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

PART III: Legacies

part iii Legacies one would be hard-pressed to find a white person of the turn-of-thetwentieth -century South who, at least in public, did not proclaim undying devotion to the Lost Cause of the Confederacy and to the superiority of the white race. Indeed, most New South leaders lauded such beliefs, which came to appear timeless, as at the very core of white Southern identity. Yet there were other Souths that could never quite be buried, including the politically dissident South that struggled to find its voice in third-party movements. And there were multiracial communities in which people defied racial categorization as white, black, or Indian. These alternative Souths contradicted images of a united white citizenry or of a society of distinct races in which people could be ranked and ordered according to their bloodlines. In recognition of these other Souths, chapters 5 and 6 analyze two legacies of Southern wartime dissent and postwar struggle. The rise of dissident political movements that challenged the hegemony of the Southern Democratic Party is the subject of chapter 5. Chapter 6 examines the growth of a multiracial community born of the Civil War collaboration between Newt Knight and Rachel Knight in the Jones County region of Mississippi. Despite Mississippi’s long history of political conflicts, it is often portrayed as a “one-party-state” before the 1950s, Texas less so after 1928, when national Republicans began to convince many white Southerners that they, rather than Democrats, represented the true party of social conservatism as well as economic progress. Until that time, the Southern wing of the Democratic Party used a states’ rights philosophy to successfully bill itself legacies 98 as the guardian of racial segregation, sexual chastity, and Christian social values. Yet, between 1877 and 1902, Republicans, Greenbackers, Independents, Prohibitionists, and Populists all challenged the seemingly invincible Southern Democratic Party. After 1902, Socialists, Progressives, and Republicans continued to offer alternatives to the Democratic Party, but with ever-dwindling success in convincing voters to abandon the “party of their fathers.” From Mississippi and Texas, respectively, Jasper J. Collins and his brother Warren J. Collins were central figures in dissident political factions from within their separate communities. Between 1894 and 1920, they and their cohorts espoused radical agrarian views, successively joining the Populist, Progressive, and Socialist Parties during these years. Religion joined third-party movements to challenge the prevailing political order. As conservative Democrats “redeemed” the state from Republicans , a circle of Jones County Unionists, including Jasper Collins, helped to found a Universalist Church in rural Mississippi. Universalism’s fundamental tenet of God’s universal goodness and salvation for all humankind distanced these Southerners from their opponents, religiously as well as politically. We have seen that dissent was a Collins family tradition. At least three generations of Collinses, most of whom intermarried with other equally feisty family lines, rejected conventional political parties and religious denominations . What can we learn from the half-hidden, often distorted, history of these families of southeastern Mississippi and East Texas? In telling the stories of their resistance, chapter 5 suggests the potential for a very different South than that which emerged from the ashes of war. In Texas, Warren J. Collins proved to be a magnet for kinfolk hoping to make a fresh start after the war. Jasper, however, did not join his kinfolks’ caravans west but remained in Jones County, where he participated in state and local politics. And what about Newt Knight, the ultimate New South dissident? Newt does not appear prominently in chapter 5 because his political career was short-circuited by his open embrace of his mixed-race descendants. Chapter 6, however, explores the legacy of Newt’s rejection of the color line. There was nothing unusual about Southern white men having sexual relations with black women, forced or consensual, right under their wives’ noses, particularly before slavery was abolished. But Newt’s postReconstruction ­interracial homestead was quite unusual. He lived openly legacies 99 in the community he had founded, among his interracial kin, for the rest of his life. Not only Newt, but also his white wife, Serena, broke the social rules of southern segregationist society. Although Serena left his household sometime between 1880 and 1900, she did not completely leave the racially mixed Knight community, even after several of her grown children married white partners and left. Rather, she lived with her daughter Mollie and son-in-law Jeffrey...