The Union League and Biracial Politics in Reconstruction Texas
The Union League and Biracial Politics in Reconstruction Texas

Author: Carl H. Moneyhon

Publisher:

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 9781623499563

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The Republican Union League of America played a major role in the Southern Reconstruction that followed the American Civil War. A secret organization introduced into Texas in 1867 to mobilize newly enfranchised black voters, it was the first political body that attempted to secure power by forming a biracial coalition. Originally intended by white Unionists simply to marshal black voters to their support, it evolved into an organization that allowed blacks to pursue their own political goals. It was abandoned by the state's Republican Party following the 1871 state elections. From the beginning the use of the league by the Republican party proved controversial. While its opponents charged that its white leadership simply manipulated ignorant blacks to achieve power for themselves, ultimately encouraging racial conflict, the League not only educated blacks in their new political rights but also protected them in the exercise of those rights. It gave blacks a voice in supporting the legislative program of Gov. Edmund J. Davis, helping him to push through laws aimed at the maintenance of law and order, securing basic civil rights for blacks, and the creation of public schools. Ultimately, its success and its secrecy provoked hostile attacks from political opponents, leading the party to stop using it. Nonetheless, the Union League created a legacy of black activism that lasted throughout the nineteenth century and pushed Texas toward a remarkably different world from the segregated and racist one that developed after the league disappeared.

The Union League and Biracial Politics in Reconstruction Texas
The Union League and Biracial Politics in Reconstruction Texas

Author: Carl H. Moneyhon

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2022-01-18

Total Pages: 547

ISBN-13: 1623499577

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The Republican Union League of America played a major role in the Southern Reconstruction that followed the American Civil War. A secret organization introduced into Texas in 1867 to mobilize newly enfranchised black voters, it was the first political body that attempted to secure power by forming a biracial coalition. Originally intended by white Unionists simply to marshal black voters to their support, it evolved into an organization that allowed blacks to pursue their own political goals. It was abandoned by the state’s Republican Party following the 1871 state elections. From the beginning the use of the league by the Republican party proved controversial. While its opponents charged that its white leadership simply manipulated ignorant blacks to achieve power for themselves, ultimately encouraging racial conflict, the League not only educated blacks in their new political rights but also protected them in the exercise of those rights. It gave blacks a voice in supporting the legislative program of Gov. Edmund J. Davis, helping him to push through laws aimed at the maintenance of law and order, securing basic civil rights for blacks, and the creation of public schools. Ultimately, its success and its secrecy provoked hostile attacks from political opponents, leading the party to stop using it. Nonetheless, the Union League created a legacy of black activism that lasted throughout the nineteenth century and pushed Texas toward a remarkably different world from the segregated and racist one that developed after the league disappeared.

Texas After The Civil War
Texas After The Civil War

Author: Carl H. Moneyhon

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9781585443628

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Moneyhon looks at the reasons Reconstruction failed to live up to its promise.

The Texas Lowcountry
The Texas Lowcountry

Author: John R. Lundberg

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2024-06-18

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 1648431763

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In The Texas Lowcountry: Slavery and Freedom on the Gulf Coast, 1822–1895, author John R. Lundberg examines slavery and Reconstruction in a region of Texas he terms the lowcountry—an area encompassing the lower reaches of the Brazos and Colorado Rivers and their tributaries as they wend their way toward the Gulf of Mexico through what is today Brazoria, Fort Bend, Matagorda, and Wharton Counties. In the two decades before the Civil War, European immigrants, particularly Germans, poured into Texas, sometimes bringing with them cultural ideals that complicated the story of slavery throughout large swaths of the state. By contrast, 95 percent of the white population of the lowcountry came from other parts of the United States, predominantly the slaveholding states of the American South. By 1861, more than 70 percent of this regional population were enslaved people—the heaviest such concentration west of the Mississippi. These demographics established the Texas Lowcountry as a distinct region in terms of its population and social structure. Part one of The Texas Lowcountry explores the development of the region as a borderland, an area of competing cultures and peoples, between 1822 and 1840. The second part is arranged topically and chronicles the history of the enslavers and the enslaved in the lowcountry between 1840 and 1865. The final section focuses on the experiences of freed people in the region during the Reconstruction era, which ended in the lowcountry in 1895. In closely examining this unique pocket of Texas, Lundberg provides a new and much needed region-specific study of the culture of enslavement and the African American experience.

