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

By Michael W. Fitzgerald

Book Overview

Led by a coalition of blacks and whites with funding from congressional radicals, the Union League was a secret society whose purpose was to bring freedmen into the political arena after the Civil War. Angry and resentful of the lingering vestiges of the plantation system, freedmen responded to the League's appeals with alacrity, and hundreds of thousands joined local chapters, speaking and acting collectively to undermine the residual trappings of slavery in plantation society. League actions nurtured instability in the work force that eventually compelled white planters to relinquish direct control over blacks, encouraging the evolution from gang labor to decentralized tenancy in the southern agricultural system and the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan. In this impressive work, Michael W. Fitzgerald explores the League's influence in Alabama and Mississippi and offers a fresh and original treatment of an important and heretofore largely misunderstood aspect of Reconstruction history.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807115266
• ISBN13: 9780807115268
• Release Date: January 1989
• Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.0" x 6.3"