Date of Award
5-1-1996
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
M.A. in Southern Studies
Department
Southern Studies
First Advisor
Ted Ownby
Second Advisor
Charles R. Wilson
Relational Format
Dissertation/Thesis
Abstract
This thesis seeks to uncover some of the cultural motivations behind white Mississippians’ acceptance of one party rule. Previous scholars of southern political life have focused mainly on the institutional means by which the Democratic party forged its hegemony over Mississippi and the rest of the South. Other factors, however, also contributed to the emergence of white political unity.
I have placed the Redemption campaign of 1875 at the center of the political and racial identities of most white Mississippians. During this campaign whites dissolved whatever differences existed between them to overthrow, by any means necessary, a Republican regime that most believed was extraordinarily corrupt. In succeeding years memories of Reconstruction and Redemption exerted a profound influence over the identities of white Mississippians. Democratic spokesmen exploited the symbolism of Redemption to help cement the party’s control over Mississippi.
This thesis, nevertheless, cautions against exaggerating the degree of unity that existed among whites. Although most white Mississippians remembered Redemption as the formative event in their political lives, various factions in the white population defined the event differently. Democratic hegemony emerged after a tortuous process of negotiation between those who enshrined Redemption as an egalitarian upwelling against centralized authority and black political influence and those who enshrined it as the beginning of Democratic dominance. Democrats were eventually able to convince a majority of whites to equate support of the Democracy with the egalitarian flashes of white pride that had undergirded the 1875 campaign. Eventually many whites came to see opposition to the Democracy as an attack on the white race, a perception that proved a valuable weapon in the efforts of the party to fend off the Populist challenge of the 1890s.
This thesis is meant to supplement interpretations that have stressed institutional processes. In Mississippi the Democracy combined rhetoric and symbols that exploited the fears and desires of white Mississippians with a gradual narrowing of electoral access in order to ensure its supremacy. No single explanation, in other words, can account for the grip that the Democratic party exerted over Mississippi and the rest of the South for much of the twentieth century.
Recommended Citation
Whitley, William Bland, "Shades of white : party politics in Mississippi, 1870-1896" (1996). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 3431.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/3431