1576
Reviews of Books and Films
crushing electoral defeat in which the opposition, led
by machine Democrats, overwhelmingly rejected black
suffrage, Republican strategists turned to the federal
government and made the Fifteenth Amendment their
device for winning the vote for blacks. However, as
Redeemer regimes won control of southern states,
Republican hopes for continued national success
through a coalition that depended on black voters in
the South diminished, and New York's importance to
Republican hegemony grew. One consequence of the
Republican leadership's renewed emphasis on securing the party's northern base was that the Grant
administration allocated to New York City a very large
percentage of federal funds appropriated under the
Enforcement Acts for the purpose of protecting black
voters.
Quigley's interpretative focus thus shifts the story of
Reconstruction from the rural South to the urban
North. However, he devotes much more attention to
antidemocratic elites and northern white racists than
he does to crusading Republican advocates of interracial democracy. For instance, by the late 1860s, members of Manhattan's Republican elite and their reform
allies in the Democratic Party were backing away from
the early postwar vision of democratization and beginning to advocate various restrictions on popular democracy. One reason they did so was that in New York
City universal manhood suffrage had brought masses
of propertyless workers and new immigrants to the
polls, which usually resulted in victories for machine
Democrats. To weaken Tammany's electoral power,
anti-Tammany reformers backed an amendment to the
state constitution that would have restricted voting to
male taxpayers, a proposal summarily abandoned by
legislators after the 1877 election demonstrated widespread voter opposition to the measure. A second line
of attack intended to limit popular control of city
services enjoyed more success. This was legislation to
have essential city services administered by commissions of supposedly nonpartisan experts rather than
party appointees-a system favored by many members
of New York's elite, including leading businessmen,
and one that became the standard approach to modernizing city governments in the twentieth century.
In making his case for New York City's centrality in
the history of Reconstruction, Quigley touches on a
wide variety of topics: northern white resistance to
extending suffrage to blacks, the evolution of the city's
African-American community, the emergence of such
elite reform institutions as the Citizens' Association
and the anti-Tweed Committee of Seventy, the ouster
of Boss Tweed, the Tompkins Square violence of 1874,
the depression of the 1870s, the Orange Riots, and the
1876 presidential election. Key individuals-T. Thomas Fortune, E. L. Godkin, Horace Greeley, William
Tweed, Samuel Tilden, and others-receive attention
as well.
The risk in telling the story of the Reconstruction
years from the perspective of a single city's history,
even if that city is Manhattan, and then claiming that a
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
second founding comparable to the first had its primary roots in the give-and-take of New York City
politics, is that of seeming to claim too much. Certainly
Republicans needed to win New York state in presidential elections, but that electoral outcome depended
more on success elsewhere in the state than it did on
carrying Manhattan. When New Yorkers beat back
elite efforts to restrict suffrage to taxpayers, did the
defeat of property qualifications for voting owe more
to the spirit of the times during Quigley's "second
founding" or to the legacy of the movement for
universal white male suffrage that had triumphed
during the Jacksonian era? Does the Reconstructionera revolt of New York's wealthy taxpayers who sought
to promote policies of parsimony in government services (an attitude that bears some similarity to antigovernment rhetoric in our time) qualify as a defining
feature of modern American politics, given that periods of expansive government social spending arose in
the 1930s and 1960s? Quigley's book offers wellarticulated starting points for considering all these
issues and many more, and even where he overstates
his case, he does so in a provocative way that is well
worth considering.
GERALD W. McFARLAND
University of Massachusetts
Amherst
STEVEN HAHN. A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political
Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great
Migration. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2003. Pp. viii, 610. $35.00.
This volume has already won the Pulitzer and Bancroft
prizes. The honors are richly deserved, for Steven
Hahn has produced a magnificent study of African
Americans in the southern United States during the
years from the 1850s to the early twentieth century.
The product of exhaustive research, it is a book that
summarizes our current understanding of the field and
puts forth bold new interpretations that will generate
debate for years to come.
One of the book's many virtues is its expansive
scope. Beginning with the late antebellum era, Hahn
provides a largely chronological account of African
Americans' struggle for freedom and independence
under slavery, Civil War, Reconstruction, and the New
South, while paying careful attention to geographical
variations. The story that he tells is in some ways well
known, but in tracing it he combines richness of detail
with sweeping narrative and interpretive sophistication
to produce a work of unusual interest and importance.
Indeed, in its epic quality, this book stands alongside
two other masterpieces of Reconstruction history,
W. E. B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in America,
1860-1880 (1935) and Eric Foner's Reconstruction:
America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988).