Texas Lithographs
Texas Lithographs

Author: Ron Tyler

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2023-02-28

Total Pages: 529

ISBN-13: 1477325980

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Westward expansion in the United States was deeply intertwined with the technological revolutions of the nineteenth century, from telegraphy to railroads. Among the most important of these, if often forgotten, was the lithograph. Before photography became a dominant medium, lithography—and later, chromolithography—enabled inexpensive reproduction of color illustrations, transforming journalism and marketing and nurturing, for the first time, a global visual culture. One of the great subjects of the lithography boom was an emerging Euro-American colony in the Americas: Texas. The most complete collection of its kind—and quite possibly the most complete visual record of nineteenth-century Texas, period—Texas Lithographs is a gateway to the history of the Lone Star State in its most formative period. Ron Tyler assembles works from 1818 to 1900, many created by outsiders and newcomers promoting investment and settlement in Texas. Whether they depict the early French colony of Champ d’Asile, the Republic of Texas, and the war with Mexico, or urban growth, frontier exploration, and the key figures of a nascent Euro-American empire, the images collected here reflect an Eden of opportunity—a fairy-tale dream that remains foundational to Texans’ sense of self and to the world’s sense of Texas.

The Wars of Reconstruction
The Wars of Reconstruction

Author: Douglas R. Egerton

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2014-01-21

Total Pages: 552

ISBN-13: 1608195740

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A groundbreaking new history, telling the stories of hundreds of African-American activists and officeholders who risked their lives for equality-in the face of murderous violence-in the years after the Civil War. By 1870, just five years after Confederate surrender and thirteen years after the Dred Scott decision ruled blacks ineligible for citizenship, Congressional action had ended slavery and given the vote to black men. That same year, Hiram Revels and Joseph Hayne Rainey became the first African-American U.S. senator and congressman respectively. In South Carolina, only twenty years after the death of arch-secessionist John C. Calhoun, a black man, Jasper J. Wright, took a seat on the state's Supreme Court. Not even the most optimistic abolitionists thought such milestones would occur in their lifetimes. The brief years of Reconstruction marked the United States' most progressive moment prior to the civil rights movement. Previous histories of Reconstruction have focused on Washington politics. But in this sweeping, prodigiously researched narrative, Douglas Egerton brings a much bigger, even more dramatic story into view, exploring state and local politics and tracing the struggles of some fifteen hundred African-American officeholders, in both the North and South, who fought entrenched white resistance. Tragically, their movement was met by ruthless violence-not just riotous mobs, but also targeted assassination. With stark evidence, Egerton shows that Reconstruction, often cast as a “failure” or a doomed experiment, was rolled back by murderous force. The Wars of Reconstruction is a major and provocative contribution to American history.

Dueling Visions
Dueling Visions

Author: Ronald R. Krebs

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 9781603447096

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The presidential election of 1952, unlike most others before and since, was dominated by foreign policy, from the bloody stalemate of Korea to the deepening menace of international communism. During the campaign, Dwight Eisenhower and his spokesmen fed the public's imagination with their promises to liberate the peoples of Eastern Europe and created the impression that in office they would undertake an aggressive program to roll back Soviet influence across the globe. But time and again during the 1950s, Eisenhower and his advisers found themselves powerless to shape the course of events in Eastern Europe: they mourned their impotence but did little. In "Dueling Visions," Ronald R. Krebs argues that two different images of Eastern Europe's ultimate status competed to guide American policy during this period: Finlandization and rollback. Rollback, championed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Central Intelligence Agency, was synonymous with liberation as the public understood it--detaching Eastern Europe form all aspects of Soviet control. Surprisingly, the figure most often linked to liberation--Secretary of State John Foster Dulles --came to advocated a more subtle and measure policy that neither accepted the status quo nor pursued rollback. This American vision for the region held up the model of Finland, imagining a tier of states that would enjoy domestic autonomy and perhaps even democracy but whose foreign policy would toe the Soviet line. Krebs analyzes the conflicting logics and webs of assumptions underlying these dueling visions, and closely examines the struggles over these alternatives within the administration. Case studies of the American response to Stalin's death and to the Soviet--Yugoslav rapprochement reveal the eventual triumph of Finlandization both as vision and as policy. Finally, Krebs suggests the study's implications for international relations theory and contemporary foreign affairs.

George T. Ruby
George T. Ruby

Author: Carl H. Moneyhon

Publisher: Texas Christian University Press

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9780875657486

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"This is the biography of George T. Ruby, an African American statesman who was active in Texas politics and fought for equal rights for black freedmen in Reconstruction Texas"--