The Scalawag In Alabama Politics, 1865–1881

THE SCALAWAG IN ALABAMA POLITICS, 1865–1881

THE SCALAWAG IN ALABAMA POLITICS, 1865–1881

SARAH WOOLFOLK WIGGINS

Winner of the Mrs. Simon Baruch University Award of the United Daughters of the Confederacy

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa and London

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Wiggins, Sarah Woolfolk, 1934–

   The scalawag in Alabama politics, 1865–1881.

   Bibliography:    p.

   Includes index.

   1.   Reconstruction—Alabama. 2.   Alabama—Politics and government—1865–1950. 3.   Republican Party. Alabama. 4.   Afro-Americans—Alabama.

I.   Title

F326.W53    320.9'761'06      76-56833

ISBN 0-8173-0557-2

Copyright © 1977

Preface Copyright © 1991

The University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-8928-4 (electronic)

In Memory of

Robert Nelson Woolfolk

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Unionists Have Their Day

2. Revolutionary Times

3. Crossing the Rubicon

4. The Horns of a Dilemma

5. Economic and Political Labyrinth

6. Total Shipwreck

7. At Sea Without a Rudder

8. Conclusion

Appendix: Republican Nominations and Appointments, Alabama, 1868–1881

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Maps

Alabama Gubernatorial Election, 1870

Alabama Railroads, 1871

Alabama Gubernatorial Election, 1872

Drawings

Political Cartoons

PREFACE

Reconstruction history—and that of the scalawag—lives in the shadow of the Civil War. Apparently, no end is in sight to the celebrations and commemorations of that romantic wartime era. But a nation that lavishly celebrated a Civil War centennial and a Revolutionary War bicentennial, that sat glued to the television screen to watch such productions as The Blue and the Gray and North and South several years ago and recently The Civil War and The Divided Union, ignored the anniversary of the Reconstruction era of American history. North or South, there was no centennial for Reconstruction.

If scalawags had endured a bad press before 1977 when this book first appeared, their reputation fifteen years later is improved among scholars but hardly better among the general public. Scalawags are associated with the oppressor in an era when the South emerged from its shattered dreams of independence to find itself occupied by a conquering army—an experience unique to the South in American history. Their physical world in ruins around them and their regional psyche thoroughly battered, Southerners retained only their pride in a glorious and prosperous past. Anyone who collaborated with the oppressors was identified as a disgraced traitor who deserved ostracism. The reputations of nineteenth-century Republicans and the Reconstruction era probably will never be entirely rehabilitated, despite the fashionable chic that surrounds Alabama Republicans in the twentieth century. Few Southerners willingly acknowledge an ancestor who was a Republican during Reconstruction.

Much of this contempt stems from the belief that Alabama and the South were treated unfairly after the Civil War. Viewed in the world context of the aftermath of civil wars—summary executions of defeated leaders, confiscation and redistribution of the property of the defeated people, massive eviction and resettlement elsewhere—the clemency of the Federal government after the Civil War is noteworthy. Southerners who complain about the harshness of Republican Reconstruction refuse to admit what they do not wish to see: that the South lost a civil war that had grown increasingly unpopular with its contemporaries.

If what was not done affects our appreciation of the stigma attached to Reconstruction, what did occur also needs to be placed in perspective. Alabama political corruption was horrendous but not unique to the state after 1865. Those years saw a national decline of public and private morals after a major war. Corruption in Alabama pales beside the imaginative thievery of New York’s Democratic politicos of Tammany Hall or the intimates of Republican President U. S. Grant. Alabama Democrats were no more honest than Alabama Republicans and no more hesitant to resort to bribes to secure passage of a favorite legislative proposal. Corruption was a national and bipartisan epidemic after the Civil War, not a local disgrace.

