Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia. .

Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia. By Jane Dailey (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000. 278pp. $39.95/cloth $17.95/paper).

Since the publication of C. Vann Woodward's powerful work Origins of the New South in 1951, questions of continuity and discontinuity have dominated scholarly explorations of the late-nineteenth-century South. Scholarship influenced by Woodward has emphasized continuity between New South boosters and the Jim Crow politicians who followed them. For scholars who lack expertise in the post Civil War South, along with those outside the academy, the late-nineteenth-century South has often been understood as simply a prelude to the coming of Jim Crow segregation and disfranchisement of the 1890s and early twentieth century. Recently, a new group of scholars working on postemancipation topics have begun not only to reassess Woodward's thesis but to ask an entirely new set of questions about the relationship among politics, race, culture, and identity. Three broad features define this new approach. First, broadening Woodward's thesis, these scholars suggest that there was a far greater degree of fluidity and possibil ity in the formal political structure of the post Civil War South than previously acknowledged. Second, these scholars embrace an expansive definition of politics, drawing connections between the negotiated experiences of blacks and whites in public life and the structure of formal political systems. Finally, more interested in the relationship between the social construction of identity and the political culture of everyday life than they are in formal political institutions, these scholars approach the study of late-nineteenth-century politics primarily through the lens of social history. Jane Daily, in a compelling new monograph on the Readjuster movement in posremancipation Virginia, offers the latest salvo in this new scholarly orientation.

Dailey observes that Reconstruction never really got under way in Virginia. Conservative forces quickly ended a Radical Republican rule that, as Dailey points out, was never particularly radical. While conservatives in other Southern states either cancelled or rescheduled their public debt, Democrats in Virginia stubbornly refused to do so. Funding the debt in Virginia came at the expense of a nascent public school system and other vital social services that formed in the wake of the Civil War. Outraged by Democratic intransigence on the debt issue, disaffected whites joined African Americans (who were largely ignored by the state's Republican Party) and voted for the Readjusters. Led by Senator William Mahone, and fueled by political patronage dispensed from Washington, the Readjusters established a brief but formidable multiracial political coalition that dominated the state from 1879 to 1883. Dailey concludes that, "the Readjuster Party ... was the most successful interracial political alliance in the post emancipation South" (1).

The first half of the book is taken up with chapters explaining the origins of the Readjuster movement in Virginia and how, through the use of the patronage system, this interracial political coalition managed to build a briefly successful alternative to the established political system. Dailey offers a meticulous anatomy of who voted for the Readjusters and a detailed picture of where exactly the Readjusters were most powerful in the state. Understanding that blacks and whites would have a hard time joining forces in the same region or city, Dailey smartly argues, "it is possible that the success of interracial politics in Virginia can be attributed at least in part to the essentially segregated geographic distribution of the coalition" (33). While Dailey presents rich detail here, her early chapters offer no broadly new insights into the Readjuster movement.

In the second half of her work, which is by far the more compelling, Dailey offers powerful chapters on the Readjusters' embrace of nineteenth-century liberal political philosophy, a thick-description of the 1883 Danville race riot, and an extended discussion on the politics of racial identity. Dailey's main objective here is to explore the social constructions of race in postemancipation Virginia. She argues that race and gender are not fixed characteristics but that they only exist in context and that their definitions and boundaries--for whites and blacks alike--are mutable. Dailey concludes that, as whites and blacks jostled with each other on the streets of Danville, and throughout postbellum Virginia, "racial identity and masculinity could be gained or lost" (93).

Central to Dailey's effort is her attempt to recover the sense of hope and possibility that infused late-nineteenth-century political culture throughout the South. Dailey constructs a portrait of postemancipation Virginia where interracial political coalitions might have ultimately forced political parties to live up to the promise of Radical Reconstruction ideals. Dailey explains that, "because historians have traditionally taken the victory of Democratic race baiting for granted and have seen white racial animosity and anxiety as inevitable, they have not considered seriously the political ideologies that interracial parties employed to contain ill will" (78). Dailey deftly charts Readjusters' attempts to build an interracial coalition by fashioning a liberal ideology that separated public issues of equality from private concerns about interracial contact.

Dailey does successfully capture the "sense of possibility, of movement, that people on the ground sensed in the late-nineteenth-century South" (156). However, having spent the entire work exploring such possibilities, Dailey seems uncomfortable with a conclusion that dwells on the success of Democrats' racist appeals in ending Readjusters' political rule. Dailey argues instead that, "the meaning of the Readjusters [is] less emblematic of the failed possibility of interracial cooperation in the postemancipation South" than it is "an inspiration for change." Dailey concludes that, "the most important thing about the Readjusters was not their failure but their existence and their legacy" (168). Such a conclusion is awkward and disappointing. While Dailey is correct in claiming that scholars have at times (though less so recently) treated late-nineteenth-century race relations as static, her emphasis on "possibility" and her focus on the renegotiation of racial and gendered identities do not alter in any fundame ntal way historians' assessment of the reasons for Readjusters' defeat. Recent scholarship, including Dailey's, clearly demonstrates that everywhere throughout the postemancipation South interracial political coalitions did indeed succumb to the same violence and race baiting demagoguery that felled the Readjusters. Dailey herself appears to understand this, as she acknowledges that, "many white Virginians ... regarded the authority invested in African Americans by the Readjusters as a direct challenge to their own authority" (77). Scholars of the post Civil War South understand such a reaction by whites to be typical. What is more, this reaction is predictable and a primary indication of why the failure of the Readjuster movement, and others like it, proved inevitable. For when push came to shove, as it was bound to do, race would obliterate the possible constructions of other political coalitions and identities. Having spent so much time exploring the hope of interracial political coalitions and the fluidit y of political and social realities in postemancipation Virginia, Dailey, unfortunately, does not seem comfortable with the inevitability of Readjusters' defeat.