Urban Emancipation: Popular Politics in Reconstruction Mobile, 1860-1890 (Southern Biography) - Softcover

Michael W. Fitzgerald (Author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807128376 ISBN 13: 9780807128374

Publisher: LSU Press, 2002

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Michael W. Fitzgerald is a professor of history at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, and the author of The Union League Movement in the Deep South: Politics and Agricultural Change During Reconstruction.

Edition details

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807128376
• ISBN 13: 9780807128374
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 250