Book Review

The late-nineteenth-century South was never as politically solid as it later became after disfranchisement. Jane Dailey's fine book is a study of the most impressive and successful of the era's insurgent coalitions of Republicans and independents, the Readjusters of Virginia, who managed to win control of the state legislature in 1879 and then again in 1881, along with the governorship.	1
There have been several accounts of the Readjusters, but Professor Dailey's purpose is more specific, namely, to assess the racial and political possibilities that their ascendancy engendered. Historians have tended recently to downplay the salience of what C. Vann Woodward once referred to as "forgotten alternatives" to the repressive system that followed. Though far from an orthodoxy, it is this recent trend that Dailey nevertheless wishes to challenge.	2
When the Readjusters decided to leave the Democratic party over the latter's refusal to scale down Virginia's postwar debt, they were forced to ally with the Republican opposition and its primarily African American constituency. Rather than backing into this coalition, Dailey argues, the Readjusters pursued it vigorously and imaginatively, fully aware of the risk and difficulty involved. Her succinct and well-written study examines this skillful political maneuver and does so with great subtlety and insight.	. . .