Two interrelated themes underlie Hahn's approach
and provide interpretive unity to his account. The first
is his broad understanding of politics as something that
DECEMBER 2004
Canada and the United States
encompasses not just elections and formal government
but "collective struggles for what might be termed
socially meaningful power" (p. 3). The second is his
emphasis on black agency, the extent to which "African Americans continually made and remade their
politics and political history in complex relation to
shifting events" (p. 7). These two themes are not
without risks; defining almost everything as political
can reduce the term's significance, and focusing too
exclusively on black agency can obscure the extent to
which African Americans were objects of brutal repression and were not able to remake their world as
they wished. For the most part, however, Hahn skillfully skirts these risks to produce a compelling story of
a never-ending struggle for human dignity. At the
heart of this struggle was the desire to avoid being
pushed around, to achieve a modicum of autonomy,
independence, or what Hahn calls "self-governance"
(p. 5).
Hahn assigns a central role in this struggle to what
he describes as "the building blocks of collective
behavior,"-"kinship, and shared experience" (p. 176).
Under slavery, these engendered a "spatially fluid" (p.
35) idea of community and a "proto-peasant consciousness" (p. 44) that enabled slaves to resist their
bondage even while coming to terms with it on a
day-to-day basis. During the Civil War, this resistance
blossomed into a mighty slave rebellion, albeit one that
"proved difficult to detect and even more difficult to
staunch" (p. 64). After the war, freedom enabled
African Americans to broaden the struggle for selfgovernance, whether by rejecting dependent work
relations, defending their families and churches, or
mobilizing for formal political participation through
the Union League and the Republican Party. They also
manifested a growing nationalism as they "made themselves into a new people-a veritable nation, as many
of them came to understand it" (p. 9).
Many of these and other arguments, which Hahn
develops with great skill, will prove controversial. His
depiction of a massive slave rebellion during the Civil
War, for example, which builds upon, and rachets up,
Du Bois's thesis of a general strike, depends in part on
a willingness to conflate flight with rebellion; when
Hahn declares that "by the middle of 1864 ... nearly
400,000 slaves had rebelled against their masters" (p.
82), he means not that they had engaged in the kind of
armed insurrection that the term "rebellion" usually
denotes, but that they had run away. At times, the very
boldness of Hahn's arguments works against nuanced
judgments. His descriptions of the way slaves and
freedpeople reacted to the Civil War and emancipation, for example, reveal few of the ambivalent sentiments, ambiguities, and inconsistencies evident in
Leon F. Litwack's Been in the Storm So Long: The
Aftermath of Slavery (1979). Similarly, in stressing the
unity of political purpose among southern blacks,
Hahn plays down (although he does not entirely
ignore) the very real divisions among them that existed
simultaneously, divisions that Dylan C. Penningroth
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
1577
has perceptively addressed in The Claims of Kinfolk:
African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (2003).
One of Hahn's most compelling interpretations lies
in his treatment of rumor, both under slavery and
after, as a subtle political weapon. Although federal
officials after the war saw black expectations of land
redistribution and white fears of black insurrection as
exaggerated and irrational, Hahn depicts these rumors
as signs of political sophistication. "Just as white
landowners turned rumors of land distribution into
harbingers of insurrection so as to reassert their local
prerogatives," he writes, "the freedpeople used the
rumors of land redistribution to bolster their own
bargaining positions" (p. 152).
More likely to elicit controversy are Hahn's discussions of black emigrationism and populism. Placing
unusual emphasis on the strength of emigrationist
sentiment among African Americans, Hahn delineates
a "grass-roots emigrationism" (p. 323) that displayed
little of the missionary impulse that some black (and
white) intellectuals expressed as they sought to promote migration to Africa. Widespread among the rural
poor (although relatively few of them acted upon it
until the Great Migration that began in the 191Os), this
grass-roots sentiment reflected an "incipient popular
nationalism," a sense that "we wants to be a People"
(p. 333) that undergirded migrations to Liberia, Kansas, Oklahoma, and later the North. If many blacks
were attracted to the idea of escaping their oppressive
conditions by fleeing the South, Hahn suggests that
few were fooled by populist rhetoric of black-white
political unity. Providing an unusually bleak portrait of
the Populist Party and the potential it offered for
interracial cooperation, he writes that "by the early
1890s, blacks had a fairly clear idea as to what they
might expect from the people who filled the Populist
ranks. They were people who had ridden with the
Klan, the Red Shirts, and the White Leaguers ... They
were people commonly known to blacks as 'regulators' " (p. 432).
In short, this is an important work that will generate
debate on a host of interpretive questions. It will
quickly take its place as a classic of Reconstruction
history (broadly conceived). It is a splendid achievement.
PETER KOLCHIN
University of Delaware
JANE TURNER CENSER. The Reconstruction of White
Southern Womanhood 1865-1895. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2003. Pp. xiii, 316. Cloth
$59.95, paper $24.95.
Few topics continue to intrigue historians so much as
the impact of the Civil War, especially on the former
Confederate States. Jane Turner Censer reexamines
the ideas of Anne Firor Scott's path-breaking The
Southern Lady (1970) through a careful look at three
generations of women in North Carolina and Virginia.
DECEMBER 2004