Something Old, Something New: Revisiting Race and Reconstruction

It has come to the point in the historiography of Reconstruction where one has to wonder if anything new can be added to our understanding of that period. Whether one views it as an unmitigated failure or an “unfinished revolution,” new questions have been slow to emerge. That is not wholly lamentable, as some of the old questions still have resonance. In particular, questions about the construction of racial hierarchy and the dissemination of racial ideology continue to provide useful fodder for historical studies of post–Civil War America. In their respective works, both Frank Wetta and D. Michael Bottoms attempt to ask new questions and answer some old ones, with unequal success.

Wetta’s study of the Louisiana scalawags is grounded in what are, by now, two age-old questions: who were these native Southerners who sided with the Republicans during Reconstruction, and what motivated them to defy the racial and political imperatives that so bound their neighbors to the old regime? Although earlier studies of these men and their politics exist for the entire region, Wetta’s study is the first to focus exclusively on Louisiana. Unfortunately, his rationale for this focus is little more than the cliche that “nothing in Louisiana is ordinary.” However, that exceptionality is too often assumed rather than proved, and aside from that introductory assertion of Louisiana’s unique culture and political style, Wetta fails to bring the culture to bear in any significant way on this study.

Unlike its companion “carpetbagger,” the term “scalawag” pre-existed the Civil War, denoting “low grade farm-animals” as well as “a low, worthless fellow,” and so was deemed an apt word to describe those “traitorous” Southern men who sided with the enemy.¹ As Wetta points out, however, these men were hardly “low down”—quite the opposite, in fact. In what is potentially the most important insight of his book, Wetta describes the Louisiana scalawags as possessing a certain brand of “cosmopolitanism.” Often well-to-do and well-educated, these men were members of the professional classes, trained as lawyers, physicians, teachers, ministers, businessmen, and civil servants. Their “cosmopolitanism broke the mold of southern provincialism” that constricted the social and political imaginations of other Southerners by providing the scalawags “with a broader worldview” (p. 184). Most of them were New Orleans–based, having been drawn to the Crescent City in the antebellum period by the economic opportunities of the nation’s largest cotton-trading port. Many of them were born outside of Louisiana, and some had Northern ties. Although others came from wealthy slaveholding families, they were generally not part of the plantocracy, at least not ideologically. These were “men on the make” whose ambition and middle-class sensibilities made them far more bourgeois than most Southerners. The scalawags were reform-minded individuals who supported a variety of movements and causes, from Fourierism to free labor. Unfortunately, Wetta does not go far enough in exploring these men’s bourgeois sensibilities. Focusing on their formal political writings and utterances, Wetta misses an opportunity to carry out the kind of cultural and intellectual analysis that has benefitted scholars of the emerging Northern middle class in the same period. Southern historians may assume that no such developments occurred below the Mason-Dixon Line, but Wetta’s character sketches of leading Louisiana scalawags suggests otherwise.

Although he attempts to make a new argument about the scalawags’ broader worldview, ultimately Wetta concludes that what defined them was a very narrow sense of politics. Previous scholars have determined that “persistent Whiggery” led scalawags to endorse compromise and Unionism during the war and Republicanism after it, but Wetta wishes to refine this argument. “It is persistent Unionism” and the Louisiana scalawags’ strong nationalist...