Urban Emancipation
Popular Politics in Reconstruction Mobile, 1860-1890
Michael W. Fitzgerald(Author)
Louisiana State University Press
Published on 1. October 2002
Book
Hardback
312 pages
978-0-8071-2807-7 (ISBN)
Description
Scholars of Reconstruction have generally described Republican Party factional conflicts in racial terms, as if the Radical agenda evoked unified black support. As Michael W. Fitzgerald shows in the first major study of black popular politics in the urban South in the years surrounding the Civil War, that depiction oversimplifies a contentious and often overlooked intraracial dynamic. Republican political power, he argues, heightened divisions within the African American community, divisions that were ultimately a major factor in the failure of Reconstruction. In Mobile, the Confederacy's fourth largest city, the most pressing social divide within the black community was between longtime residents - often freeborn prosperous, and of mixed ancestry - and the wave of destitute rural freedmen fleeing the countryside. After Emancipation, moderate African American leaders seeking legal equality emerged from the first group. The newcomes spawned a more militant faction who formed the constituency for the white "carpetbag" leadership that dominated popular Republican politics.
Fitzgerald traces how the rivalry between these black factions yielded a startlingly antagonistic political scene that steadily escalated into physical conflict. Though Fitzgerald's book examines the local level, its implications are far reaching. It demonstrates that the Republican factionalism that helped doom Reconstruction went beyond competing cliques of white officeholders. Blacks too were partially responsible for the failure of Reconstruction. Boldly challenging reigning theories about the nature of post-Civil War politics, Urban Emancipation will spark historical debate for years to come.
Fitzgerald traces how the rivalry between these black factions yielded a startlingly antagonistic political scene that steadily escalated into physical conflict. Though Fitzgerald's book examines the local level, its implications are far reaching. It demonstrates that the Republican factionalism that helped doom Reconstruction went beyond competing cliques of white officeholders. Blacks too were partially responsible for the failure of Reconstruction. Boldly challenging reigning theories about the nature of post-Civil War politics, Urban Emancipation will spark historical debate for years to come.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Baton Rouge
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
8 halftones, 2 maps
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-8071-2807-7 (9780807128077)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Michael W. Fitzgerald is professor of history at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, and the author of The Union League Movement in the Deep South.