Through Many Dangers, Toils and Snares: Black Leadership in Texas, 1868-1900 (review)

364civil war history between whites and blacks but between the New South-oriented business and planter interests and the majority of white farmers. In the long run, the Redeemers left apositive legacy: the South embraced industrialization , which eventually led "to its full reintegration into the mainstream of the nation's life" (p. 131). In a mere 132 pages of text Durden provides an amazingly complete sketch of southern race relations and politics during the nineteenth century . That so little of the discussion seems new or unusual may only be a measure of the degree to which a concensus has been achieved over the revisionism ofthe last two generations. Accordingly, this book will have an important role if it is brought out in a less expensive paperback edition and promoted for use as collateral reading in courses on race relations , the Civil War and Reconstruction, southern politics, even perhaps the U.S. survey—wherever a background in nineteenth-century politics, sectionalism, and race is necessary to place a course in proper context. One must be cautious in ascribing too much to racism. If it is really the South's self-inflicted wound, we must remember that the entire nation shot itself in the foot. It was not racism that made the South distinctive from the North but rather the way in which it found expression. Certainly the surrender of the white majority to racial fears is a self-inflicted wound that helps us to understand the nineteenth-century history of all the United States. If this is true, the explanatory power of racism for southern history may not be as great as we commonly believe. Still, for a concise outline of the effect of the "self-inflicted wound" on southern history, this book will be hard to beat. RichardE. Berincer University of North Dakota Through Many Dangers, Toils and Snares: Bhck Leadership in Texas, 1868-1900. By Merline Pitre. (Austin, Texas: Eakin Press, 1985. Pp. xii, 253. $15.95.) Much is familiar in Merline Pitre's monograph on the role of black leadership in Reconstruction in Texas andiate nineteenth-century Texas politics . Professor Pitre presents a thorough analysis of the participation of blacks in the Texas Constitutional Convention of 1868-1869, the election of blacks to the Texas state legislature and their participation in the Reconstruction government of the state, the alliance of blacks with the Republican party, and then the almost inevitable redemption of the state through violence and intimidation and the elimination of blacks as participants in Texas politics. The rise and fall of "black"Reconstruction in the post-Civil War South is a story of which many historians have written and debated. book reviews365 Pitre, however, goes well beyond the standard or even revisionist interpretation of Reconstruction and focuses on theblack men who served in the Texas legislature during and after Reconstruction. She examines the contributions of these men to the state as well as their failures. She also highlights the lives and careers of other noted black politicians in Texas, such as Norris Wright Cuney of Galveston, who did not serve in the state legislature but who made some contribution to postwar Texas politics. Pitre organizes the thesis of her book around a verse from the song Amazing Grace. To demonstrate the "toils" of postwar black leadership in Texas, she painstakingly examines the bills, resolutions, and individual records of each of the forty-one black men who served in the Texas legislature from 1868 to 1898. To illustrate the "snares" inwhich many of these men found themselves, she examines the role that these men played in Republican and fusion politics in the state during this period and how their failings as political leaders eventually led to the elimination of blacks as participants in Texas politics. In the most uneven section of the book in terms of length, (each of the other sections has at least three chapters), she uses one chapter to analyze the "dangers" that confronted black leaders in Texas when white conservatives and Democrats used physical violence, economic and political intimidation, and gerrymandering to remove blacks from office and disfranchise the black electorate. After encountering a double table of contents at the beginning of the...