Michael Perman

Two-party politics in the one-party South : Alabama's hill country, 1874-1920

Samuel L. Webb presents new evidence that, contrary to popular belief, voters in at least one Deep South state did not flee en masse from the Republican party after Reconstruction. Instead, as Webb conclusively demonstrates, the party gained strength among white voters in northern Alabamas Hill Country region between 1896 and 1920. Not only did GOP Presidential candidates win more than a dozen area counties during this period but also Republican congressional candidates made progress in Democratic strongholds and local officials gained control of several county courthouses. These new Republicans were not simply the descendants of anti-Confederate families, as some historians have claimed. Rather, they were former independents, Greenbackers, and Populists, who, in keeping with the 1890s Populist movement, reacted against what they perceived as the takeover of the Democratic party by the moneyed elites and Black Belt planter-landlords. By 1900, many Hill Country Populists had found a congenial home in the GOP, albeit one with a populist and progressive bent. Webb breaks with previous historical opinion by showing that ex-Populists in the Hill Country, who were radical reformers during the 1890s, remained reform-minded after 1900. Continuity existed between their movement and progressivism. Webb uses the pivotal year of 1912 to exemplify how many ex-Populists were attracted by Theodore Roosevelt and his Bull Moose Progressive party and supported a variety of reforms, particularly those related to the rights of labor. Webb then analyzes retrospectively and prospectively the reasons for the movement.

The South and Congress's Reconstruction Policy, 1866–67

If the Civil War had erupted in 1861 because the two sections had failed to produce a formula capable of reconciling their many differences, then it would not be inaccurate to assert that in 1865, four years later, that long-sought basis of settlement was even more remote and unlikely. Yet the search for mutually acceptable terms of agreement continued. As practitioners of the art of negotiation and reconciling differences, Reconstruction politicians on both sides aimed at reunion and talked of compromise. One hundred years later, many revisionist historians also assumed that compromise solutions were available after the war. Somehow both politicians and historians manifested a conventional response in presuming that bargain and negotiation leading to settlement were applicable and meaningful approaches to the problem of reconstruction. Yet perhaps the underlying reality was such that this traditional political approach was likely to be ineffective and quite inappropriate. Perhaps the interests and attitudes of the groups in power within each section were irreconcilable short of the capitulation or extinction of one of them. In that case political realism would have required that attempts to conciliate, moderate or compromise should be rejected, and other methods of achieving political goals tried and experimented with.