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.

Focusing on Mobile, the Confederacy's fourth largest city, Fitzgerald traces how the rivalry between longtime black residents and destitute freedmen fleeing the countryside yielded a startlingly antagonistic political scene. He demonstrates that the Republican factionalism that helped doom Reconstruction went beyond competing cliques of white officeholders. Boldly challenging reigning theories about the nature of post-Civil War politics, Urban Emancipation will spark historical debate for years to come.--Eric Foner, author of Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

Binding Type: Paperback
Author: Fitzgerald, Michael W.
Published: 09/01/2002
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807128374
Pages: 320
Weight: 1.07lbs
Size: 9.16h x 6.10w x 0.89d