Southern Mountain Republicans, 1865-1900: Politics and the Appalachian Community (review)

94CIVIL WAR HISTORY Southern Mountain Republicans, 1865-1900: Politics and the Appalachian Community. By Gordon B. McKinney. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978. Pp. xiv, 277. $18.00.) Refusing to read backwards from the problem of Appalachian poverty as rediscovered in the 1960's, Gordon McKinney, an associate professor of history at Western Carolina University, emphasizes at the outset of this readable, competent study that the period from 1865 to 1900 was a hopeful one for the mountain people. The promise of industrialization loomed large, while many of its grimmer consequences lay hidden in die future. As for the origins of the Republican party among the Southern mountaineers, McKinney points to the secession crisis of 1861 as the starting point. Unsympathetic to antislavery, Republicans, and blacks in the 1850's, the mountain folk found their first self-conscious unityin their Unionist aversion to secession; and the hardships and traumas of the Civil War only deepened the region's Unionism. The national Republican party's racial policies after the war, however, proved to be a serious liability in the eyes of most mountain whites, even though blacks numbered less than one-tenth of the region's population. Heavily dependent on federal assistance and tied to national Republican policies concerning the blacks, the Republican party in Appalachia dramatically declined during the course of Reconstruction. Adopting a martial type of organization in the 1870's and shifting to local issues and appeals after 1876, McKinney suggests, the mountain Republicans grew increasingly strong through the 1880's and by die latter part of the decade had gained the support ofa clear majority ofthe region's voters. But by the 1890's industrialization, focused on the vast mineral and timber resources of the region, was bringing further changes. Businessmen and lawyers, along with other new professional groups, replaced an older leadership. The relative quiescence of the 1880's concerning racial matters was broken first by the Lodge Elections Bill of 1890 and even more by the racist tactics to which Southern Democrats resorted when challenged by the agrarian revolt with its widespread pattern in the South of cooperation, in varying degrees, between Republicans and Populists. McKinney concludes that, despite serious limitations and failures, the mountain Republicans played a positive role in the political life of the upper South during the last third of the nineteenth century. With Southern Democrats of the period paralyzed by a controlling desire for low taxes and minimum government services as well as being triggerquick to resort to racism and fraud, the mountain Republicans at least made an effort to find practical, popular answers to some of the area's problems. A statistical profile of the mountain Republicans is presented in an appendix, and numerous demographic and electoral tables are scattered BOOK REVIEWS95 throughout the text. The details of the intraparty squabbling among the mountain Republicans in the various localities which McKinney covers will be less than compelling to some readers, but he nevertheless manages to present a clear picture of both the forest and its trees. Robert F. Durden Duke University ...