The Union League and Biracial Politics in Reconstruction Texas

Abstract

Texas has often been omitted from histories of Reconstruction in the former Confederate states, but no one has done more to correct this than Carl H. Moneyhon. He has written well-researched, detailed studies of the era, the Republican party, and prominent Republicans in the Lone Star State just after the Civil War, and he adds to that fine body of work with this analysis of the rise and fall of the Union League of America in Texas. The Republican party organized in Texas in the summer of 1867, after the passage of the First Reconstruction Act. From the start, the league played an important role in mobilizing the African American electorate and binding it to the Republicans. African Americans in Texas had already been pushing for economic and social improvements, doing enough to realize that full equality, if it could be had, would require an alliance with sympathetic whites to seize political power. White leaders among the new Republicans understood the importance of the voting bloc controlled by the league, in which African Americans were always a majority. The result was a biracial coalition that weathered challenges from conservative Democrats and the Ku Klux Klan, which arrived in 1868, and The Union League of America in Texas in 1873 became the last chapter in the former Confederacy to be disbanded.