A Southern Moderate in Radical Times: Henry Washington Hilliard, 1808-1892 (review)

Abstract

J U L Y 2 0 0 9 219 1940s, Mississippi spent an average of $47.95 a year to educate a white child but only $6.16 for a black child. This collection reveals similarly deplorable figures on school funding for other states. While such Deep South states as Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and others made school desegregation difficult, there were different approaches to integration in each state. The crisis at Central High School in Little Rock, for example, stands as a symbol of white resistance to school desegregation, but smaller school districts in the state did not follow Little Rock’s example. In 1955, the Hoxie school system, located in northeastern Arkansas, successfully abolished segregation by admitting a small number of black students. Johanna Miller Lewis suggests that the resolve of local school leaders ensured success in Hoxie. While she does not argue this point, it is apparent that Hoxie had a smaller African American population than Little Rock, and the school board there considered admitting black students to be the path of least resistance. Anyone acquainted with the public school system in the United States knows that true desegregation is far from a reality, even fifty-five years after Brown. More than a decade after the Supreme Court’s order that schools desegregate with all deliberate speed, whites in most places had resorted to a variety of schemes to preserve a dual school system. Some school districts used freedom-of-choice plans, ability grouping, or private academies, and some were segregated due to white flight to the suburbs . Based upon these practices, the authors conclude, there has been a resegregation in many southern school districts. J. Michael McElreath, in his analysis of North Carolina, sums things up with the blunt statement: “the school desegregation experiment has failed” (p. 21). STEPHEN MIDDLETON Mississippi State University A Southern Moderate in Radical Times: Henry Washington Hilliard, 1808– 1892. By David Durham. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008. xv, 241 pp. $40.00. ISBN 978-0-8071-3328-6. David Durham has filled a significant gap by writing the first scholarly biography of the enigmatic Henry Washington Hilliard, the most prominent leader of the Whig Party in Alabama. The state’s antebellum history has long been one-sided, for there are few collections of papers from Whigs. Although Durham effectively utilized Hilliard’s scattered letters and exhaustively combed relevant newspapers and manuscript material, he was forced to rely often upon Hilliard’s published materials, especial- T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 220 ly the recollections Hilliard wrote in his old age. Despite this challenge, Durham has produced a readable, coherent narrative that forms a useful complement to Eric Walther’s recent biography of Hilliard’s fire-eating opponent, William Lowndes Yancey (Chapel Hill, 2006). With impressive thoroughness, Durham presents Hilliard as an inordinately ambitious politician who was also a teacher at the University of Alabama, a Methodist minister, a successful lawyer, and a diplomat. He evaluates Hilliard’s legal career, traces his three terms in the U.S. Congress (1846–1851), and explores his literary activities, including the novel De Vane (New York, 1865). As Durham argues, Hilliard’s diplomatic service was central to his self-concept, he fully analyzes his two-year stint in Belgium (1842–1844) as well as his postwar service in Brazil (1877– 1881). Consistently, Durham balances Hilliard’s glowing recollections about himself with evidence that others saw the politician as self-serving and manipulative. The author’s overall evaluation of his subject is positive but appropriately critical. Durham’s treatment of Hilliard’s prewar view of slavery is less satisfactory . Hilliard’s sermons were not preserved, and he refused to discuss the morality of slavery in his published political speeches. If he had reservations , which is plausible, he kept them to himself. The fact is that no one voicing serious doubts about slavery could have won majorities in the plantation-rich congressional district that Hilliard served. Moreover, Hilliard had, as Durham writes, a large, magnificently furnished home in Montgomery, and his lavish lifestyle depended on a house full of African American slaves. Durham...