Abstract
Michael W. Fitzgerald's meticulously researched history of the “popular politics” of Mobile, Alabama, from 1860 to 1890 ends on a surprising note of confession—or perhaps reproach. “The polemical needs of the second Reconstruction,” he writes, have “obscured certain aspects of African American political behavior in the first [Reconstruction]” (p. 266). In other words, scholars writing during and after the civil rights revolution have presented a “sanitized version of events” by uncritically celebrating black political activism during Reconstruction without recognizing the utterly “self-seeking” character of many of the politicians of this era. Motivated by a desire for federal patronage, such leaders in Mobile were responsible for “endemic factionalism,” which “threatened to turn African American politics into the vehicle of activists' personal priorities” (ibid.) and contributed to the ultimate failure of Reconstruction in the Alabama port city. The author of an earlier Reconstruction monograph, The Union League Movement in the Deep South (1989), Fitzgerald shares in the broad revisionist consensus on emancipation and black enfranchisement, and his book appropriately bears the endorsement of Lawrence N. Powell and Eric Foner. He certainly does not use his candor about “factionalism” as a stick to beat Reconstruction or southern Republicans. Instead, his research should push Reconstruction scholars to consider the actions of ordinary black voters as well as office seekers and to study Reconstruction as a process that began before 1865 and continued, in some important ways, after 1877.
Published Version
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