| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Urban Emancipation: Popular Politics in Reconstruction Mobile, 1860–1890. By Michael W. Fitzgerald. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. xviii, 301 pp. Cloth, $67.50, ISBN 0-8071-2807-4. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8071-2837-6.)

Michael W. Fitzgerald's meticulously researched history of the "popular politics" of Mobile, Alabama, from 1860 to 1890 ends on a surprising note of confession—or perhaps reproach. "The polemical needs of the second Reconstruction," he writes, have "obscured certain aspects of African American political behavior in the first [Reconstruction]" (p. 266). In other words, scholars writing during and after the civil rights revolution have presented a "sanitized version of events" by uncritically celebrating black political activism during Reconstruction without recognizing the utterly "self-seeking" character of many of the politicians of this era. Motivated by a desire for federal patronage, such leaders in Mobile were responsible for "endemic factionalism," which "threatened to turn African American politics into the vehicle of activists' personal priorities" (ibid.) and contributed to the ultimate failure of Reconstruction in the Alabama port city.

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