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The Redeemers were a loose political coalition in the southern United States during the Reconstruction era, who sought to re-establish the rule of white supremacy by overthrowing the Radical Republican coalition of Freedmen, carpetbaggers and Scalawags. They were the southern wing of the Bourbon Democrats, the conservative, pro-business wing of the Democratic Party. Their membership was from diverse social, economic and political backgrounds.
History
Between 1868 and the Compromise of 1877, in the process known as Redemption, Redeemers won many state and local offices by appealing to Scalawags (white Southerners who previously supported the Republican Party). They also gained a small share of the black vote. Their program emphasized opposition to the Radical Republican system that they considered to be corrupt and a violation of true republican principles. They denounced high taxes and high state debts. Once in power, they typically cut government spending; shortened legislative sessions; lowered politicians' salaries; scaled back public aid to railroads and corporations; and reduced support for public education. The process of stripping blacks of their rights in the wake of the Compromise was gradual. Blacks continued to vote in significant numbers well into the 1880s and black Congressmen continued to be elected, albeit in ever smaller numbers, until the 1890s. George Henry White, the last Southern black of the post-Reconstruction period to serve in Congress, retired in 1901, leaving Congress completely white.
In the 1890s, the Redeemers and Bourbon Democrats faced their biggest challenge with the Agrarian Revolt, when their control of the South was threatened by the Farmers Alliance, the effects of Bimetallism and the newly-created People's Party. As a consequence, William Jennings Bryan defeated the Bourbons and took control of the Democratic Party nationwide.
Historiography
In the years immediately following Reconstruction, most blacks and former abolitionists held that Reconstruction lost the struggle for civil rights for black people because of horrific opposition, including murder and other forms of terrorism, by the Redeemers and their supporters in the Ku Klux Klan. Former slave turned abolitionist Frederick Douglass and Reconstruction Congressman John R. Lynch also cited the withdrawal of federal supports from the South as the other primary reason for the failure of Reconstruction to maintain its goals after the slave economy was overthrown.
By the turn of the century, historians, led by the Dunning School, saw Reconstruction as a failure because of its political and financial corruption, its failure to heal the hatreds of the war, and its control by self-serving northern politicians, such as the people around Grant. The worst part of what historian Claude Bowers called "the Tragic Era" was the extension of suffrage to illiterate African American Freedmen, a policy he claimed led to misgovernment and corruption. The Freedmen, they argued, were manipulated by corrupt whites interested only in raiding the state treasury and staying in power. They agreed the South had to be "redeemed" by foes of corruption. Reconstruction, in short, violated the values of "republicanism" and Radical Republicans were "extremists". This interpretation of events was the hallmark of the Dunning School which dominated most history textbooks from 1900 to the 1960s.
Beginning in the 1930s, historians such as C. Vann Woodward and Howard K. Beale attacked the "redemptionist" interpretation of Reconstruction, calling themselves "revisionists" and claimed that the real issues were economic. The Northern Radicals were tools of the railroads, and the Republicans in the South were manipulated to do their bidding. The Redeemers, furthermore, were also tools of the railroads and were themselves corrupt.
In 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois published a critical analysis of the Dunning School in his Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880. His book described the role of African Americans during Reconstruction, history that was omitted from the history books written by the white historians of the Dunning School.
By the 1960s, a number of contemporary historians led by Eric Foner picked up where Du Bois left off, by taking the struggle of Freedmen to center stage. While acknowledghing some corruption in the Reconstruction era, they hold that the Dunning School over-emphasized it while ignoring the worst violations of republican principles--namely the white racism of the Redeemers who denied African Americans their civil rights, including their right to vote *.
See also
References
Secondary sources
- Ayers, Edward L. The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (1993).
- Baggett, James Alex. The Scalawags: Southern Dissenters in the Civil War and Reconstruction (2003), a statistical study of 732 Scalawags and 666 Redeemers.
- Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt. Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 (1935), explores the role of African Americans during Reconstruction and criticizes the historian William Archibald Dunning and his followers for racism.
- Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (2002), a major synthesis that overturned prevailing views on Reconstruction by greatly expanding the work of Du Bois in describing the role of Freedmen during Reconstruction.
- Garner, James Wilford. Reconstruction in Mississippi (1901), a classic Dunning School text.
- Harris, William C. With Charity for All: Lincoln and the Restoration of the Union (1997), presenting Lincoln as a moderate and opponent of Radical Republicans (Radicals).
- Roger L. Hart, Redeemers, Bourbons, and Populists: Tennessee, 1870-1896 LSU Press, 1975.
- James Tice Moore, "Redeemers Reconsidered: Change and Continuity in the Democratic South, 1870-1900" in the Journal of Southern History, Vol. 44, No. 3 (Aug., 1978) , pp. 357-378.
- Perman, Michael. The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869-1879 (1984).
- Stampp, Kenneth M. The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877 (1967), a pro-Radical overview.
- Wallenstein, Peter. From Slave South to New South: Public Policy in Nineteenth-Century Georgia (1987).
- Williamson, Edward C. Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 1877-1893 (1976).
- Woodward, C. Vann. Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (1951). Historian questions the then dominant views of the Dunning School.
Primary Sources
- Fleming, Walter L. Documentary History of Reconstruction: Political, Military, Social, Religious, Educational, and Industrial (1906), an anti-Radical text.
- Hyman, Harold M., ed. The Radical Republicans and Reconstruction, 1861-1870. (1967), a pro-Radical text.
- Lynch, John R. The Facts of Reconstruction(Neale Publishing Co.: 1913)Online text by African American member of the United States Congress during Reconstruction era.
"Redeemers"