The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies

by Victoria E. Bynum

Overview

The Long Shadow of the Civil War relates uncommon narratives about common Southern folks who fought not with the Confederacy, but against it. Focusing on regions in three Southern states--North Carolina, Mississippi, and Texas--Victoria E. Bynum introduces Unionist supporters, guerrilla soldiers, defiant women, socialists, populists, free blacks, and large interracial kin groups that belie stereotypes of Southerners as uniformly supportive of the Confederate cause. Centered on the concepts of place, family, and community, Bynum's insightful and carefully documented work effectively counters the idea of a unified South caught in the grip of the Lost Cause.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807898215
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	04/15/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Victoria E. Bynum is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of history at Texas State University, San Marcos. She is author of The Free State of Jones: Mississippi's Longest Civil War and Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South.

Table of Contents

Preface iii

Introduction: Kinship, Community, and place in The old and the new South 1

Part I Home Front 26

Chapter 1 Guerrilla wars: Plain Folk Resistance to the Confederacy 32

Chapter 2 Occupied at Home: Women Confront Confederate Forces in North Carolina's Quaker Belt 66

Part II Reconstruction and beyond 100

Chapter 3 Disordered Communities: Freedpeople, Poor Whites, and "Mixed Blood" Families in Reconstruction North Carolina 106

Chapter 4 Fighting a Losing Battle: Newt Knight Versus the U.S. Court of Claims, 1870-1900 141

Part III Legacies 184

Chapter 5 Civil War Unionists as New South Radicals: Mississippi and Texas, 1865-1920 190

Chapter 6 Negotiating Boundaries of Race and Gender in Jim Crow Mississippi: The Women of the Knight Family 222

Epilogue: Fathers and Sons 259

Notes 283

Bibliography 391

Acknowledgments 435

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Based on deep and creative research, this book opens up large and hotly debated questions of racial identity, gender roles, national identity, family life, and community in the South during and after the Civil War. It is a poignant portrait of all manner of Southern common folk coming to grips with war, freedom, and dislocation on a scale that few Americans have ever experienced.—W. Fitzhugh Brundage, editor of Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Regional Identity in the American South

The South in the Civil War era was anything but solid. Victoria Bynum tells us why, introducing us to a set of intriguing events and a cast of unforgettable characters.—Suzanne Lebsock, author of A Murder in Virginia: Southern Justice on Trial

Editorial Reviews

Bynum (Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South), a historian at Texas State University, offers an analysis of “home front schisms” in three Confederate regions: Big Thicket in eastern Texas, Piedmont North Carolina's “Quaker Belt,” and the counties in Mississippi's Piney Woods known as the “Free State of Jones.” Geographically and culturally isolated, they were largely populated by nonslaveholding subsistence farmers whose relationships with slaves and free blacks often generated “a lively interracial subculture” and even interracial family networks. Conscription policies favoring planters and manufacturers, together with food requisitions and taxes collected in kind by force, contributed to a sense of “rich man's war, poor man's fight” that made civilian-supported desertion and draft-evasion endemic. Defiance escalated to insurgency; Bynum quotes one unrepentant de facto Unionist: “we fought [Confederates] like dogs, and we buried them like asses....” The collapse of Reconstruction left these dissenters marginalized by a race-based legal system and a lost cause mythology. Bynum highlights the “solid South” as a construction and even more successfully presents the importance of “kinship, community, and place” in sustaining resistance to oppression. 9 illus., 1 map. (Apr. 15)

Publishers Weekly

The bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth has come and gone, and with it a flood of books about the sixteenth president. But the sesquicentennial of the Civil War now looms on the horizon, promising its own deluge of books of every size, shape and description. We will be fortunate indeed if in sheer originality and insight they measure up to . . . The Long Shadow of the Civil War, [a] new work by . . . Victoria Bynum . . . on the Confederate experience.—Eric Foner, The Nation



Bynum highlights the 'solid South' as a construction and even more successfully presents the importance of 'kinship, community, and place' in sustaining resistance to oppression.—Publishers Weekly



Bynum has plunged deeply into the primary sources on these interesting individuals, family groups, and local communities. . . . Valuable . . . because it proves that dissent was not rare and insignificant.—H-Civil War



Those who enjoy the study of Reconstruction social and political battles as much or more than the military conflicts of the Civil War will find a wealth of material here for further study. . . . [Bynum's] engaging writing style will no doubt interest many readers of her book as well.—TOCWOC



Bynum maps a road that few took, but the evocative stories of these families demand notice.—Virginia Quarterly Review



Supported by impressive research and crafted to enlighten rather than celebrate or condemn, this book offers a penetrating portrait of the dissenters and their world. A strong addition to upper-level Civil War collections, it will also serve as a lively read for the general public. . . . Highly recommended.—Choice



A masterful community study. . . . Based on exhaustive and innovative research. . . . [That] brilliantly demonstrates that common men and women, yeoman farmers, poor whites, slaves, and freedpeople left their stories behind for historians to excavate.—Arkansas Historical Quarterly



Offers vivid examples of the different Souths that fought, endured, and remembered the war.—North Carolina Historical Review



Historians wishing to pursue such comparisons and questions will find great value in Bynum's careful research.—Journal of the Civil War Era



Fascinating. . . . Bynum demonstrates an impressive, intricate knowledge of the case. . . . The book is an interesting read and opens up avenues for scholars who wish to trace kinship migrations throughout the South and the cultural linkages those migrations may have established.—The Review of Politics

From the Publisher