The Battle for the University of Alabama: The Perilous Path of Higher Education in the Reconstruction South

Traces the little-known story of the bitter contest for the fate of the University of Alabama after the Civil War.

In The Battle for the University of Alabama, William Warren Rogers Jr. gives a fascinating account of the fierce struggle over the nature of the University of Alabama after the Civil War. Union forces reduced the campus to ruins as the war ended, and the university did not reopen until 1869. In the interregnum, powerful forces shifted the trajectory of the school. Alabama Republicans authored an egalitarian state constitution that delivered oversight of the university to the Republican Party. That set the stage for turmoil and confrontation. This book tells the story of that conflict.

In the next few years, Democrats charged Republicans with turning the university into a “radical” institution. They alleged that a handful of unqualified individuals had gained faculty positions because of their political allegiance, which resulted in the university’s academic desecration. Professors were bitterly denounced in the state newspaper press and quite personally in Tuscaloosa. Administration of the university became part of the fratricidal political debate in the state. Political violence and questions concerning race, specifically the possible integration of the university, illuminated the controversies of the Reconstruction years. Many of these questions resonate even today.

This authoritative account sets events at the University of Alabama against the backdrop of what occurred at other state universities in the Reconstruction South. The University of North Carolina experienced controversy similar to Alabama’s. At the University of Georgia, however, calm prevailed. This story of the incendiary events at Alabama’s flagship university charts new ground and provides a revelatory look into the extraordinary partisanship that characterized the South after the Civil War.

William Warren Rogers Jr. is professor emeritus of history at the University of North Georgia. He is author of Reconstruction Politics in a Deep South State: Alabama, 1865–1874; A Scalawag in Georgia: Richard Whiteley and the Politics of Reconstruction; Confederate Home Front: Montgomery during the Civil War; and Black Belt Scalawag: Charles Hays and the Southern Republicans in the Era of Reconstruction.