Fenians, Freedmen, and Southern Whites: Race and Nationality in the Era of Reconstruction (review)

J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 9 73 Such questions as these seem particularly interesting to anyone who has read Cobb’s The Sacred Harp, in which he concluded that Sacred Harp could not be moved and that its preservation was not a sure thing: “the Sacred Harp songs may be transplanted, but the tradition itself can not be” (p. 154). In the thirty years between Cobb’s and Miller’s books, Sacred Harp singing has moved into new territory. The diaspora that Miller describes was just beginning in the 1970s. Since then it has established itself and flourished. Presently, growing interest and widening geographic coverage argue against Cobb’s second conclusion that preservation is not certain. Miller rightly keeps the question of preservation open, however. Does the Sacred Harp diaspora preserve and expand Sacred Harp’s musical culture, or does it merely imitate something that it cannot become? Singers and nonsingers will find Miller’s study thought provoking, well informed, and patient in its efforts to know the community of the Sacred Harp. Beyond its focus on Sacred Harp singing, the book demands that its readers reflect on the larger issues of tradition and change. MALINDA SNOW Georgia State University Fenians, Freedmen, and Southern Whites: Race and Nationality in the Era of Reconstruction. By Mitchell Snay. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. xii, 218 pp. $40.00. ISBN 978-0-8071-3273-9. Mitchell Snay has written a book that offers a compelling new slant on three broad traditions in postwar American history: Fenians, African Americans, and southern whites. He achieves this through a close analysis of the contexts of three organizations: the Union Leagues, which became a focal point for African American equality struggles; the Ku Klux Klan, which represented the brutal hegemony of the southern white; and the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which unleashed a global, diasporic struggle against British rule in Ireland. Snay compares three groups which, at first glance, seem inherently different, yet he succeeds. This is the strength of the book and the mark of its originality. The ideological similarities between the groups work only insofar as each of them can be represented as engaging in national struggles, or struggles for particular national, ethnic, or civic identities. The most interesting series of connections between the three organizations, however , is in their political cultures and modes of operation. While struggling for open political claims, the three organizations also used questionable, T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 74 extrapolitical means to achieve their ends and were, as Snay demonstrates , quasi-militaristic. All of them were violent in varying degrees. In a general sense, all three were shadowy, secret societies with elaborate initiation ceremonies, rituals, and passwords (as well as an age of nationalism , this also was an age of confraternity with origins in the codes of Freemasonry). The book demonstrates how these three groups allied physical force and politics in pursuit of their ends. The Fenians invaded Canada in 1866, in a showy and futile but dramatically symbolic strike against the British Empire. Canadians resisted the move and Americans distanced themselves from it. A year later, an African American government was founded in Bullock County, Alabama, by northern agitators and the local Union League. Despite white fears of what the Irish Citizen newspaper described as “a general rising and extermination of whites” (p. 5), and though African Americans hoped for permanent political change, the Bullock County experiment was also a gesture that collapsed. But, as Snay contends, the action showed that “like Fenians, African Americans . . . saw political self-determination and ethnic autonomy as a desirable and indeed feasible aspiration” (p. 5). From its inception, the Klan was a systematic user of violent methods. But what kind of identity were these groups displaying? The racialized thinking of whites and blacks suggests an ethnic nationalism based on common biological origins, but such an identity also defined one group against others. Snay also draws deeply from the well of nationalist theories and examines the ways in which these groups’ identities manifested evidence of protonationalism (the pre-stages of nationalism) and civic nationalism (the...