southerner at all, Whiteley migrated from Ireland to eastern Georgia when he was seven. Settling with his family in Augusta, he climbed the ranks of the state's fledgling textile industry, married, and in the 1850s relocated to Bainbridge. As Rogers explains in an exceedingly readable and gracefully written biography, it was there that Whiteley became interested in the law, and it was there that he also bought his first slave. Sticking to a fairly predictable script, Whiteley was among the first to enter Confederate service and was among the last to leave it. Yet it was mammon, not mastery, that shaped Whiteley's interests, and, convinced that the Democrats could do little to put the South on the road to recovery, he abruptly turned to those he thought could: the Republican Party.

Whiteley, however, was not much of a radical at all. As both a longtime owner of property and employer of people, he generally eschewed the issues that most animated the nation's ex-slaves: land redistribution, social equality, and black workers' rights. Indeed, as a lifelong beneficiary of laissez-faire capitalism, Whiteley was far more likely to promote the free-labor ethics of self-help, industry, and thrift—messages that appealed more to his partisan opponents than to the recently freed, rank & file of Georgia's Republican Party.

But while Whiteley's politics undoubtedly reassured his landowning, exslaveholding neighbors, being a Republican in a Deep South community was no simple matter. As Rogers tells us, campaigns in southwest Georgia tended to be brutal and occasionally deadly affairs. Yet Whiteley managed to stay ahead of the trouble and, for a time, ahead of the pack, winning a post as a solicitor general and then later, in congress. Still, it was a tricky balancing act, this staying alive and staying in office. It also raises a number of questions, the most pressing of which has to do with Whiteley's ability to nearly outlast Radical Reconstruction in Georgia. What was it about him and his demonstrably conservative brand of Republicanism that captured and held for nearly a decade the support of rural black voters? It is not enough to assume, as Rogers seems to do, that ex-slaves were uncritical citizens who blindly cast their lot with whoever appeared on the Republican ticket. In fact, as other studies of Reconstruction have revealed, former slaves were savvy, discriminating, and critical political players. They knew their own minds, they knew their own [End Page 526] needs, and they were rarely reluctant to withhold support from those who held more in common with ex-slaveholders than with ex-slaves.

This question of constituents is not immaterial. In fact, it seems rather difficult to tell the story of a white Republican without telling the story of black people too. After all, political institutions are made up of people, and few Republicans could succeed without the ballots that black people cast. This was especially true in the South's plantation districts, and Richard Whiteley knew it. The man Rogers shows to have been an indefatigable campaigner never took black people's support for granted. Neither should we as historians. Thus, while Rogers makes an important contribution to our understanding of one of the most turbulent periods of national history, he tells only a part of a much larger story, one that involves hundreds of thousands...

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