Urban Emancipation - (Southern Biography) by Michael W Fitzgerald (Paperback)

Book 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.

Review Quotes

"In this sophisticated study of black politics in Mobile, Michael Fitzgerald adds a new dimension to our understanding of the competing social visions and political strategies that emerged in the black community in the aftermath of Emancipation."--Eric Foner, author of Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

From the retail politics of the street to the debt-service politics of the counting house, Urban Emancipation captures the complexity of Reconstruction-era African American politics like few other studies before it. . . . One comes away from Fitzgerald's book with a deeper appreciation of black political sophistication at the dawn of African American politics.--Lawrence N. Powell author of New Masters: Northern Planters During the Civil War and Reconstruction

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.