The Union League Movement in the Deep South: Politics and Agricultural Change During Reconstruction.

The Union League Movement in the Deep South: Politics and Agricultural Change during Reconstruction. By Michael W. Fitzgerald * Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. x + 283 pp. Tables, notes, bibliography, and index. $25.00.

Originating in the North as a wartime patriotic club, the Union League (or Loyal League) jumped the Mason-Dixon Line in 186,5 and became the Republican party's organizing vehicle in the South. Recruiting first among anti-Confederate upcountry white yeomen, after 1867 it targeted newly enfranchised freedmen. Historians have not overlooked the League, but they have disagreed sharply about its character and significance. Early in the twentieth century, William A. Dunning, Walter Lynwood Fleming, and others portrayed the League as both powerful and malignant, perhaps the most virulent feature of a destructive Reconstruction. Emphasizing the League's mysterious ritual and secrecy, they argued that insinuating League organizers hoodwinked ignorant and superstitious ex-slaves and herded them like cattle to the polls, where they trampled the South's decent white folk. In the 1960s, revisionist historians rejected the Dunning school's racist and coaspiratorial interpretation of Reconstruction. But, according to this valuable post-revisionist analysis by Michael W. Fitzgerald, in their eagerness to rehabilitate the freedmen modern scholars were too quick to deny the importance of the Union League.

Fitzgerald demonstrates that the League played a crucial role in attracting ex-slaves to Republicanism. Within months of gaining the franchise, virtually every eligible black man in Alabama and Mississippi (the two states examined here) had registered to vote. The League's success in organizing freedmen had nothing to do with secret ritual, however; it grew directly from the crisis in southern agriculture. Rather than creating dissatisfaction, the League politicized "an already dissatisfied work force" (p. 129). Fitzgerald's discovery of the "interconnection between political insurgency and labor concerns" (p. 117) is this study's greatest contribution. After the war, former masters resisted emancipation and reinstituted a coercive slave-like plantation regime. Freedmen realized that the League offered the best hope of breaking up the unified plantation and escaping gang labor. Organized democratically, the League could be bent to the freedmen's own ends. Consequently, neighborhood concerns quickly supplanted strictly partisan ones. Aggressive black leaders ...