Bluecoats & Tar Heels: Soldiers and Civilians in Reconstruction North Carolina (review)

Mark Bradley’s study of the U.S. Army’s role in North Carolina’s reconstruction experience stands out amid recent scholarship of the period by its careful blending of military and social history. Bradley’s attention to detail and succinct writing style enhance his examination of the relationship between southern civilians and soldiers facing the tedium of reconstruction duty.

Bradley argues that, for the most part, the military tried to pacify whites in North Carolina between the time of Gen. Joseph E. Johnston’s surrender to Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman near Durham’s Station in 1865 and the end of Reconstruction in 1877. Sherman, he notes, tried to implement surrender terms that would set the tone for the entire Confederacy as part of his vision of sectional conciliation. Andrew Johnson overruled Sherman but was generous to the South and to North Carolinians in his own right, paving the way under provisional governor William Holden to return the state to civil government.

As North Carolinians adjusted to emancipation under the supervision of the Army’s Department of North Carolina, Sherman’s successors in the state faced tension as race relations became subject to renegotiation. White Carolinians especially resented the presence of African American soldiers in their towns. At the same time African American soldiers, like their white counterparts, grew weary as the complications accompanying the maintenance of social order overshadowed the clearer mission of the recently ended war. Bradley hints at the national nature of racism as he argues that white soldiers were eventually able to gain more confidence from the state’s white population than from African American residents. Many white soldiers showed no more respect for former slaves than did former Confederates, deliberately siding with white civilians in disputes with African American soldiers and sometimes looting African American businesses.

Reaction to the military presence as a whole was mixed among members of the white population. While some whites resented what they perceived as an intrusion, many others believed the army’s presence was necessary to keep the state from descending into chaos. Bradley argues that, even when Congress tried to impose a stricter Reconstruction and divided most of the former Confederacy into military districts, the army itself tried to remain lenient in its approach to North Carolina’s white populace. After the federal government sought to assert the citizenship rights and mandate the franchise for African Americans, many white North Carolinians unleashed their anger not at the military but at the Republican Party, which became along with African Americans the main target of vigilante violence and political manipulation. After white supremacists reestablished a viable political presence in the state, Reconstruction opponents softened even more toward the presence of soldiers.

Along with other recent works tackling the southern experience during the Civil War and Reconstruction period, Bluecoats & Tar Heels traces the growing divide between experience and memory as the nation moved toward the twentieth century. During Reconstruction, Bradley concludes, the military presence in North Carolina actually helped pave the way for the conciliatory rhetoric of “New South” boosters. The trend toward demonizing soldiers as an intrusive occupying force was not set until the turn of the twentieth century, when Democrats fought off a Populist challenge and the Lost Cause myth began to take a firm hold in popular and academic histories. By moving his narrative beyond the Reconstruction years, Bradley is able to build a convincing case that racism was a strong factor in the development of relationships between soldiers and civilians.