The Long Shadow of the Civil War
Southern Dissent and Its Legacies
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
In The Long Shadow of the Civil War, Victoria Bynum 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--Bynum introduces Unionist supporters, guerrilla soldiers, defiant women, socialists, populists, free blacks, and large interracial kin groups that belie stereotypes of the South and of Southerners as uniformly supportive of the Confederate cause.
Examining regions within the South where the inner civil wars of deadly physical conflict and intense political debate continued well into the era of Reconstruction and beyond, Bynum explores three central questions. How prevalent was support for the Union among ordinary Southerners during the Civil War? How did Southern Unionists and freedpeople experience both the Union's victory and the emancipation of slaves during and after Reconstruction? And what were the legacies of the Civil War--and Reconstruction--for relations among classes and races and between the sexes, both then and now?
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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 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.
