
Urban Emancipation
Popular Politics in Reconstruction Mobile, 1860-1890
Michael W. Fitzgerald(Author)
Louisiana State University Press
Published on 30. September 2002
Book
Paperback/Softback
320 pages
978-0-8071-2837-4 (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.
Focusing on Mobile, the Confederacy's fourth largest city, Fitzgerald traces how the rivalry between longtime black residents and destitute freedmen fleeing the countryside yielded a startlingly antagonistic political scene. He demonstrates that the Republican factionalism that helped doom Reconstruction went beyond competing cliques of white officeholders. Boldly challenging reigning theories about the nature of post- Civil War politics, Urban Emancipation will spark historical debate for years to come.
Focusing on Mobile, the Confederacy's fourth largest city, Fitzgerald traces how the rivalry between longtime black residents and destitute freedmen fleeing the countryside yielded a startlingly antagonistic political scene. He demonstrates that the Republican factionalism that helped doom Reconstruction went beyond competing cliques of white officeholders. 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
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 17 mm
Weight
466 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8071-2837-4 (9780807128374)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Michael W. Fitzgerald is a professor of history at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, and the author of The Union League Movement in the Deep South: Politics and Agricultural Change During Reconstruction.