SUVCW-L Archives

From: Thomas Rightmyer <>
Subject: [SUVCW] Fw: Rubin III on Baggett,_The Scalawags: Southern Dissenters in the Civil War andReconstruction_
Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2008 13:36:37 -0500

An interesting book review about Unionist Southerners in the
Civil War and later.

Tom Rightmyer Asheville, NC


H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by (November, 2007)

James Alex Baggett. _The Scalawags: Southern Dissenters in the Civil War
and Reconstruction_. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
2003. xvi + 323 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index.
$55.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8071-2798-8; $23.95 (paper), ISBN
978-0-8071-3014-8.

Reviewed for H-NC by Hyman Rubin III, Department of History and Political
Science, Columbia College, South Carolina

On the Origin of Scalawags

James Alex Baggett's purpose in _The Scalawags: Southern Dissenters in
the Civil War and Reconstruction_ is to answer one of the most difficult
questions historians have asked about the Reconstruction era: why did
some white southerners after the Civil War join African Americans and
northerners in the Republican Party (thus becoming "scalawags" to their
white Democrat neighbors), while most did not?

Of course historians have asked other important questions about these
"southern dissenters" as well: how many scalawags were there? How
important were they to Reconstruction's prospects? What did they
accomplish? What persecution did they face? How honorable were they? How
well did they cooperate with northerners and blacks? What became of them
after Reconstruction? Baggett acknowledges these questions and provides
partial answers for them, but they are clearly not his focus; this is a
book about the choice to become a scalawag. Baggett describes his book
as "an analysis of scalawag origins" (p. 7); he considers its "most
important" result to be a demonstration of "why individuals joined the
party and became Republican leaders despite bitter opposition by most
whites" (p. 13). While his single-minded focus renders the book's broad
title a bit misleading, it also allows Baggett to achieve a remarkable
success. To a degree unlikely to be surpassed, he has isolated the
factors that made some white southerners do what others considered
unthinkable: join the party of Lincoln.

Baggett's well-conceived method of isolating the variables leading to
Republicanism begins with the creation of "a well-defined universe" of
data: all white southern officeholders in formerly Confederate areas
from 1863-1880. Baggett includes only the following officeholders:
"governors, congressmen, state supreme court and circuit court judges,
heads of state executive departments," "candidates for one of these
offices," or federal "internal revenue collectors, customs collectors,
or United States judges, attorneys, and marshals." Those who were white,
southern, and Republican he counts as scalawags. He excludes about 20
percent of these officials because of insufficient information, leaving
742 scalawags in his sample. The 666 Democrat officeholders Baggett
counts as "redeemers" (pp. 7, 10).

Having established his universe of data, Baggett compares the redeemers
to the scalawags in terms of prewar wealth, slaveholdings, educational
level, vocation, office-holding, party affiliation, and stand on
secession. He also compares their wartime activities, including
Confederate or Union military service. Observing the diversity of his
findings across the South, Baggett subdivides the former Confederacy
into Upper South, Southeast, and Southwest. (Fortunately his
quantitative analysis preserves state-by-state data as well as regional
totals; these are summed up in six tables in the appendix.) All in all,
he finds the redeemers and scalawags quite comparable in most
categories, even if redeemers had a bit more wealth and education. The
major difference, he finds, is that scalawags were significantly cooler
to secession and the Confederacy than were redeemers (p. 262).

While his use of a specific set of scalawags is sound, it has drawbacks.
For one thing, by definition his scalawags were officeholders; this
leads to a focus on elite scalawags, not the rank and file. Baggett
acknowledges the elite bias of his sample. Another problem is the lack
of an appendix listing the scalawags who were part of the sample.
Baggett makes mention of some individuals who were not scalawags in ways
that might lead to reader confusion. Finally, readers will assuredly be
confused at times about whether Baggett's reference to "scalawags" is
intended to mean all scalawags or his chosen sample. Sometimes, because
of the numbers involved, it obviously means the former: "Most north
Alabama scalawags associated with the peace movement: some journeyed to
Union-occupied Middle Tennessee, and more than 2,500 joined the United
States Army" (p. 263). Sometimes it clearly means the latter, as when we
learn of the scalawags that "most were lawyers" (p. 261). But sometimes
it is ambiguous: "Whatever their political party allegiance in 1860,
future scalawags overwhelmingly opposed secession, even after Lincoln's
election in November" (p. 42). Despite these issues, Baggett's
quantitative analysis will be of great interest to Reconstruction
scholars.