Alabama accumulated an enormous state debt during Reconstruction. Evaluation of this debt must consider two questions: With what is the debt compared and on what was the money spent? The state debt by 1874 seems especially appalling in size when compared with those in 1860 or 1880. What must be remembered is that the Civil War wiped out the property on which so much of Alabama’s prewar tax structure had rested—slaves as property. While revenues had existed to fund public services in 1860, it was another matter to fund such programs during Reconstruction. After Democrats regained political power in Alabama in 1874, one of their primary goals was debt reduction. By the 1880s their goal was accomplished, in no small way thanks to their financial strangulation of the public schools. These programs that Reconstruction governments financed—public education and transportation—were extremely expensive. Before Reconstruction, education of blacks had been forbidden. Now blacks clamored for education, and efforts to meet the demands of old and young posed an enormous burden for state resources. Alabama’s meager prewar transportation system had collapsed under the strain of war, and both Democrats and Republicans pushed for state stimulation of postwar railroad construction. Their willingness to indebt themselves and future generations for what they considered essential projects foreshadowed current priorities in behalf of education and highway construction.

Alabama Reconstruction governments broke with their past—were radical—only in their changes in suffrage requirements. The Alabama constitution adopted in 1868 enfranchised black male adults and excluded many white males. However, the next year the legislature began a gradual relaxation of this proscription of whites, and by 1870 most adult males could vote in Alabama, whether former slaves or ex-Confederates. Revolutionary as it may sound that illiterate blacks now were enfranchised, a good case may be made that the former slaves differed little from the barely civilized, illiterate frontiersmen initially granted the vote in the late 1820s or the immigrants unable to communicate in English who voted in the late nineteenth century. What matters more than the literacy level of Alabama voters is that their economic dependence undermined their political independence. Black dependence on whites for a livelihood allowed employers to manipulate the black vote, and Alabama Democrats made no effort to disfranchise blacks at the end of Reconstruction. Instead, Democrats gerrymandered congressional and legislative districts and changed bond requirements to shrink opportunities for blacks to hold office. Not until blacks showed alarming signs of political independence in the 1890s did Democrats move toward black disfranchisement. As long as Alabama Democrats controlled black voters, Democrats had no objections to black suffrage.

Blacks and carpetbaggers did not dominate Alabama politics during Reconstruction. Instead, native white Republicans controlled the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of state government as well as many Federal legislative and judicial positions. Ex-Confederates joined Unionists as Reconstruction-era Republicans. They understood their political predicament as losers in a civil war; they accepted Reconstruction, determined to control it. However, most scalawags grossly underestimated what their decision would cost.

Important books synthesizing recent scholarship on Reconstruction have appeared in the last fifteen years. The best single volume is Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1988). Foner explores every aspect of Reconstruction and demonstrates a remarkable appreciation of the particular local quirks of Alabama Republicans. James M. McPherson, Ordeal By Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), provides a general survey of Reconstruction. For the era of Presidential Reconstruction Dan T. Carter, When the War Was Over: The Failure of Self-Reconstruction in the South, 1865–1867 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), examines the leadership shortcomings of Alabama Unionists and places the state into the context of Reconstruction in the rest of the South. Michael Perman, The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869–1879 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), is the only study that considers the machinations of Alabama Democrats as well as Republicans. The book is especially important as one that focuses on how political Reconstruction worked as well as how it failed.

Recent scholarship on Alabama scalawags has been limited. The absence of substantial collections of personal papers continues to stifle historians’ efforts to understand what made these men tick. Harriet E. Amos, Trials of a Unionist: Gustavus Horton, Military Mayor of Mobile During Reconstruction, Gulf Coast Historical Review, IV (Spring 1989), 134–51, focuses on a Boston-born Mobile resident who became the scalawag mayor of Mobile. The life and political career of Charles Hays of Eutaw has been considered in William Warren Rogers, Jr., Scalawag Congressman: Charles Hays and Reconstruction in Alabama (Ph.D. dissertation, Auburn University, 1983). Hays’s turbulent congressional career is studied in William Warren Rogers, ‘Politics Is Mighty Uncertain’: Charles Hays Goes to Congress, Alabama Review, XXX (July 1977), 163–90, and William Warren Rogers, Jr., Reconstruction Journalism: The Hays-Hawley Letter, American Journalism, VI (Fall 1989), 235–44. Michael W. Fitzgerald, Radical Republicanism and the White Yeomanry During Alabama Reconstruction, 1865–1868, Journal of Southern History, LIV (November 1988), 565–96, finds that Alabama Unionists favored a biracial political coalition to achieve political power over their enemies (ex-slaveholders and ex-Confederates). Peter Kolchin, Scalawags, Carpetbaggers, and Reconstruction: A Quantitative Look at Southern Congressional Politics, 1868–1872, Journal of Southern History, XLV (February 1979), 63–76, considers the variations in the Southern Republican party from state to state, finding that where sizable numbers of scalwags appeared in the top ranks of the party (as in Alabama), the party was in trouble.

