|
|
|
Book Review
| Mary Gorton McBride with Ann Mathison McLaurin, Randall Lee Gibson of Louisiana: Confederate General and New South Reformer, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. Pp. xiii + 320. $45.00 (ISBN 0-8071-3234-9).
|
| In this volume of LSU's Southern Biography series, McBride joins the ranks of historians who have puzzled over the survival of antebellum values in the New South. Over the decades, a number of scholars have been fascinated by men like Randall Lee Gibson—conservative Democrats who combined patrician manners, Confederate credentials, and devotion to honest and frugal government, with a surprising flexibility on social and racial issues. Gibson (1832–1892) was raised among well-connected planters in Louisiana and Kentucky, and was educated at Yale. A European traveler, a lawyer who practiced in English and French, he was typical of the cosmopolitan southerners described in Michael O'Brien's Conjectures of Order (2004). In the manner of O'Brien's haunted protagonists, he backed a revolution for the preservation of slavery. After the revolution failed, Gibson, along with many white southerners, was ready to condone revolutionary violence in the name of white supremacy. |
1
|
|
Like Wade Hampton of South Carolina and Thomas Goode Jones of Alabama, Gibson was a Reconstruction-era "Redeemer." As a congressman in the mid-1870s, Gibson was an important player (151–72) in the bargains by which his ally Francis T. Nicholls gained the Louisiana statehouse and Rutherford B. Hays secured the White House. Once Home Rule was secure, Gibson and his colleagues took a national, unifying stance, accepting the consequences of Confederate defeat—including the emancipation and subsequent citizenship of African Americans. They never tired of declaring how happy they were that slavery was ended. Both Gibson and Nicholls affirmed the rights of black citizens under the recently amended U.S. Constitution (170). |
2
|
|
Former slaveholders, white conservatives viewed African Americans through a backward-looking lens of paternalism. While they never could accept black folk as equals, they were comfortable with their presence in the south—comfortable soliciting their votes and dispensing a limited number of offices and other rewards. Their vision of black participation fell short of the fellowship offered by (some) Republicans and agrarian radicals; on the other hand they were capable of genuine affection and esteem across racial lines. Gibson's approach to race relations was a good example of what historian C. Vann Woodward, in his Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955) would call a "forgotten alternative" to an eventual system of exclusion, segregation, and disfranchisement. |
3
|
|
McBride does a fine job of tracing the episodes of Gibson's life. In addition to the material above, she covers his Civil War career, in which he suffered from the hostility of his Louisiana neighbor Braxton Bragg, that avatar of grudge-holding incompetence; his exploits in the complex political warfare of post-bellum Louisiana, especially during his years (1882–1892) in the U.S. Senate; and his role, beginning in 1881, as leader in the effort to launch Tulane University. The Gilded Age passages make Randall Lee Gibson of Louisiana worthwhile reading for legal historians. The U.S. Senate as Gibson knew it was a forum of negotiation among representatives of great economic interests. Gibson spent much of his time there acting, essentially, as the legislative attorney of sugar planting and manufacturing interests. Thus we see his consistent defense of protective tariffs (an heretical position for a southern Democrat), and his support of a Mississippi River Commission and federal involvement in the construction of levies (245–246). |
4
|
|
Yet Gibson's roles as public man and lawyer merged most completely in his work (183–228) for Tulane University. McBride discusses Gibson's tactful management of the eccentric millionaire Paul Tulane; his involvement in the selection of trustees, officers, and faculty, insisting on the highest standards of scholarship and service; his public relations work (sometimes in the face of opposition from New Orleans' civic leaders); and his successful defense of Tulane's tax-exempt status before the Louisiana Supreme Court. McBride also points out that Gibson, wearing his senatorial hat, twice supported the Blair Bill—controversial among southerners because as a federal measure it was (arguably) a violation of states rights, and because it would have targeted illiterates, black and white alike, potentially altering the calculus of race and class in the region. |
5
|
|
Thus McBride makes her case that Gibson was a true reformer, at least in an educational sense. She could have accomplished more, however, had she pondered the law's place in his sensibilities. This biography brushes past Gibson's legal education and provides scant mention of his partnerships and practice. What sympathies—what tendencies—did he derive from common law or civil law? Investigation of such questions might have allowed McBride further insights into the world of the New South's conservative reformers. |
6
|
| Paul M. Pruitt, Jr.
|
| University of Alabama |
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|