Urban Emancipation: Popular Politics in Reconstruction Mobile, 1860-1890

Scholars of Reconstruction have generally described Republican Party factional conflicts in racial terms, as if the Radical agenda evoked unified black support. As Michael W. Fitzgerald shows in the first major study of black popular politics in the urban South in the years surrounding the Civil War, that depiction oversimplifies a contentious and often overlooked intraracial dynamic. Republican political power, he argues, heightened divisions within the African American community, divisions that were ultimately a major factor in the failure of Reconstruction.

In Mobile, the Confederacy's fourth largest city, the most pressing social divide within the black community was between longtime residents--often freeborn, prosperous, and of mixed ancestry--and the wave of destitute rural freedmen fleeing the countryside. After Emancipation, moderate African American leaders seeking legal equality emerged from the first group. The newcomers spawned a more militant faction who formed the constituency for the white "carpetbag" leadership that dominated popular Republican politics. Fitzgerald traces how the rivalry between these black factions yielded a startlingly antagonistic political scene that steadily escalated into physical conflict.

Though Fitzgerald's book examines the local level, its implications are far reaching. It demonstrates that the Republican factionalism that helped doom Reconstruction went beyond competing cliques of white officeholders. Blacks too were partially responsible for the failure of Reconstruction. Boldly challenging reigning theories about the nature of post-Civil War Politics, URBAN EMANCIPATION will spark historical debate for years to come.