A Scalawag in Georgia: Richard Whiteley and the Politics of Reconstruction
By William Warren Rogers Jr.
(September 2008 Civil War News)

288 pp., 2007. University of Illinois Press, 1325 South Oak St., Champaign, IL 61820-6903, $40 plus shipping

Reviewer: Dr. Anne J. Bailey
Dr. Anne J. Bailey is a professor of history at Georgia College & State University. She is the author of eight books on the Civil War, numerous book chapters, and more than 300 articles and book reviews and she has won several book awards. Dr. Bailey is also general editor of “Great Campaigns of the Civil War,” published by the University of Nebraska Press, and editor of the SCWH Newsletter, a quarterly publication of the international Society of Civil War Historians, and of the Georgia Historical Quarterly, the state’s historical journal of record.

Review:
Biographies often provide a popular vehicle for authors to analyze historical periods as well as to define and detail the life of an individual person. In recent years it has become common for historians to turn to lesser-known figures as a means to include the common man or woman in the overall scope of history.

William Warren Rogers Jr., has done just that. His chosen subject, Richard Henry Whiteley, is not a figure that readers will recognize; Whiteley is not even a name specialists in Georgia history could immediately identify.

An Irishman by birth, he arrived in American in 1837 at the age of 7 with this widowed mother and siblings.

A self-made man who eventually became a lawyer in southwest Georgia, Whitely was a moderate who “thought the fire-eaters were extreme and secession was an alternative of last resort.”

Still, he joined the Confederate army early in 1861. As a captain in the 5th Georgia Infantry, he fought at Shiloh, Perryville and Murfreesboro; as a major he reported on the fight at Chickamauga and the defense of Atlanta.

But Whiteley’s wartime exploits are not Rogers’ focus and cover less than five pages. The war is over by page 20 and the remainder of the book describes how the Irishman became a prominent politician in Georgia’s reconstruction.

A Republican who defended freedmen, Whiteley is representative of scalawags of the era. Part of his significance, Rogers point out, is that he “ran for Congress five times between 1868 and 1876 (more than any other southern Republican during Reconstruction).”

But with the end of Reconstruction, white Georgians had little use for his radical principles and Whiteley left for Colorado in 1877, where he died in 1890.

While there is little in the book to interest military enthusiasts, those who study Reconstruction will find it a wealth of information.