Reconstructing Democracy: Grassroots Black Politics in the Deep South after the Civil War by Justin Behrend

Abstract

Reviewed by: Reconstructing Democracy: Grassroots Black Politics in the Deep South after the Civil War by Justin Behrend Daryl Scott Reconstructing Democracy: Grassroots Black Politics in the Deep South after the Civil War. By Justin Behrend. ( Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, 2015. Pp. xiv, 355. Paper, $32.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5142-1; cloth, $59.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4033-3.) The rapid incorporation of newly emancipated people into the political community has been a feature of historiography since the advent of professional history. Writing in the tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois and Eric Foner, Justin Behrend is most interested in the spread of democracy. He seeks to add to this tradition by dismissing the notion that the trajectory of the political struggle was inevitable and by explaining how black Republicanism came to be: "What needs explaining, then, is how most freed people in the American South rejected patron-client relations and instead made the conceptual leap of believing that protection and opportunity could arise from a broad-based community of poor people, linked with a distant and nebulous power in the nation's capital" (p. 4). At the core of his project is understanding how freedpeople developed a "grassroots democracy" (p. 6). While Behrend does not forthrightly say so, the core of his argument is that black people were more interested in constructing a democracy than in pursuing racial solidarity or party politics. Moreover, he suggests that those who opposed them did so largely for antidemocratic reasons. The struggle, then, was about democracy not race. Using a wide array of federal sources and archival records, Behrend focuses on the Natchez District, four Mississippi counties and two Louisiana parishes with an overwhelmingly black population and large plantations. He documents how the black community developed its civic life by participating in religious, fraternal, and political formations and laid the groundwork for creating a grassroots democracy. The importance of this background is to document that freedpeople drew on their own experiences, not just the Union League and the Republican Party, to generate a political culture. He suggests that community building mattered greatly in producing grassroots democracy. His linkage of freedpeople's prior organizing to their subsequent political mobilization is the work's major contribution to the literature. By holding that political affairs could have instead developed with freed-people supporting their former masters, Behrend leads readers to expect that he will also explore the behavior of the Democrats and the planter class. Indeed, this part of the story cannot be told without an analysis of the motives and behaviors of the planters and businesspeople who formed the leadership of the Democratic Party during presidential Reconstruction. When restoring the political order, the Democrats made no efforts to include black people in the process, treating them as just as politically irrelevant as they had during the antebellum and Confederate [End Page 482] periods. Indeed, the black codes were created without the consent of those they governed. This fact undoubtedly shaped the political proclivities of freedpeople, making them wide open to the Republicans, especially as the Party of Lincoln came around to advocating for black citizenship and black male suffrage. Ignoring this phase of presidential Reconstruction also allows Behrend to suggest that white people were more open to the black community's political participation than they were. Increasingly, historians are realizing that the struggle for redemption was a veritable countermovement that began at the onset of black political participation, not simply with the ultimate electoral victories. The central state was attempting to undermine conservative white forces and lacked the capacity to do so. We learn much about grassroots democracy, but the nature of the opposition is often assumed. The story cannot be truly understood without a full juxtaposition and exploration of both political cultures, democratic and conservative. Unfortunately, the author does not explore how much of black people's democratic impulses were driven by racial necessity and by popular white conservative opposition. That would suggest black solidarity was predetermined. Daryl Scott Howard University Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association