Studies of Alabama carpetbaggers have been scarcely more numerous. An outstanding study that includes Alabama carpetbaggers is Richard Nelson Current, Those Terrible Carpetbaggers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), a sensitive insight into the lives and political activities of Alabama’s two Republican U.S. senators, the scoundrel George E. Spencer and the conscientious public servant Willard Warner. Professor Current extensively used the Grenville M. Dodge Papers, State Historical Society of Iowa, Des Moines, a collection that contains many letters from Alabama residents about state politics. Terry L. Seip is preparing a monograph studying George Spencer. Kenneth B. White, Wager Swayne: Racist or Realist? Alabama Review, XXXI (April 1978), 92–109, is the only study of the assistant commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Alabama. Because no collection of Swayne’s personal papers exists, White relies heavily on bureau papers in the Alabama Department of Archives and History and the National Archives. Studies of two carpetbagger politicians influential on the local level in their adopted counties in the Black Belt are Michael J. Daniel, Samuel Spring Gardner: A Maine Parson in Alabama, Maine Historical Society Quarterly, XXIII (Spring 1984), 151–75, and Sarah W. Wiggins, J. DeForest Richards, A Vermont Carpetbagger in Alabama, Vermont History, LI (Spring 1983), 98–106. Two articles provide demographic pictures of Alabama politicians. Richard L. Hume, Carpetbaggers in the Reconstruction South: A Group Portrait of Outside Whites in the ‘Black and Tan’ Constitutional Conventions, Journal of American History, LXIV (September 1977), 313–30, considers carpetbaggers, while Thomas J. Davis, Alabama’s Reconstruction Representatives in the U.S. Congress, 1868–1878: A Profile, Alabama Historical Quarterly, XLIV (Spring & Summer 1982), 32–49, focuses on Alabama congressmen. Shyam Krishna Bhurtel, Alfred Eliab Buck: Carpetbagger in Alabama and Georgia (Ph.D. dissertation, Auburn University, 1981), focuses on the career of a carpetbagger congressman.

The bulk of recent scholarship on Alabama Reconstruction focuses on blacks, despite the existence of few personal papers. Loren Schweninger, James T. Rapier and Reconstruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), studying one of Alabama’s three black U.S. congressmen, is the only book-length monograph on a black political figure. Howard N. Rabinowitz, ed., Southern Black Leaders of the Reconstruction Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), contains three essays on black Alabama politicians: Loren Schweninger, James T. Rapier of Alabama and the Noble Cause of Reconstruction, 79–99; Richard L. Hume, Negro Delegates to the State Constitutional Conventions of 1867–69, 129–53; and Howard N. Rabinowitz, Holland Thompson and Black Political Participation in Montgomery, Alabama, 249–80. The latter essay is a superb example of how much information can be gleaned from local records when no personal papers exist. Richard Bailey, Neither Carpetbaggers Nor Scalawags: Black Officeholders during the Reconstruction of Alabama, 1867–1878 (Montgomery: Richard Bailey Publishers, 1991), not only identifies and analyzes black political figures during Reconstruction but also provides background information and follows the activities of these men into the twentieth century. Sydney Nathans, Fortress Without Walls: A Black Community After Slavery, in Robert L. Hall and Carol B. Stack, eds., Holding on to the Land and the Lord: Kinship, Ritual, Land Tenure, and Social Policy in the Rural South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982), 55–65, looks at the postwar continuity of a black community in Hale County that had moved to Alabama from North Carolina in the 1840s. Black political efforts in Alabama are detailed in Loren Schweninger, Alabama Blacks and the Congressional Reconstruction Acts of 1867, Alabama Review, XXXI (July 1978), 182–98, and Black Citizenship and the Republican Party in Reconstruction Alabama, Alabama Review, XXIX (April 1976), 83–103. Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Random House, 1979), considers how blacks understood and experienced freedom and briefly discusses black Alabamians.

