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  • Reconstruction's Ragged Edge: The Politics of Postwar Life in the Southern Mountains. by Steven E. Nash
  • Drew Swanson (bio)
Reconstruction's Ragged Edge: The Politics of Postwar Life in the Southern Mountains. By Steven E. Nash. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Pp. 288. Cloth, $39.95.)

Steven Nash's new account of Reconstruction in the western North Carolina mountains reveals a regional case of Eric Foner's famous description of Reconstruction as an "unfinished revolution." In this corner of Appalachia, Nash argues in Reconstruction's Ragged Edge, efforts at biracial Republican political power made real strides between the end of the Civil War and 1870, with the support of the Freedmen's Bureau and other federal initiatives. By the later date, reactionary violence, a loss of federal support, and a renewed emphasis on the business of business began to undo much of this change. More broadly, Nash convincingly argues for the importance of Reconstruction histories rooted in the past and politics of particular localities, as well as for the necessity of paying greater attention to Appalachian history between the end of the Civil War and the industrial extractive era that gained steam in the 1880s.

The book's first chapter outlines the social and political conditions in the Carolina mountains immediately before and during the Civil War, with a particular focus on the importance of slavery, despite the relatively low percentage of slaves and planters in the region. Like many other scholars, Nash argues that the conflicted and shifting allegiances of mountain residents during the war set up divisive postwar politics. Chapter 2 also covers familiar material, exploring the process of emancipation in the mountains, including discussion of labor contracts, child indentures, and the daily operations of the Freedmen's Bureau.

Beginning in the third chapter, Nash's historiographical intervention becomes clearer, as he argues that mountain Republicans fully adopted "the mantle of the Republican Party—complete with that party's national stance on issues of race and civil rights" (56). This assessment challenges older scholarship that cast mountain Republicanism as being of a different stripe than that in other parts of the state, supposedly because of the region's comparatively small African American population. When Republicans firmly grasped power under congressional protection in 1868, conservatives decided to make race the crucial issue in state politics. This was, Nash contends, "a strategic shift away from the politics of loyalty to the politics of white supremacy" (108). Thanks in part to the work of local offices of the Freedmen's Bureau, which the book portrays as both active and fairly effective, the crucible of race politics did not immediately fracture the party in the western mountains. [End Page 339]

Ku Klux Klan violence and simultaneous strident Conservative Party (the name for North Carolina's opposition party during Reconstruction) responses to Republican power changed all that. By the time that violence—which took place in the state's piedmont region as well as the mountains—forced out Republican governor William Woods Holden in 1871, the national commitment to securing southern civil rights, or even electoral rights, had waned. As Nash notes, "Federal power played a critical role in mountain and state Republicans' rise to power in 1868, but little help was forthcoming in 1871" (143). This "redemption" changed the focus of mountain politics, with the question of white supremacy moving from center stage, to be replaced by economic development issues such as the Western North Carolina Railroad, investment in mining and logging, and the expansion of highland tobacco farming. In the last chapter, Nash emphasizes the interrelationship of railroad development, local politics, and racial violence in a way similar to the work of Scott Reynolds Nelson in Iron Confederacies: Southern Railways, Klan Violence, and Reconstruction (1999), a book that is strangely absent from the bibliography. White Republicans and Conservatives, though still divided on many issues, could clasp hands across new railroad lines, mica mines, and tobacco fields.

The book is written in an accessible style, thoroughly researched, and well argued. In particular, Nash should be commended for his close reading of the state's secondary literature and the era's primary sources. He does an excellent...

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