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It may be difficult to imagine that a consequential black electoral politics evolved in the United States before the Civil War, for as of 1860, the overwhelming majority of African Americans remained in bondage. Yet free black men, many of them escaped slaves, steadily increased their influence in electoral politics over the course of the early American republic. Despite efforts to disfranchise them, black men voted across much of the North, sometimes in numbers sufficient to swing elections. In this meticulously-researched book, Van Gosse offers a sweeping reappraisal of the formative era of American democracy from the Constitution's ratification through Abraham Lincoln's election, chronicling the rise of an organized, visible black politics focused on the quest for citizenship, the vote, and power within the free states. Full of untold stories and thorough examinations of political battles, this book traces a First Reconstruction of black political activism following emancipation in the North. From Portland, Maine and New Bedford, Massachusetts to Brooklyn and Cleveland, black men operated as voting blocs, denouncing the notion that skin color could define citizenship.
A new edition of the notorious carpetbagger's personal and political memoir A memoir of the ambitious life and controversial political career of Louisiana governor Henry Clay Warmoth (1842-1931), War, Politics, and Reconstruction is a firsthand account of the political and social machinations of Civil War America and the war's aftermath in one of the most volatile states of the defeated Confederacy. An Illinois native, Warmoth arrived in Louisiana in 1864 as part of the federal occupation forces. Upon leaving military service in 1865, he established himself in private legal practice in New Orleans. Taking full advantage of the chaotic times, Warmoth rapidly amassed fortune and influence, and soon emerged as a leader of the state's Republican Party and, in 1868, was elected governor. Amid an administration rife with scandal and corruption, the Louisiana Republican Party broke into warring factions. Warmoth survived an impeachment attempt in 1872, but a second attempt in 1873 culminated with his removal from office. This fall from Republican grace stemmed from his allegiance with white conservatives, remnants of the old guard, and staunch opponents of those Republicans who sought a wider role for African Americans in Louisiana's changing political landscape. Never again to hold political office, Warmoth remained in his adopted Louisiana, enjoying the fruits of his investments in plantations and sugar refineries. In 1930, the year before his death, he published War, Politics, and Reconstruction, a vindication of his public life and a rebuttal of his reputation as an opportunistic carpetbagger. Despite Warmoth's obvious self-serving biases, the volume offers unparalleled depth of personal insight into the inner workings of Reconstruction government in Louisiana in the words of one of its key architects. A new introduction by John C. Rodrigue places Warmoth's memoir within the broader context of evolving perceptions and historiography of Reconstruction. Rodrigue also offers readers a more balanced portrait of Warmoth by providing supplemental information omitted or slighted by the author in his efforts to cast his actions in the most positive light.
One of the most misunderstood periods in American history, Reconstruction remains relevant today because its central issue -- the role of the federal government in protecting citizens' rights and promoting economic and racial justice in a heterogeneous society -- is still unresolved. America's Reconstruction examines the origins of this crucial time, explores how black and white Southerners responded to the abolition of slavery, traces the political disputes between Congress and President Andrew Johnson, and analyzes the policies of the Reconstruction governments and the reasons for their demise. America's Reconstruction was published in conjunction with a major exhibition on the era produced by the Valentine Museum in Richmond, Virginia, and the Virginia Historical Society. The exhibit included a remarkable collection of engravings from Harper's Weekly, lithographs, and political cartoons, as well as objects such as sculptures, rifles, flags, quilts, and other artifacts. An important tool for deepening the experience of those who visited the exhibit, America's Reconstruction also makes this rich assemblage of information and period art available to the wider audience of people unable to see the exhibit in its host cities. A work that stands along as well as in proud accompaniment to the temporary collection, it will appeal to general readers and assist instructors of both new and seasoned students of the Civil War and its tumultuous aftermath.
This is a comprehensive examination of the use of violence by conservative southerners in the post-Civil War South to subvert Federal Reconstruction policies, overthrow Republican state governments, restore Democratic power, and reestablish white racial hegemony. Historians have often stressed the limited and even conservative nature of Federal policy in the Reconstruction South. However, George C. Rable argues, white southerners saw the intent and the results of that policy as revolutionary. Violence therefore became a counterrevolutionary instrument, placing the South in a pattern familiar to students of world revolution.