More needs to be written about Reconstruction on the county level. Two fine revisionist county histories that reflect the political turmoil and outright violence of the period are Rhoda Coleman Ellison, Bibb County Alabama: The First Hundred Years, 1818–1918 (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1984), and Michael Jackson Daniel, Red Hills and Piney Woods: A Political History of Butler County, Alabama, in the Nineteenth Century (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Alabama, 1985).

The Freedmen’s Bureau was a major force in the early years of Alabama Reconstruction. The bureau’s role in assisting blacks is discussed in Kenneth B. White, The Alabama Freedmen’s Bureau and Black Education: The Myth of Opportunity, Alabama Review, XXXIV (April 1981), 107–24, and Black Lives, Red Tape: The Alabama Freedmen’s Bureau, Alabama Historical Quarterly, XLII (Winter 1981), 241–58. Evidence to support the accusation that bureau agents meddled in Alabama politics appears in Richard L. Hume, The Freedmen’s Bureau and the Freedmen’s Vote in the Reconstruction of Southern Alabama: An Account By Agent Samuel S. Gardner, Alabama Historical Quarterly, XXXVII (Fall 1975), 217–24, and in Daniel’s accounts of Gardner’s activities in Butler County. LaWanda Cox has a study underway focused on James F. McGogy, a Freedmen’s Bureau agent in Butler and Talladega counties, and additional work is needed to detail the operation of other local offices of the bureau in Alabama. Gail Snowden Hasson, The Medical Activities of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Reconstruction Alabama, 1865–1868 (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Alabama, 1982), and Health and Welfare of Freedmen in Reconstruction Alabama, Alabama Review, XXXV (April 1982), 94–110, are the only examinations of Alabama bureau activities in the health field.

Education, religion, and newspapers among black Alabamians have attracted scholarly attention. Robert G. Sherer, Subordination or Liberation? The Development and Conflicting Theories of Black Education in Nineteenth Century Alabama (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1977), traces black educational progress in the state, and Jerry C. Oldshue, Remembering Education in Hale County During Reconstruction, Alabama Review, XLI (October 1988), 289–98, provide examples of what blacks and whites studied in rural Black Belt schools. Educational activities of the American Missionary Association in Alabama are examined in Joe M. Richardson, The American Missionary Association and Blacks on the Gulf Coast during Reconstruction, Gulf Coast Historical Review, IV (Spring 1989), 152–61. Although James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), includes the Reconstruction period, the book concentrates on Alabama education after the founding of Tuskegee. Harriet E. Amos, Religious Reconstruction in Microcosm at Faunsdale Plantation, Alabama Review, XLII (October 1989), 243–69, details blacks’ independence as they broke with the churches of their former masters; Amos plans a full-length examination of this subject in Alabama. Black Republican newspapers in Alabama during Reconstruction are discussed in Allen Woodrow Jones, Alabama, in Henry Lewis Suggs, ed., The Black Press in the South, 1865–1979 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983).

Miscellaneous factual information about Republican officeholders in Dallas County appears in Alston Fitts III, Selma: Queen City of the Black Belt (Selma: Clairmont Press, 1989). Eric Foner is compiling information for a biographical directory of black officeholders in the South, including Alabama.

