The Jackson County War: Reconstruction and Resistance in Post–Civil War Florida by Daniel R. Weinfeld (review)

Daniel R. Weinfeld’s The Jackson County War: Reconstruction and Resistance in Post–Civil War Florida, examines a topic with which many scholars and students of Florida history will be familiar: the bloodshed and wanton loss of life in Jackson County during the early days of the state’s reconstruction. Historians seeking to better understand Reconstruction and the use of terror to subjugate freed persons in the Sunshine State have discussed at length the tragic events of the period. William Watson Davis’s Civil War and Reconstruction in Florida and John Wallace’s Carpetbag Rule in Florida were two of the earliest efforts to chronicle and interpret the violence in the Middle Florida county, and during the twentieth century, historians Joe M. Richardson, Jerrell Shofner, Richard Peek, Canter Brown, and others actively engaged the county’s violent past. Indeed, the assassination plots, murders, victims, as well as the names of those responsible for the violence have been a well-documented part of the state’s history for more than a century. Through his meticulous research, Weinfeld successfully presents the reader with the most detailed biographical sketches of many of the major participants in the violent era to date. In addition to an excellent discussion of the events of the period, the author provides new insight into the strengths and flaws of the many politicians who dominated Florida politics during Reconstruction.

Weinfeld begins The Jackson County War with a discussion of the peaceful character of the county prior to the Civil War and how Union victory ushered in dramatic economic and social change for the area’s black and white population. The book emphasizes that neither segment of the population fully comprehended the changes the war wrought, the most important being African American emancipation. Against this backdrop, Weinfeld introduces the two men whom many in Jackson County blamed for their problems with the African American population, Freedmen’s Bureau agents Charles Hamilton and William J. Purman.

Weinfeld then proceeds to discuss the period from the defeat of the Confederacy to the end of violence in the county in 1871. The author presents the reader with a history of how the violence evolved from isolated random individual acts of racial violence to a more organized group violence fueled by political as well as racial impulses. By the book’s end, Weinfield demonstrates that many of the chief perpetrators of the violence not only escaped punishment for the lawless acts, but benefited economically, socially, and politically for them.

Historians with interests in the history of African Americans in Florida will find Weinfeld wrestles with many of the same obstacles they have faced in studying free persons during this period, chief among them a scarcity of first-person accounts from African Americans who survived the era. The author uses testimony from congressional investigation of the Ku Klux Klan activity in the South, court cases, and newspaper articles to recount what life was like for African Americans living in Jackson County and how they responded to the murders and violence that became a common feature of their lives during Reconstruction. Although the author weaves a very powerful narrative of what the group faced in Jackson County—with the exception of prominent African American politician Emanuel Fortune and the County’s African American justice of the peace, Calvin Rogers—outside of being targets of violence, African Americans as a group appear to occupy only secondary roles in the drama, despite comprising half of Jackson County’s postwar population. The murder of Maggie McClellan described in the book’s introduction was likely in retaliation for a failed assassination attempt that resulted in the death of a small African American child, but it does not become clear that the suspected perpetrator was the actual target until later in the work. Readers will very likely leave this book understanding that further scrutiny of...