The Union League Movement in the Deep South: Politics and Agricultural Change During Reconstruction, and: Conflict and Compromise: The Political Economy of Slavery, Emancipation, and the American Civil War (review)

284CIVIL WAR HISTORY Congressional Globe. Historians and lawyers still need to take seriously the lack of literature on what the law actually was and what citizenship meant for white Americans in a time of change. Patricia Allen Lucie Glasgow University The Union League Movement in the Deep South: Politics andAgricultural Change During Reconstruction. By Michael W. Fitzgerald. (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. Pp. xii, 283. $25.00.) Conflict and Compromise: The Political Economy of Slavery, Emancipation , and the American Civil War. By Roger L. Ransom. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pp. xvi, 317. $39.50 cloth; $12.95 paper.) Michael Fitzgerald's monograph provides both more and less than its title suggests. The work is concerned with two states, Alabama and Mississippi, and it is not so much a history of the Union League per se as it is an interpretation of the overall relationship between Reconstruction politics and the transition from a slave to a free labor system in the postwar South. As such this is a well researched and thoughtful work that provides a persuasive theoretical statement and a welcome emphasis upon the usually neglected connection between political and socioeconomic developments during the Reconstruction period. The theoretical focus of the work sometimes seems a bit askew, however; the author is apparently unfamiliar with James S. Allen's Reconstruction: The Battle for Democracy (1937) and exaggerates the uniqueness of his own appreciation of the importance of the Union League. With the advent of radical Reconstruction in 1867, the Union League became a major organizational tool for Republicans throughout the South. As hundreds of local league chapters were established, they not only mobilized the desired Republican voters, but they also became strong and active arms of Republicanism that played an independent and often controversial role in Reconstruction conflicts of many different types. The secrecy and local autonomy of the league organizations especially lent themselves to the needs of blacks in their ever dangerous struggle to maximize the meaning of emancipation. Fitzgerald's detailed picture essentially confirms James S. Allen's judgment that during radical Reconstruction the Union Leagues "were the heart of the revolution" as "a constant struggle was waged, on the plantations, in the towns, at the polling places, at the crossroads" (Allen 91-96). Fitzgerald carefully traces the origins and rapid spread of the league among both blacks and whites, depicts in substantial detail its impact and varying roles in urban and rural settings, and analyzes its strengths and weaknesses. Particular BOOK REVIEWS285 attention is paid to the central role of the league in helping blacks secure a system of decentralized tenant farming in place of the old plantation system. Although successfully resisting co-optation and economic intimidation , the league was ultimately destroyed by the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan, and its destruction was central to the collapse of Southern Republicanism and to the undermining of whatever promise the system of tenant farming held. "The League, in essence," concludes Fitzgerald, "was an overwhelmingly successful mobilization on behalf of a doomed cause." He succeeds well in establishing much of the reality of that impressive but tragic tale. Ransom's much broader study is an informed, well written, and persuasive synthesis that covers the period from 1776 to 1876 and provides an excellent introduction to major political and economic issues respecting the origins of the Civil War, the nature of that war, and the impact of emancipation and the Civil War on the United States. A brief introductory chapter provides a historiographical introduction and explains Ransom's intention of utilizing the models and findings of a selected group of recent economic and political historians to provide an interpretive narrative account. Four succeeding chapters (over half the volume) analyze the coming of the Civil War with an emphasis upon the sectional conflict over slavery, the Southern stake in that profitable system, the role of racism, and the reasons why the nation's political system was unable to resolve the crisis. A sixth chapter offers an explanation of Northern victory, Southern defeat, and the policy of emancipation. Two concluding chapters cover Reconstruction and the impact of the war on the economy of the United States. These two...