Violence against Alabama Republicans was unrelenting and extensive. Stephanie C. Hardin, Climate of Fear: Violence, Intimidation and Media Manipulation in Reconstruction Mobile, 1865–1876, Gulf Coast Historical Review, II (Fall 1986), 39–52, explores the impact of fear on the city of Mobile. Two articles by Melinda Meek Hennessey, Political Terrorism in the Black Belt: The Eutaw Riot, Alabama Review, XXXIII (January 1980), 35–48, and Reconstruction Politics and the Military: The Eufaula Riot of 1874, Alabama Historical Quarterly, XXXVIII (Summer 1976), 112–25, study two of five important race riots in Alabama during Reconstruction. Federal authorities infrequently moved to suppress violence. Two articles describe such efforts: Mike Daniel, The Arrest and Trial of Ryland Randolph April-May, 1868, Alabama Historical Quarterly, XL (Fall and Winter 1978), 127–43, an effort to bring to justice a prominent white Democrat who had assaulted a black, and William Warren Rogers, Jr., The Eutaw Prisoners: Federal Confrontation with Violence in Reconstruction Alabama, Alabama Review, XLIII (April 1990), 98–121, an instance where the Federal officials succeeded in punishing Republican attackers. Gene L. Howard, Death at Cross Plains: An Alabama Reconstruction Tragedy (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1984), describes an east Alabama lynching and its subsequent investigation. George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), details the violence of the 1874 redemption election, placing Alabama events into a Southern context. These studies of the role of Democrats in the terror campaigns of Reconstruction represent the bulk of scholarly attention devoted to Alabama Democrats.

The history of women and the family in the Reconstruction era also needs more study. One of the few biographies of an Alabama woman in this era is Mary Tabb Johnston, Amelia Gayle Gorgas: A Biography (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1978). Although George C. Rable, Civil Wars: Women and The Crisis of Southern Nationalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), consulted diaries and papers of many Alabama women in this period, no clear picture of Alabamians emerges. Jonathan M. Wiener, Female Planters and Planters’ Wives in Civil War and Reconstruction: Alabama, 1850–1870, Alabama Review, XXX (April 1977), 135–49, emphasizes continuity in the position of white women in Alabama between 1850 and 1870 despite the upheavals resulting from the war. Two essays in Carol Bleser, ed., In Joy and In Sorrow: Women, Family, and Marriage in the Victorian South, 1830–1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), reflect the postwar struggles of Alabama women simply to survive: Carol Bleser and Frederick M. Heath, The Clays of Alabama: The Impact of the Civil War on a Southern Marriage, 135–53, and Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins, A Victorian Father: Josiah Gorgas and His Family, 233–52. Bleser is studying ten couples for insight into the impact of the Civil War on Southern marriages. Several Alabama couples will be included. Wiggins is editing the journals of Josiah Gorgas that reflect family life as well as economics and politics of the postwar era.

Economic matters during Alabama Reconstruction continue to be a Byzantine labyrinth that defies clear understanding. However, the most lucid analysis thus far of the catastrophe of the Alabama and Chattanooga Railroad is Mark W. Summers, Railroads, Reconstruction, and the Gospel of Prosperity: Aid Under the Radical Republicans, 1865–1867 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984). Terry L. Seip, The South Returns to Congress: Men, Economic Measures, and Intersectional Relationships, 1868–1877 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), discusses factionalism among Alabama Republicans and their stance on economic measures introduced in the U.S. Congress. W. David Lewis, Joseph Bryan and The Virginia Connection In The Industrial Development of Northern Alabama, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, XCVIII (October 1990), 613–40, traces the development of Sloss-Sheffield Steel and Iron Company in Birmingham and other industries in Alabama. Lewis’s forthcoming study of the Sloss Furnaces will include some assessment of Reconstruction-era railroads in the growth of Birmingham.

