An entirely revised and updated edition of the best-selling 2001 original
 
This collection of biographical essays, written by thirty-four noted historians and political scientists, chronicles the times, careers, challenges, leadership, and legacies of the fifty-seven men and one woman who have served as the state's highest elected official. The book is organized chronologically into six sections that cover Alabama’s years as a US territory and its early statehood, the 1840s through the Civil War and Reconstruction, the late nineteenth-century Bourbon era, twentieth-century progressive and wartime governors, the Civil Rights era and George Wallace’s period of influence, and recent chief executives in the post-Wallace era.
 
The political careers of these fifty-eight individuals reflect the story of Alabama itself. Taken together, these essays provide a unified history of the state, with its recurring themes of race, federal-state relations, tensions between north and south Alabama, economic development, taxation, and education.
 
Alabama Governors expertly delineates the decisions and challenges of the chief executives, their policy initiatives, their accomplishments and failures, and the lasting impact of their terms. The book also includes the true and sometimes scandalous anecdotes that pepper Alabama’s storied history. Several of the state's early governors fought duels; one killed his wife's lover. A Reconstruction era-governor barricaded himself in his office and refused to give it up when voters failed to reelect him. A twentieth-century governor, an alumnus of Yale, served as an officer in the Ku Klux Klan.
 
This entirely updated and revised edition includes enlarged and enhanced images of each governor. Published as Alabama prepares for its sixty-fourth gubernatorial election, Alabama Governors is certain to become a valuable resource for teachers, students, librarians, journalists, and anyone interested in the colorful history of Alabama politics.
 

The story of Alabama's governors has been often bizarre, occasionally inspiring, but never dull. Several of the state's early governors fought duels; one killed his wife's lover. A Reconstruction era-governor barricaded himself in his administrative office and refused to give it up when voters failed to reelect him. A 20th-century governor, an alumnus of Yale, married his first cousin and served as an officer in the Ku Klux Klan.
 

This collection of biographical essays, written by 34 noted historians and political scientists, chronicles the foibles and idiosyncrasies, in and out of office, of those who have served as the state's highest elected official. It also describes their courage; their meaningful policy initiatives; their accomplishments and failures; the complex factors that led to their actions or inaction; and the enormous consequences of their choices on the state's behalf. 
 

Taken together, the essays provide a unified history of the state, with its recurring themes of race, federal-state relations, economic development, taxation, and education. Alabama Governors is certain to become an invaluable resource for teachers, students, librarians, journalists, and anyone interested in the colorful history and politics of the state.

 

A vignette of local Southern history

Among the villains, heroes, rogues and demigods who inhabit Southern folklore, Stephen S. Renfroe deserves a place. In the twentieth-century a few popular magazine and newspaper articles have been written about Renfroe, while Carl Carmer’s Stars Fell on Alabama, published in 1934, devoted several pages to him. Other than this, all is previously know about the enigmatic sheriff who because an outlaw is in the form of a legend.
 
In general, Renfroe appeared in the Black Belt town of Livingston, Alabama in the late 1860s and quickly became a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Allegedly playing a major role in driving out carpetbaggers and ridding Sumter County of Radical Republican rule, he was awarded with the office of sheriff. However, he reverted to a pattern of crime that earned him disgrace and ostracism.
 
As to his origins, his background, and the details of his career—much has been speculated but little has been documented. Although no statue commemorates Renfroe’s role as a statesman, educator, or solider (his highest military rank was that of private), a case can be made that he helped shape the course of politics in Alabama’s Black Belt.
 

An important story of one man’s life, lived with courage and principle
 
During the decades of Bourbon ascendancy after 1874, Alabama institutions like those in other southern states were dominated by whites. Former slave and sharecropper Jack Turner refused to accept a society so structured. Highly intelligent, physically imposing, and an orator of persuasive talents, Turner was fearless before whites and emerged as a leader of his race. He helped to forge a political alliance between blacks and whites that defeated and humiliated the Bourbons in Choctaw County, the heart of the Black Belt, in the election of 1882. That summer, after a series of bogus charges and arrests, Turner was accused of planning to lead his private army of blacks in a general slaughter of the county whites. Justice was forgotten in the resultant fear and hysteria.
 

The gripping story of the 1894 Alabama coal miners strike

The Alabama coal miners’ strike of 1894 to gain improved working conditions and to protect themselves from wage reductions. The authors recount the depression of the early 1890s, which set the stage for the strike, and the subsequent use of convict labor, which became a catalyst. The gripping story of the strike includes the dramatic decision to strike and corporate attempts to break the strike by the use of company guards and “scab” labor. In Alabama corporate bosses inflamed passions further by deploying African American “black leg” workers, ultimately requiring the deployment of the state militia to restore peace.
 

Recounts in detail the volatile political period in Alabama following the end of the Civil War
 
Following the end of the Civil War, white Southerners were forced to concede equal rights to those who had been enslaved, ushering in a new and ruthless brand of politics. Suddenly, the status and place of some four million former slaves dominated the national and regional political dialogue. In Alabama, the Republican Party established itself quickly and powerfully with the participation of a newly freed constituency, firmly aligned against the Democratic Party that had long dictated the governance of the state. Well-heeled planters, merchants, and bankers, joined by yeoman farmers, staged a counterrevolution by gravitating strongly to the Democratic Party and its unabashedly white supremacist measures. The ensuing power struggle in the birthplace of the Confederacy is at the heart of Reconstruction Politics in a Deep South State: Alabama, 1865–1874.

What emerges in William Warren Rogers Jr.’s comprehensive study of the era is a detailed examination of Reconstruction politics, particularly in Alabama. This book explores an explosive and unpredictable political environment that a few years earlier would have been inconceivable. A vivid picture emerges of courthouse rallies and bitter infighting in legislative circles. Rogers’s narrative ventures into darker places as well: to the Tennessee Valley and the Black Belt regions of Alabama, where Klan nightriders used violence against an enemy and ideology they could not abide.

The attempt to capture and account for the unforgiving political landscape created by the extraordinary circumstances of Reconstruction constitutes this study’s most central contribution. Rogers often quotes black and white citizens, Democrats and Republicans. Drawn from newspapers, correspondence, and various federal investigations, these firsthand voices are passionate, unvarnished, and filled with conviction. They offer a startling immediacy and illustrate the temper—or distemper—of the times. Readers are treated to a panoramic unveiling of Reconstruction Alabama politics that provides a sense of what was truly at stake: the values by which a region and the nation as a whole would chart its future for the century to come.
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