In this provocative study, Robert Harrison provides new insight into grassroots reconstruction after the Civil War and into the lives of those most deeply affected, the newly emancipated African Americans. Harrison argues that the District of Columbia, far from being marginal to the Reconstruction story, was central to Republican efforts to reshape civil and political relations, with the capital a testing ground for Congressional policy makers. The study describes the ways in which federal agencies such as the Army and the Freedmen's Bureau attempted to assist Washington's freed population and shows how officials struggled to address the social problems resulting from large-scale African-American migration. It also sheds new light on the political processes that led to the abandonment of Reconstruction and the onset of black disfranchisement.
The Republican Union League of America played a major role in the Southern Reconstruction that followed the American Civil War. A secret organization introduced into Texas in 1867 to mobilize newly enfranchised black voters, it was the first political body that attempted to secure power by forming a biracial coalition. Originally intended by white Unionists simply to marshal black voters to their support, it evolved into an organization that allowed blacks to pursue their own political goals. It was abandoned by the state’s Republican Party following the 1871 state elections. From the beginning the use of the league by the Republican party proved controversial. While its opponents charged that its white leadership simply manipulated ignorant blacks to achieve power for themselves, ultimately encouraging racial conflict, the League not only educated blacks in their new political rights but also protected them in the exercise of those rights. It gave blacks a voice in supporting the legislative program of Gov. Edmund J. Davis, helping him to push through laws aimed at the maintenance of law and order, securing basic civil rights for blacks, and the creation of public schools. Ultimately, its success and its secrecy provoked hostile attacks from political opponents, leading the party to stop using it. Nonetheless, the Union League created a legacy of black activism that lasted throughout the nineteenth century and pushed Texas toward a remarkably different world from the segregated and racist one that developed after the league disappeared.
Historians have traditionally drawn distinctions between Ulysses S. Grant's military and political careers. In Let Us Have Peace, Brooks Simpson questions such distinctions and offers a new understanding of this often enigmatic leader. He argues that during the 1860s Grant was both soldier and politician, for military and civil policy were inevitably intertwined during the Civil War and Reconstruction era. According to Simpson, Grant instinctively understood that war was 'politics by other means.' Moreover, he realized that civil wars presented special challenges: reconciliation, not conquest, was the Union's ultimate goal. And in peace, Grant sought to secure what had been won in war, stepping in to assume a more active role in policymaking when the intransigence of white Southerners and the obstructionist behavior of President Andrew Johnson threatened to spoil the fruits of Northern victory.
Historians overwhelmingly have blamed the demise of Reconstruction on Southerners' persistent racism. Heather Cox Richardson argues instead that class, along with race, was critical to Reconstruction's end. Northern support for freed blacks and Reconstruction weakened in the wake of growing critiques of the economy and calls for a redistribution of wealth. Using newspapers, public speeches, popular tracts, Congressional reports, and private correspondence, Richardson traces the changing Northern attitudes toward African-Americans from the Republicans' idealized image of black workers in 1861 through the 1901 publication of Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery. She examines such issues as black suffrage, disenfranchisement, taxation, westward migration, lynching, and civil rights to detect the trajectory of Northern disenchantment with Reconstruction. She reveals a growing backlash from Northerners against those who believed that inequalities should be addressed through working-class action, and the emergence of an American middle class that championed individual productivity and saw African-Americans as a threat to their prosperity. The Death of Reconstruction offers a new perspective on American race and labor and demonstrates the importance of class in the post-Civil War struggle to integrate African-Americans into a progressive and prospering nation.
In this highly original study, Gregory Downs argues that the most American of wars, the Civil War, created a seemingly un-American popular politics, rooted not in independence but in voluntary claims of dependence. Through an examination of the pleas and
In this illuminating study, Steven E. Nash chronicles the history of Reconstruction as it unfolded in the mountains of western North Carolina. Nash presents a complex story of the region's grappling with the war's aftermath, examining the persistent wartime loyalties that informed bitter power struggles between factions of white mountaineers determined to rule. For a brief period, an influx of federal governmental power enabled white anti-Confederates to ally with former slaves in order to lift the Republican Party to power locally and in the state as a whole. Republican success led to a violent response from a transformed class of elites, however, who claimed legitimacy from the antebellum period while pushing for greater integration into the market-oriented New South. Focusing on a region that is still underrepresented in the Reconstruction historiography, Nash illuminates the diversity and complexity of Appalachian political and economic machinations, while bringing to light the broad and complicated issues the era posed to the South and the nation as a whole.