Postwar agricultural changes in Alabama have attracted more scholars than have industrial activities. Significant changes in labor patterns are studied in Michael W. Fitzgerald, ’To Give Our Votes to the Party’: Black Political Agitation and Agricultural Change in Alabama, 1865–1870, Journal of American History, LXXVI (September 1989), 489–505, and The Union League Movement in the Deep South: Politics and Agricultural Change During Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989). Fitzgerald traces how black pressure transformed gang labor and centralized management into decentralized tenant farming. Fitzgerald’s book also delineates the activities of Alabama’s efficient, highly centralized, patronage-wielding Freedmen’s Bureau. Michael L. Lanza, Agrarianism and Reconstruction Politics: The Southern Homestead Act (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), recounts the corruption and mismanagement in postwar efforts to open Federal lands in Alabama. Grady McWhiney, The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Alabama Agriculture, Alabama Review, XXXI (January 1978), 3–32, emphasizes the dramatic changes in the agrarian lifestyle of Alabamians between 1850 and 1870 with the end of the open range. In contrast to these studies that emphasize economic change in postwar Alabama, Jonathan M. Wiener, Planter-Merchant Conflict in Reconstruction Alabama, Past and Present, LXVIII (August 1975), 73–94, and Social Origins of the New South: Alabama, 1860–1885 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), present a Marxist interpretation of the era, finding a persistent planter elite in Alabama despite the Civil War. William L. Barney, The Ambivalence of Change: From Old South to New in the Alabama Black Belt, 1850–1870, in Walter J. Fraser, Jr., and Winfred B. Moore, Jr., eds., From the Old South to the New: Essays on the Transitional South (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981), also finds continued planter dominance after the Civil War.

Why Republican Reconstruction failed is addressed in two studies. Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins, Alabama: Democratic Bulldozing and Republican Folly, in Otto H. Olsen, ed., Reconstruction and Redemption in the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 47–77, emphasizes racism, party factionalism, corruption, violence, economic and physical intimidation, patronage battles, and white desertion of the Republicans. J. Mills Thornton III, Fiscal Policy and the Failure of Radical Reconstruction in the Lower South, in J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, eds., Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 349–94, emphasizes the importance of viewing Reconstruction in the light of antebellum policies. Moving forward from his Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), Thornton persuasively argues that when Republican tax policy and disbursements of public funds adversely affected small white farmers during Reconstruction, they abandoned the party.

Review of the historical literature of Reconstruction for the past fifteen years emphasizes that Reconstruction was a time much like our own, one with collisions between state and Federal authority, constant adjustments in race relations, patronage battles, and frantic efforts to stretch shrinking tax revenues to cover expensive public services. These postwar years remind us that today’s problems transcend our own time. Perhaps instead of a celebration the best legacy of Reconstruction is, after all, perspective on contemporary concerns.

Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins

Tuscaloosa, January 1991

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted to more people than I can properly thank for their assistance with this project. Of special assistance were the late T. Harry Williams of Louisiana State University who advised me on the initial stages of this study and the late Elizabeth Tyler Coleman of the University of Alabama, the late Milo B. Howard, Jr., of the Alabama State Department of Archives and History, William W. Rogers of Florida State University who encouraged me to finish it. The University of Alabama Faculty Research Committee has generously provided financial support. The capable staffs of the Alabama State Department of Archives and History, Rutherford B. Hayes Library, National Archives, Library of Congress, University of Alabama Library, University of North Carolina Library, have gone out of their way to be accommodating. The Alabama State Department of Archives and History generously made available plates for all the cartoons in this book.

Annie L. Ballard and Ruth Kibbey have graciously typed and retyped the manuscript, and Claude D. Stabler and his staff have assisted me with the maps. I shall also never forget the three children who helped me pick up the manuscript one hot summer morning after it had been left on the trunk of my car while I drove off scattering three hundred pages over a mile of Loop Road. Finally, the patience and faith of my family have been essential.

Some of the material in the preface is adapted from an earlier essay, No Centennial for Reconstruction, Alabama Magazine (January 1976), 27–28. I appreciate the willingness of Robert B. Ingram, former editor and president of that publication, to grant me permission to use this material again.

INTRODUCTION

Scalawags have had a bad press