Resident Strangers: Immigrant Laborers in New South Alabama by Jennifer E. Brooks

Abstract

The true connoisseur of monographs knows better than to look first to the book itself. The notes are where to find treasure. Brooks’ Resident Strangers is stupendously rich in that respect—sixty-one pages of citations and lengthy discursions, shrewd and thoughtful, proof positive that her study of immigration in Alabama at the turn of the century will long stand the test of time and challenge.And what an array of sources! It takes three pages, nearly, to list all the newspapers. Interviews with immigrants and their descendants, custom-house records, correspondence from the United Mine Workers’ archives, wills and probates, immigrant passenger lists, passport applications, and most revealingly, convict records make the most convincing of cases: Hungry for a foreign workforce to supplement or supplant Black labor in factory and field, white officials and employers strove to bring in the huddled masses, who were all too often treated like wretched refuse. Woe to the Chinese immigrant that came to work along the Stantons’ Alabama and Chattanooga Railroad project, stiffed in their wages as readily as the bondholders were in their interest payments. Used as strikebreakers and treated with contempt or summary punishment when they fell afoul of the law, Europeans found themselves relegated to a position between Blacks and self-defined whites, their labor as necessary as their presence distrusted. It is no wonder that so many of them chose to look elsewhere for a better abode.It is a story well-worth telling; the dramatic moments and rank injustices will rouse readers’ indignation easily. Historians of immigration may suggest that, as some of the material cited shows, Alabama authorities worked assiduously to summon Americans from the Midwest and West. How successful they were, the census might have told. Conceivably, they heavily outnumbered those from abroad. Specialists in Reconstruction may demur with the commentary, mostly from secondary literature, about the disgruntlement that white planters felt about Black labor. Undoubtedly they did, but it was not only the frustration with alternatives that kept the Black Belt Black. Many of the complaints, just after the war, were the wish fathering the thought: Convinced that slaves could not work in freedom, their former masters assumed the worst, at the top of their lungs. Yet, as accounts (not used)—like the papers of Sidney Andrews, Charles Nordhoff, and a wide array of those from other planter families—make clear, those fears dwindled to an occasional grumble. For planters, Black labor was not a necessary evil; to their minds, it had become a positive good.At this juncture, a problem with the endnotes emerges. On the one hand, they beg the question of when Brooks over-eggs the pudding. Vast and lavish they are in their newspaper coverage, but are the newspapers from Honolulu, Fort Worth, Indianapolis, and Oregon as directly pertinent to the Alabama experience as, say, those from Montgomery or Mobile? Yet for the period when freedpeople’s labor was put to the test, the primary materials are thin indeed. Until 1871, the journals cited are from Memphis, Mississippi, California, New York, and South Carolina. For a brief burst in that last year, the Alabama State Journal holds lonely eminence, but thereafter, except for one 1875 article, no references to it appear until 1877. Thereafter, Alabama papers remain in short supply into the mid-1880s. The very rich, very revealing Freedmen’s Bureau papers are cited, but readers will strain to find where Brooks uses them. Sometimes a source is puzzling. Brooks mentions gangs of Chinese workers mistreated on the Stantons’ railroad, but the census figure cited for the total number of Chinese people in Alabama was … one. Minor matters may perplex: Was there really a revolution in France in 1868? Where was the battle of “Mission Ridge”?None of these cavils changes the thumbs-up that this review affords. For intense, thorough work, at least after 1886, Resident Strangers should not be a stranger on any Gilded Age historian’s shelves.