Black Belt scalawag

by Rogers, William Warren

In this revealing study of politics in Reconstruction-era Alabama, William Warren Rogers, Jr., traces the career of a former slaveholder and Confederate soldier who shocked his fellow southerners by embracing the Republican party and the rights of freedmen. The product of a well-to-do planter family, Charles Hays (1834-79) served as an officer in the Army of Tennessee. After the war, however, he saw clearly the new political realities and became convinced that extending political and economic opportunities to freedmen was necessary as well as morally correct. His rise as a "scalawag" (the derisive term applied to white southerners who favored the policies of Reconstruction) began in 1867, when he abandoned the Democratic party and served as a delegate to the Alabama constitutional convention. He then served in the Alabama state senate before being elected in 1869 to the first of four terms as the representative of the Fourth Congressional District.^ Driven by his belief that former sla