Race, Radicalism, and Reconstruction

Robert Harrison

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511993381.008

6 - Race, Radicalism, and Reconstruction

Grassroots Republican Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2012

Robert Harrison

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Robert Harrison: Affiliation:
University of Wales, Aberystwyth

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Summary

Introduction

For a few years after the Civil War, the enfranchisement of male African Americans opened up the space for an extraordinary efflorescence of political organizing, grassroots activism, and community development. It has become clear from recent studies of grassroots Reconstruction, by, for example, Steven Hahn, Michael W. Fitzgerald, Julie Saville, Rebecca J. Scott, and John C. Rodrigue, that freedpeople's political activity in the postbellum South served a much wider range of practical and psychological functions than merely the exercise of an abstract constitutional right. Not only in the countryside of the South but also in cities such as Charleston, Richmond, and Mobile, freedpeople organized politically, converting the newly established Republican Party to serve the social and economic needs of their communities. However briefly and however imperfectly, the Republican Party acted as a force for social change. “More than a political party,” says Saville, “a social movement was in the making.”

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Type: Chapter
Information: Washington during Civil War and Reconstruction
Race and Radicalism
, pp. 184 - 210

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511993381.008 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2011

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