William Warren Rogers Jr. Reconstruction Politics in a Deep South State: Alabama, 1865–1874.

Abstract

In this new study, Reconstruction Politics in a Deep South State: Alabama, William Warren Rogers Jr. argues that with the end of slavery, political conflict in the state became a struggle to define the place of African Americans in the new order of things. He deftly analyzes conflicts over education, railroad financing, and other internal improvements, but it was the race “problem” that ultimately shaped the contours of partisanship during the period. Before emancipation, there had been no question about white domination of Alabama, and even the poorest of whites enjoyed rights, political and otherwise, denied the enslaved and the small number of free African Americans. After the war, how white domination might be restored was, to say the least, an open question. As across the south, Rogers argues, most white Alabamians hoped to sharply limit the citizenship rights of Blacks. In the months immediately following the war, political leaders feared that President Andrew Johnson might impose the transformative plan of Reconstruction many congressional Republicans had been demanding. Johnson, however, soon announced a plan that left the fate of freed people largely in the hands of former enslavers. Alabama joined other southern states in producing constitutions that fulfilled the Johnson plan’s requirements. Because the Johnson plan did not mandate Black enfranchisement, the election of the first government after the war was a typical all-white affair, and the first legislature convened under the new constitution did not disappoint its constituents. It quickly moved to approve measures that sought to reestablish white control of Black labor and define Blacks as second-class citizens. As Rogers clearly demonstrates, other than some expansion of educational opportunity for freed people thanks to the efforts of the American Missionary Association and other organizations, freedom fell far short of African Americans’ and their Republican allies’ expectations.