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

In 1869, Nathan Bedford Forrest ventured to Alabama to promote a new railroad venture. Because his road's future depended on county referenda in the state's black-majority plantation belt, the Klan figurehead found himself in the awkward position of soliciting freedpeople for their support. He asked prominent African American politicians to publically champion his road; he told black workers he would compensate them with land; and, when racial purists in the Democratic press attacked him, he defended himself in a Republican paper. In other words, when it suited him, Forrest compromised his white supremacist credentials in order to advance his business interests.

This surprising vignette encapsulates Michael W. Fitzgerald's contribution with Reconstruction in Alabama: From Civil War to Redemption in the Cotton South. Throughout his survey of the state's postwar political experience, Fitzgerald emphasizes the "conservative" tendency that prevailed among elite Alabamians prior to Redemption. Whether promoting railroads or mitigating labor conflict in the plantation belt, conservatives often found pragmatism more useful than dogmatic adherence to ideology—even when that ideology was as widespread as white supremacy. To be clear, Fitzgerald does not diminish the brutal reality of racist violence. Rather, his consideration of the white community's tactical and class fissures enables him to explore the ways freedpeople leveraged those fissures to achieve their economic and political goals. Fitzgerald has thus identified in Alabama a degree of political ambiguity that has often eluded Reconstruction scholars. The coexistence of racial accommodation and terrorism, he suggests, challenges the teleological assumption that Redemption and Jim Crow were the era's inevitable outcomes. This framing should be familiar to readers of Fitzgerald's studies of topics such as the Union League, the Klan, and urban emancipation. As with his earlier work, Fitzgerald delights in challenging our assumptions about Reconstruction. The result is a deeply considered—albeit bewilderingly detailed—exposition of Alabama's journey from the Civil War to Redemption.

Fitzgerald divides his work into three sections. The first establishes the context for Reconstruction by examining the traditional divisions within Alabama's political order, as well as the ways those divisions shifted in response to military occupation, presidential Reconstruction, and the promise of economic development. The second section covers the turbulent years between the advent of congressional Reconstruction and the economic collapse of 1873. Chapters on the entry of rural freedpeople into formal politics and the proliferation of Klan violence emphasize the centrality of race during the period, but Fitzgerald repeatedly eschews any notion of white unity. Instead, he follows a diverse range of coalitions, including freedpeople, terrorists, whiggish conservatives, unionists, northern investors, federal administrators, and many others attempting to adjust to the dizzying pace of economic and political change. It is in these chapters that Fitzgerald best illustrates the ways contentious economic policies, war-era resentments, and regional hostilities exposed white cleavages and created a fluid, often chaotic political situation. To support this claim, he wades into policy thickets long shunned by Reconstruction historians. For example, across four chapters he details the tragicomedy of the state's attempt to subsidize rail development, a narrative so rife with incompetence, opportunism, and corruption "as to defy easy explanation" (223). By the early 1870s, interest payments on incomplete rail projects were swallowing the state's budget, and neither party could offer a way out. Fitzgerald argues that the railroad fiasco produced a "lapse of racial legal predominance" that coincided with generally peaceful labor conditions in the plantation belt (230). The political salience of race, in other words, was conditional on a range of economic and policy factors within Alabama and beyond. The book's final section reinforces this point, as Fitzgerald details how the 1873 crash, Congress's proposed civil rights bill, and a series of corruption scandals finally enabled the Democrats to forge a white coalition of conservatives, former unionists...