Two-Party Politics in the One-Party South: Alabama's Hill Country, 1874-1920

This study challenges the long-held view that the only importantand influential politicians in post-Reconstruction Deep South stateswere Democrats. In this insightful and exhaustively researched volume, Samuel L. Webbpresents new evidence that, contrary to popular belief, voters in at leastone Deep South state did not flee en masse from the Republican partyafter Reconstruction. As Webb demonstrates conclusively, the party gainedstrength among white voters in Upcountry areas of northern Alabama between1896 and 1920. Not only did GOP presidential candidates win more than adozen area counties but Republican congressional candidates made progressin Democratic strongholds, and local GOP officials gained controlof several county courthouses. Nor were these new Republicans simply the descendants of anti-Confederatefamilies, as some historians have claimed. Rather, they were former independents,Greenbackers, and Populists, who, in keeping with the 1890s Populist movement,were reacting against what they perceived as the control of the Democraticparty by "moneyed elites" and planter landlords. Webb also breakswith previous historical opinion by showing that ex-Populists in the HillCountry, who had been radical reformers during the 1890s, remained reformminded after 1900. Webb's ground-breaking reassessment of Alabama state politics from Reconstructionto the 1920s describes a people whose political culture had strong rootsin the democratic and egalitarian Jacksonian ideology that dominated northAlabama in the antebellum period. These people carried forward elementsof Jacksonianism into the late 19th century, with its tenets continuingto influence them well into the early 20th century.