Summer is ending, and I picked the cotton off the lone plant in my garden yesterday. Over at Cliopatria at around the same time, Ralph Luker posted links to two reviews of Nicholas Lemann's Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War. It's dangerous to comment on a book based on its reviews, but one common thread in Wilentz and Yardley gives me serious pause: apparently Lemann starts his tale in Mississippi in 1875.
1875 Mississippi is a compelling, tragic story. White Democrats took control of the state government through a massive campaign of violence and intidation. For some reason this goes unreported in history curricula, even among "revisionist" teachers who cover Klan violence and the end of Reconstruction. My own high school history teacher spent two-thirds of a semester on the period — twelve weeks in which we learned in detail the mechanisms used to disenfranchise black voters — but I never heard about the Mississippi Plan until I started researching the period over the last ten years.
Mob violence and intimidation isn't the whole story of Redemption, however. Not that those theories haven't had their defenders — presumably this is Lemann's premise, and Faulkner depicted this massive electoral fraud favorably in the last chapter of The Unvanquished — but C. Vann Woodward wouldn't buy it. Woodward spent the first few chapters of his Origins of the new South on the Redeemers, discrediting them by empahsizing their continuity with the Reconstruction régime.
Woodward points out that most of the Redeemers in Southern states were actually old Whigs: urban industrialists who rose to power through a voter coalition including both railroad magnates and Good-Government-minded Negroes disgusted with the scandals of the Grant Administration. He emphasizes that many of them held a profound distaste for the Democratic party and its politics, to the extent that the official party name in some states was a variant on "Conservative and Democratic" — sometimes eliding the "Democratic" altogether. This variety of Redeemer came to power in the years bordering 1870, and although they eschewed the Radical agenda, they practiced tokenism whenever possible. Save perhaps for their moderate racial policy, Woodward is deeply unsympathetic to the Redeemers, viewing them as wanna-be robber barons and ex-Confederate Rent-a-Generals who come down on the wrong side of history against the Readjusters in the decade after they took control.
The states that experienced the most violence in their emergence from Reconstruction were the states that emerged last. Louisiana and Mississippi are not merely noted for racial violence in 1875, but also for being two of the three contested states in the Tilden/Hayes election of 1876. I don't know enough to assign causality here, but there's certainly a correlation between the plutocratic/patriarchal nature of the administrations that were reconstructed early and the populist, violent Democrats that only wrested control from the Federal government through mob violence and trading electoral votes.
This is where my I make my bleg. Somewhere I've read that the Mississippi Plan and the movements inspired by it were part of a larger white populist reaction to not only Reconstruction, but also the moderate Redeemer administrations to which it yielded power. This source noted the effect of racial violence on not only Freedmen but also moderate/conservative whites. The particular tactic that stuck in my mind was Democratic newspaper editors stationing observers around the polls, to publish not just the names of Negro voters, but more especially the names of their white employers so that intimidation could be brought to bear upon them, too. This narrative viewed the reactionary Redeemers of the later years as reestablishing the racial solidarity created after Bacon's Rebellion.
I've looked in Woodward, but found nothing in New South, Jim Crow, or Reunion and Reaction. I can't find it anywhere in Stampp's Era of Reconstruction, which covers the Mississippi Plan nicely. I've never read Foner, so I know it's not there. There's even a Wikipedia entry on the Mississippi Plan, but it doesn't mention the intimidation against white moderates.
Can anyone help me out?
Posted by Ben Brumfield at September 11, 2006 07:12 PM