Reconstruction in Alabama: From Civil War to Redemption in the Cotton South by Michael W. Fitzgerald (review)

An unexpected sesquicentennial is following hard on the heels of the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War. Conflicting memories and agendas, polarizing political rhetoric, exposed corruption in high places, struggles for public space and unobstructed ballot boxes, and tragic acts of senseless violence followed by judicial apathy now rise regularly like the ghosts of Reconstruction. Some voices even warn of a new redemption. Accounts and attitudes born in Reconstruction's aftermath, meanwhile, continue to have currency in many circles and appear regularly in a bevy of newspaper comment sections and Facebook memes. As Michael W. Fitzgerald observes at the beginning of Reconstruction in Alabama: From Civil War to Redemption in the Cotton South, the major survey of Alabama in the Reconstruction era somehow remains Walter L. Fleming's Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama (New York, 1905), a volume that is not only well over a century old but also steeped in the racist assumptions of its times. In this new work, Fitzgerald sets out to supersede Fleming's painfully passé volume while integrating a mass of recent literature. Fitzgerald delivers more than a new synthesis, however. Boldly postrevisionist in its interpretation, Reconstruction in Alabama offers nothing less than a new framework for understanding the period in the complicated cotton South.

Throughout Reconstruction in Alabama, Fitzgerald stresses the centrality of factional politics and proto–New South economics, factors that he believes most historians of the period gloss over too readily. He grounds his analysis in antebellum Alabama, where white non-elites regularly confronted black belt planters for power. When a mass of planters attempted to push Alabama out of the Union in 1861, Jacksonian Democrats from the northern Alabama hill country uncomfortably joined a growing handful of elite Whig conservatives to oppose the Confederacy. Wartime persecution, battlefield defeats, and brutal retaliation along the Tennessee River increased both Unionist numbers and their alienation from many of their white neighbors. Shared harassment never successfully welded these vying scalawag factions, and rivalry and class distrust endured. Unconditional Unionists from the hills particularly scorned wealthy latecomers, some of whom really did embrace the Union simply as a way to protect or rebuild personal fortunes. Race, in contrast, ironically provided a unifying element, as few white Alabama Republicans were antislavery or interested in the rights of postwar freedpeople except when they needed temporary allies. Instead, economic concerns such as railroads became uppermost to postwar GOP leaders and Alabama boosters. Class and prewar status likewise divided freedpeople, who in reality could only trust the United States Army during military occupation. Struggles over political rights and labor deepened as agricultural conditions worsened. Crop failures fatefully coincided with the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 and black suffrage. The Ku Klux Klan and similar groups rose up during hard times out of the violent tradition of antebellum patrollers and wartime guerrillas.

Reconstruction was not an uninterrupted period of insurgent bloodletting, however. Challenging many scholars of the period, Fitzgerald stresses again and again that in most of Alabama, and notably in the black belt, a period of relative peace emerged in 1870. Ulysses S. Grant occupied the White House. Better prices for crops and cotton due to war in Europe, the Democrats' own deep divisions, and the "Liberal Republican movement" lowered the pressure (p. 263). White landowners and African American laborers needed each other and warily coexisted in hopes of all boats rising. Outside of the hills, where bloody ethnic cleansing continued, black people voted in relative safety and began increasing their demands, notably in the arena of civil rights. Reconstruction was working.

But it was a "false dawn" (p. 257). The Amnesty Act of 1872, the devastating national depression in 1873, the subsequent collapse of the state's railroad bonds, a new round of local crop failures due to heavy rain, and civil rights legislation in Congress all combined to give...