Preface TheLongShadowoftheCivilWar takes us inside the worlds of men and women whose deepest commitments were to family, community, and the principles of government that they believed best served both. In this book, you’ll meet Southerners like Newt Knight, Warren Collins, and Anna Knight, who were at once profoundly traditional in their beliefs and unorthodox in their actions. Whether they opposed the Confederacy in the Civil War, rejected conventional politics and religion after the war, or refused to accept race-based rights of citizenship, these Southerners fiercely defended their choices. For their efforts, they were frequently branded as renegades, outlaws, or even deviants. There are few more vivid images in popular culture than those purporting to portray “typical” Southerners. Television, movies, novels, and even mainstream newscasts have long presented us with white Southerners who take unusual pride in ancestry, revere military traditions, and glory in the causes of both the American Revolution and the Civil War. Popular images of African American Southerners commonly center on slavery, segregation, and the civil rights movement. Less common are images of white Southerners who rejected the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy or of the deep ties of kinship that linked whites, blacks, and Native Americans in a world bounded by unequal relations of power. Regardless of whether one views the South sympathetically or critically, white Southerners are almost invariably assumed to have supported the Confederate cause in the Civil War. In popular memory, the war became a chief symbol of white Southern cultural identity. The “proof” for such Preface x assumptions is often found in old obituaries, reports of family reunions, or local histories that note the illustrious Confederate service of individual family members. As every courtroom lawyer knows, however, there are the “facts” and there are the “true facts.” The mere publication of family facts does not make them true, nor did enlistment in the Confederate Army prove that one supported the Confederate cause. The Civil War home front schisms presented in this book demonstrate the extraordinary power of kinship, family, and community in people’s lives. In protecting what was closest to them— loved ones, land, and the daily rituals of neighborhood— men and women struggled to meet the concrete and immediate needs of life. Abstract notions of honor or political valor often had no place in this struggle. Yet political ideology did have its place. For Southern Unionists, ideology was grounded in the struggles of the American Revolution of their ancestors, the nationalizing War of 1812, and the settling of frontier communities that marked their family’s participation in building a republican nation. For enslaved Southerners, the war brought an exhilarating struggle for freedom while simultaneously threatening their safety and their very lives. For all, the American Civil War was at once a local and a national crisis. As the Civil War ripped at the fabric of society, it created a home front of uncertainty, deprivation, and grief, forcing people to draw on their deepest psychological and material resources to sustain themselves and each other. When we look back, it is comforting to think of people “pulling together” in a time of such intense stress and to imagine that their suffering led to a deeper appreciation of fellow human beings. The Civil War home front was far too complicated, however, for glib characterizations. True, there were many touching instances of kindnesses shared between strangers, as well as some unexpected alliances between groups separated by barriers of class, race, and gender. Yet home front conditions also remind us of how rigid those barriers were. For the past twenty-five years, I have researched Civil War dissenters and their descendants in North Carolina, Mississippi, and Texas. As a result of my research in North Carolina records, I encountered the Free State of Jones, a Civil War uprising in which my own Bynum ancestors participated. The Free State of Jones in turn led me to the Big Thicket jayhawkers. Here I expand upon that research in a series of discrete, yet interrelated, chapters. The North Carolina Piedmont, the Mississippi Piney Woods, and the Big Thicket region of Hardin County, Texas, form the geographic bases for six [3.229.122.112] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 14:06 GMT) Preface xi chapters, as well as an introduction and epilogue. The Southern stories they tell offer compelling narratives of bold actions and expressions of outrage by white people who did not honor the cause of secession, who in fact hated the Confederacy with a passion, so...