ECW: William Mahone and the Readjuster Party in Virginia

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https://emergingcivilwar.com/2019/04/11/emerging-scholar-heath-anderson/#more-181687

Selectively Remembered: William Mahone and the Readjuster Party

Modern discussions about Confederate monuments have led all of us to reconsider what is the best way to remember and teach the American Civil War. These monuments were constructed to promote a **** political and racial agenda and therefore are instructive lessons in what white southerners wanted to commemorate and what they wished to forget. William Mahone was one prominent Confederate general from Virginia who never received a statue to commemorate his wartime service because of his postwar political allegiance to the Republican Party and his acceptance of African American suffrage. The life and career of William Mahone demonstrates the complexities of the Reconstruction years that defy the period’s traditional timeline and reminds us that we should resist generalizing the actions and views of white and black people and Republicans and former Confederates during the tumultuous postwar years.

Reconstruction is often taught as a bookend to the cataclysmic war and as an unpleasant cleaning up act that ended with the successful admittance of the rebel states back into the harmonious United States that was ready to take its place on the world stage. For decades, and even to this day, many white southerners maintain that Reconstruction was a period of tyrannical northern rule over the former Confederate states that only ended with the return of southern white men to political power. Modern scholarship has reframed our discussion of Reconstruction to a focus on the actions of black people and the successes of Reconstruction despite recalcitrant white southerners. However, most current works still use the year 1877, when the last federal soldiers left the South, as the endpoint for Reconstruction. William Mahone and the Readjusters operated in the 1880s and their example demonstrates the need to expand our discussion of Reconstruction into the 1880s and 1890s when the South disenfranchised most of its African American citizens.

Mahone was part of a younger generation of white men who fought for the Confederacy and, like many of his generation, he was more interested in his own personal wealth and how to reform Virginia along a northern industrial model than a concern over what his former comrades thought of him. When Virginia Conservatives could not find a satisfactory resolution to Virginia’s crushing wartime debt, Mahone organized the Readjusters and pledged to reduce the debt or refuse to pay it all together. White farmers flocked to his banner and black people, who argued that as former slaves they should not be required to participate in debt repayment, supported Mahone as well. The Readjusters elected Mahone to the United States Senate and, in exchange for their support, Senator Mahone funded black schools and hospitals with the Readjuster Party placing black men on public school boards in Richmond and Petersburg, and he declared that Virginia’s politics would no longer be decided by racial issues. This movement temporarily represented the most successful case of a biracial political party on a Republican model in the postwar South.
 
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