Blacks, Carpetbaggers, and Scalawags: The Constitutional Conventions of Radical Reconstruction

by Richard L. Hume, Jerry B. Gough

After the Civil War, Congress required ten former Confederate states to rewrite their constitutions before they could be readmitted to the Union. An electorate composed of newly enfranchised former slaves, native southern whites (minus significant numbers of disenfranchised former Confederate officials), and a small contingent of "carpetbaggers," or outside whites, sent delegates to ten constitutional conventions. Derogatorily labeled "black and tan" by their detractors, these assemblies wrote constitutions and submitted them to Congress and to the voters in their respective states for approval. Blacks, Carpetbaggers, and Scalawags offers a quantitative study of these decisive but little-understood assemblies -- the first elected bodies in the United States to include a significant number of blacks. Richard L. Hume and Jerry B. Gough scoured manuscript census returns to determine the age, occupation, property holdings, literacy, and slaveholdings of 839 of the conventions' 1,018 delegates. Carefully analyzing convention voting records on certain issues -- including race, suffrage, and government structure -- they correlate delegates' voting patterns with their racial and socioeconomic status. The authors then assign a "Republican support score" to each delegate who voted often enough to count, establishing the degree to which each delegate adhered to the Republican leaders' program at his convention. Using these scores, they divide the delegates into three groups -- radicals, swing voters, and conservatives -- and incorporate their quantitative findings into the narrative histories of each convention, providing, for the first time, a detailed analysis of these long-overlooked assemblies. Hume and Gough's comprehensive study offers an objective look at the accomplishments and shortcomings of the conventions and humanizes the delegates who have until now been understood largely as stereotypes. Blacks, Carpetbaggers, and Scalawags provides an essential reference guide for anyone seeking a better understanding of the Reconstruction era.

552 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2008

Reviews

[Oliver Bateman · Rating 4 out of 5]

An important scholarly contribution, and the culmination of a career's work for Hume. It's not the least bit interesting--all tables and charts and whatnot--but it's extraordinarily important, since it:

a) Collects a huge amount of pertinent info about the "Black and Tan" constitutional conventions in one place.
b) Demonstrates that most of these conventions were far less radical than the "Redeemer Democrats" who came after them would have us believe. In particular, most were led by middle-of-the-road white southern Republicans. The impact of "carpetbaggers" and African-American delegates was, in the main, far less than previously thought.
c) Contains fantastic chapters on the highly problematic Florida and Texas conventions, as well as good chapters on the aberrantly progressive Louisiana and South Carolina conventions.

I'd like to see someone release a complementary book that deals with the various Southern constitutional conventions that reversed the reforms (such as they were) contained in these constitutions. But this would take a lot of time--maybe an entire career, as in the case of Hume--and result in a huge, difficult-to-read book that's parsed only by people who are frantically writing their dissertations and thus hungry for well-organized data.

[Andrew · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very dry and loaded with statistics. Otherwise, it is interesting history that builds on the work already out there on the state constitutional conventions during Reconstruction.