Booknotes: Fractured Freedoms

New Arrival:

• Fractured Freedoms: Reconstructing Central Louisiana by David T. Ballantyne (LSU Press, 2025).

When, in April 1862, Union army and naval forces captured New Orleans, not only Louisiana's largest city but the most populous city by far in the entire Confederacy, that stunning event opened the floodgates for carrying the war into the Lower Mississippi Valley. By May 1862, the state capital, Baton Rouge, fell to Union forces and control of much of Louisiana's transportation and economic infrastructure soon followed. This early-war period occupation of the heart of a Deep South state offered the Lincoln administration a golden opportunity to test its wartime reconstruction policies.

Rather than attempting a comprehensive examination of reconstruction in Louisiana during the Civil War years and beyond, David Ballantyne's Fractured Freedoms: Reconstructing Central Louisiana employs a more localized approach to the topic. Its focus is on 1860s through 1890s Rapides Parish, which was located smack dab in the center of the state, had a large land area, and had a majority black population. The location of the parish seat, Alexandria, on the right bank of the Red River (and a relatively short distance from the Red's confluence with the Mississippi) meant that the small city was heavily visited by the war's kaleidoscope of effects.

From the description: "Using the region as a case study, Ballantyne reveals what is, in part, a rural Reconstruction success story, emphasizing the resilience of Black politics and the persistence of significant divisions among white residents that allowed the Republican Party to gain and maintain power there. It was only with the collapse of state-level Republican power in 1877 that Democratic forces in the parish were able to dismantle local Republican political control and gradually constrict Black freedoms."