Book Review

Before Jim Crow, a study of the Readjustor political movement in post-Civil War Virginia, is also a study of nineteenth-century ideas about race and gender, and one brimming with theoretical insights and intellectual wit. Jane Dailey carefully traces the interconnections between society's political and social spheres, while analyzing the unstable boundaries that marked political, racial, and gender identities, to illuminate an era of intense political and social change and equally intense historical debate.	1
Marshaling evidence found in private papers, newspapers, and government documents, Dailey convincingly argues that the disfranchisement and segregation of blacks were not foregone conclusions in the postbellum South and that the end of slavery did not lead inexorably toward their domination and degradation by whites. Her study of Virginia's Readjustor Movement demonstrates not only that democratic solutions were possible, but that biracial democracy was for a brief time successfully implemented. As post-Civil War politicians struggled over the meaning of black freedom, however, virtually every encounter between southern blacks and whites, whether in the halls of state legislatures or on public streets, ignited feelings that were at once personal and political.	2
Although Dailey characterizes the Readjustors' third party movement as the "most successful interracial democratic political movement in the postwar South" (5), she demonstrates its important class component as well. The movement emerged in response to conservative political leaders' decision to fund Virginia's prewar public debt at the expense of virtually all social services, including free public education, and despite the devastating effects of the Civil War. In opposition, Readjustors advocated "readjusting," or partially repudiating the debt in the name of ordinary citizens suffering from mounting debts, poll taxes, and little or no access to education. As the Readjustors built their movement, they embraced liberalism, but without embracing laissez-faire economic theory. "Sounding more like Tom Paine than John Locke," writes Dailey, they "trumpeted the rights of man" (79).	3
The Readjusters challenged elite authority by defining political rights and masculine honor as emanating from one's freedom rather than one's race. By 1883, Virginians had elected Readjustors to be their governor, both their U.S. senators, and six of their ten congressional representatives. Citing the important role that blacks played in this success, Dailey argues persuasively that southern Democrats' white supremacy campaign and the infamous "Jim Crow" system erected during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries represented efforts to destroy the mounting political power of black men and to curb the increasing social assertiveness of black men and women.	4
Despite the willingness of some blacks and whites to ally along class lines, the Readjustor coalition was fragile. Perhaps no one better exemplified its unusual combination of men than coalition leader William Mahone, a former slaveholder, Confederate officer, and railroad entrepreneur. But Mahone's entrepreneurial proeducation sensibilities were shocked by Virginia conservatives' insistence on funding the state's public debt at the expense of free public schools. Furthermore, by 1880 he realized that electoral success depended on black as well as white votes. Accordingly, during the 1881 elections Readjustors not only advocated final readjustment of the public debt, but also free public education, tax relief, protective tariffs to encourage industry in the new South, a mechanics lien law that favored workers, and the railroad regulation advocated by Grangers. As Dailey argues, expansion of the party's political platform brought significant support from both nonelite white Democrats and black Republicans. Perhaps most important to attracting black voters was the federal patronage granted to Virginia Readjustors by the national Republican Party. This patronage brought previously rare political appointments and civil service jobs to black supporters.	5
But black power in Virginia had distinct limits, even under the brief period of rule by Readjustors. Dailey reminds readers that whites continued to dominate high office and to own most of the state's property. Nor did any blacks attend the elite University of Virginia or the College of William and Mary. In an effort to hold on to white support, white Readjustors straddled the race issue, embracing universal equal manhood suffrage while maintaining belief in white superiority. Their liberal rhetoric espoused personal engagement between black and white men in the political sphere, but racial segregation of the "private" world. To this end, most white Readjustors supported antimiscegenation laws.	6
Advocating political rights for black men while denying social equality to black men and women backfired on white Readjustors. Greater political rights, and especially the right to a public education, inevitably encouraged, even necessitated, greater private and personal relations between blacks and whites. Blacks recognized that equality without social rights was not true equality, while conservative whites viewed each and every right gained by blacks as theft of their own. Exhibiting a "zero-sum" mentality, they argued that granting any prerogatives of masculine honor to black men diminished the honor of white men.	7
Building on white resentment, elites from both major parties set out to destroy the Readjustor Party. White Democrats were particularly successful in conflating black rights with race mixing and the degradation of the white race. Deeply ingrained ideas about race and manhood fostered by slavery reinforced Democrats' efforts to establish white supremacy and undermined Readjustors' success in building a class-based biracial coalition. Nowhere was the power struggle over male honor, female purity, and segregation more directly played out than in the public schools. No matter how strenuously Readjustors' argued that black political rights did not threaten whites' political and social security, the fact was that notions of racial supremacy and identity were deeply embedded in white men's understanding of the rights of manhood, marriage, and everyday uses of public space.	8
Dailey devotes a chapter to showing how the Danville riot of November 1883 epitomized the connection between "civility and civil rights and between manners and massacres" (105) and enabled Democrats to destroy the Readjustor Party. Because the riot began as an altercation between whites and blacks on the streets of Danville, Democrats labeled it a "race war" and the inevitable result of race-mixing and elevation of blacks to positions of power. Blaming coalition politics for the riot, Democrats successively demonized the Readjustor Party as the harbinger of black domination, both political and sexual. Warning that black men were poised not only to seize the reins of government, but also to take white women from white men, Democrats insisted that only segregation of the races would restore white male honor and protect white female purity.	9
Stories of political defeat are often interpreted as inevitable consequences of unequal power structures in which the forces of racial, religious, and sexual chauvinism inevitably triumph. Jane Dailey's careful study of the rise and fall of Virginia's Readjustor Movement reminds us that oppressive political policies are rooted in struggles over shared governance and equitable distribution of resources. In her skillful hands, the Readjustor Movement emerges as one more example of the complex relations of class and race among Southerners. Simultaneously, she demonstrates the importance of analyzing gendered discourses about honor and shame to better understand the alternately hopeful and dismal record of post-Civil War politics.	10
Victoria Bynum Southwest Texas State University

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