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PART II: Reconstruction and Beyond
- The University of North Carolina Press
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part ii Reconstruction and Beyond the union’s defeat of the Confederacy in 1865 should have been a time of jubilant celebration for pro-Union Southerners and newly freed slaves. And so it was, at least initially. Victory over the Confederacy produced heady, hopeful times for Union men, many of whom gained unprecedented political power. But before the decade’s end, the tide had turned against both white and black Republicans. Chapters 3 and 4 reveal the interrelated yet distinct struggles of two communities of dissenters in the post–Civil War South: poor white and African American citizens of Orange County, North Carolina, and white pro-Union deserters of the Confederate Army in Jones County, Mississippi. For citizens of African descent, the burning question during Reconstruction was whether they would be allowed to exercise the social, economic, and political freedoms granted them by the Republican-dominated U.S. Congress. Economically and politically, antebellum free black men were more prepared than most slaves to assume leadership roles in the postwar South. Thus, in Orange County, North Carolina, a number of male descendants of interracial unions were politically active in the immediate aftermath of Union victory. Despite societal taboos and economic barriers, Orange County whites and blacks, rich and poor, had regularly interacted with one another, socially and sexually, long before the war. Most obviously, sexual exploitation of enslaved women, a white male prerogative exercised throughout the antebellum South, had contributed to a large population of light-skinned African Americans. Not so obviously, white women also crossed the color reconstruction and beyond 56 line, although it was not their prerogative to do so, especially in older regions of the South with diverse populations. Chapter 3’s Lydia Bowers was such a woman. Like numerous unmarried white women from respectable yeoman families, Bowers was hauled before court magistrates after she became pregnant. Publicly shamed, such women’s chances for prosperous marriages typically plunged. But how were unmarried mothers to make a living? Many took jobs as domestics or field workers and lived quiet, obscure lives. Others became locally renowned “public women,” not necessarily prostitutes but members of interracial enclaves in which drinking, gambling, and informal exchanges of favors took place. Lydia chose the latter path. Chapter3tracestheeffectofLydia’spre–CivilWarsocioeconomicdescent on the life of her daughter, Ann Bowers Boothe, a woman of ambiguous racial identity, in post-Reconstruction North Carolina. Interracial mingling produced many such people in Orange County. After the war, poor whites and their African American kin contributed to a fragile biracial political coalition, which was relentlessly targeted by former Confederate leaders in their vicious counterrevolution against Republican Reconstruction. In overwhelmingly white Jones County, Mississippi, however, no such biracial political coalition developed. Jones County’s prewar population included virtually no free people of color; thus, there was no biracial free community such as that in Orange County on which to build. The lack of such a base, combined with racism, prevented most whites from even considering a postwar political alliance with former slaves. Yet harassment of former Unionists and freedpeople often emanated from the same white supremacist terrorists. Morgan Valentine, a former member of the Knight band, perhaps provided a clue to his decision to move his family to Colorado , where they embraced Mormonism, when he recalled the “Ku Klux” that “after the surrender . . . we had to contend with.”1 Despite the different racial compositions of the above counties, ordinary whites in both feared that racial equality would undermine their own precarious status. At Mississippi’s 1865 constitutional convention, Jones County delegate Thomas G. Crawford expressed such concerns when he spoke for the suffering yeoman farmers of Jones County, while expressing disdain for racial reform. Crawford framed his objections to political and social equality for African Americans in class-based rhetoric. Arguing that neither former slaves nor slaveholders ought to receive congressional funds, he condemned efforts by several legislators to compensate former slaveholders. Crawford called on [52.205.218.160] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 05:18 GMT) reconstruction and beyond 57 the state first to address the needs of impoverished white widows and children . At the same time, he objected to legislative debates over freedpeople’s status when so many whites in his district were suffering. “In honesty to this convention,” he implored his colleagues “to remember the white race [that is, the white yeomanry] and not be wholly absorbed in Africanism.”2 The “white race” that Crawford deemed more worthy of legislative aid was epitomized by Jones County’s Unionist rebels...