Randall Lee Gibson of Louisiana: Confederate General and New South Reformer (review)

As Mary Gorton McBride demonstrates in this thoroughly researched biography, Confederate brigadier general Randall Lee Gibson of Louisiana lived a particularly eventful life, even by the standards of Americans who experienced the Civil War. Born in Kentucky in 1832 of distinguished lineage, he was raised on his family's Louisiana sugar plantation. He studied at Yale, where he won the respect of both northern and southern classmates, and belonged to that school's accomplished Class of '53. He studied law in New Orleans but did not practice before the war. Gibson traveled to Europe in the mid-1850s and served briefly in the diplomatic corps. Returning home, he undertook an unrewarding attempt at planting and instead gravitated toward politics. Having earlier eschewed his father's Whiggish proclivities, he allied with the pro-secession faction of Louisiana's Democratic Party as the sectional crisis deepened. At the start of the war, he was elected colonel of the Thirteenth Louisiana Infantry and fought in all of the major campaigns of the Confederacy's Army of Tennessee. Gibson was one of many Confederate officers who feuded with General Braxton Bragg, who took a particular dislike to him and blocked his promotion to general until Bragg's own resignation in late 1863, whereupon Gibson finally received the long-overdue promotion.

After the war, Gibson established a successful law practice in New Orleans. He married a native New Orleanian and socialite whose father belonged to the northern-born element of the city's commercial elite and maintained extensive northern connections. In addition to practicing law and raising a family, Gibson resumed his fledgling political career, becoming a prominent member of the state's Democratic Party and strongly opposing Radical Reconstruction, though he never resorted to violence. He won election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1874 and played an integral role in the Compromise of 1877. Having become keenly interested in rebuilding the levees along the Mississippi River, Gibson challenged southern states' rights dogma by advocating federal levee oversight, and he was instrumental in the 1879 creation of the Mississippi River Commission. He ascended to the U.S. Senate in 1883 and held that office for the rest of his life. While in Congress, McBride maintains, Gibson supported a number of other progressive measures, including federal support for public education. Gibson considered his greatest accomplishment to be his role in establishing Tulane University, to which he devoted the last decade of his life (roughly concurrent with his senatorial career) before his death in 1892.

McBride argues that Gibson practiced noblesse oblige throughout his adult life and was motivated by a commitment to duty and honor. She also sees Gibson as a reformer whose patrician background fostered a concern for the lower orders and whose progressive agenda attempted to address the problems of Gilded-Age America. In Congress, Gibson sought to balance the interests of his state and region with those of the nation in working toward regional reconciliation. The problem, however, is that not only does McBride tend to view Gibson uncritically, especially after the war, but she also seems to identify too closely with his perspective. Indeed, her prose frequently makes her own viewpoint as author difficult to distinguish from that of her subject. To be sure, McBride notes instances in which Gibson made tactical mistakes. While she is also aware that much of the story of the postbellum South involved the struggle for and against racial equality, she does not seriously consider Gibson's opposition to racial equality, in any meaningful sense of the term, or his role in constructing and maintaining a white supremacist social order. McBride ought not to have engaged in moral condemnation of her subject. Nevertheless, she might have explored the paradox that Gibson's reformist and reconciliationist objectives, whatever their merits, were predicated upon white supremacy, and that Gibson in many ways exemplified those otherwise decent...