Not content to crunch numbers, Baggett also fleshes out the origins of
each southern state's Republican Party with more traditional (but hardly
less impressive) archival research. Baggett has found the key
personalities among each state's scalawag element, and he demonstrates
the individual and local circumstances leading to the founding of state
parties. He understands that southerners did not take calculators into
the polling place; they made decisions about politics on the basis of
family, friendship, and community ties. Like other scholars, Baggett
finds family networks and like-minded communities essential to the
creation of white Republicans. In addition, he finds influential
individuals (like Lewis E. Parsons of Alabama, William H. Holden of
North Carolina, William G. Brownlow of Tennessee, and Ossian B. Hart of
Florida) who attracted whites to the Republican Party by virtue of their
personal popularity. These like-minded communities and influential
individuals were almost always those who had had a long record of
Unionism.

The conclusion Baggett draws from all this is that prewar and wartime
Unionism were the keys to postwar Republicanism; as he envisions it, the
farther a southerner moved along a spectrum of pro-Union positions
between 1860 and 1865, the more likely that southerner became a
Republican in 1867 and 1868. Baggett presents the spectrum thus: "an
1860 antisecessionist Breckinridge supporter/1860 Bell or Douglas
supporter/1860 anti-secessionist passive wartime unionist/peace party
advocate/active wartime unionist/postwar Union party supporter" (p.
271).

Baggett does not go much beyond 1868; in fact, the eighth of ten
chapters is titled "Birth of a Party." (Most of the book discusses the
years from 1860 to 1866; only chapter 9 discusses Congressional
Reconstruction at any length.) Nevertheless, his findings have three
important implications for Reconstruction's prospects, and none of them
leads to much optimism about what might have been. First of all, his
conclusion might be restated thus: Republicanism was the most extreme
expression of Unionism. If so--if scalawags were indeed the "Radicals"
their opponents said they were--then it stands to reason that they could
only have comprised a minority of white southerners. (Based on Baggett's
widely scattered references to numbers, some 20 percent of white
southerners may have flirted with Republicanism in the early stages of
Reconstruction; see pp. 126, 129, 144, 146, 186, 191, 199, 200, 208,
219, 227, 249, 267.)

The second implication of the statement that Republicanism was the most
extreme expression of Unionism is this: southern Republicanism came with
an expiration date. Baggett's scalawags are rarely shown as crusaders
for equal rights, or even for economic modernization. They are not
motivated by the new issues of the postwar era, but rather by the old
issue of the Union. While devotion to the Union was a powerful force in
the lives of many white southerners, when translated into politics it
amounted to a strong position on an issue that had just been
definitively settled. By 1866 it was clear that the Confederacy was dead
and the Union had been preserved. While Unionists might vote to avenge
themselves against secessionists in 1868, they would have new problems
and would be focused on new issues by 1878 or 1888. Indeed, in many
states Baggett finds few converts to Republicanism after 1868 (see for
example pp. 238, 248, and 257).

Finally, Baggett convincingly shows, through anecdote and through data,
how distinct the Republican parties in different southern states were.
In some states most Republicans were white, while in other states most
were black. In some states the top party positions were held by northern
migrants, while in others native southerners ran the party. In some
states moderates dominated, while in others more radical leadership
prevailed. But there was one constant: by 1900 all the Republican
parties in the South were defeated and irrelevant. It would have been
interesting had Baggett speculated on how the Republicans could have
succeeded in the South, but such a question is far from his interests
here.

Baggett sets three tasks for himself in _The Scalawags_, and he
accomplishes all three extremely well: he identifies as much as is
possible the factors leading one southerner to become a scalawag while
another became a Democrat; he explains in great detail the local
variations among scalawags and the Republican parties to which they
belonged; and he provides a fair and reasonable basis for statistical
comparisons between Republican and Democratic officeholders in the
Reconstruction era. While many readers will wish he had taken on other
questions as well, it is hardly a scathing criticism to say that Baggett
leaves Reconstruction scholars wanting more.





Copyright ? 2007 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the
redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational
purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web
location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities &
Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews
editorial staff at .

This thread:

• [SUVCW] Fw: Rubin III on Baggett,_The Scalawags: Southern Dissenters in the Civil War andReconstruction_ by Thomas Rightmyer <>