Who Killed John Clayton? Political Violence and the Emergence of the New South, 1861-1893 (review)

book reviews325 emerge. While small, the Corps provided useful service. The ability of ship's guards to maintain order was important to the rapidly expanding U.S. Navy. Marines seem to have been particularly useful for countering snipers and forming small landing parties during the river and coastal blockade operations which formed the bulk of the navy's activities. Marine officers were quick to take offense and prone to petty squabbles. Sullivan includes nearly two hundred illustrations, photographs, and maps. Most ofthese consist ofpictures from contemporary popular histories and posed studio photographs.All ofthe maps are reproductions ofcontemporary sketches and maps. While of historical interest, the maps are not linked to the text and do little to clarify the often confusing descriptions of operations. This is an exhaustively researched book. Sullivan seems to have read every letter, diary, and report written by or about Marines, and quoted most at length. This is a boon to the researcher, but it makes for a plodding, repetitive narrative. Sullivan also assumes that his reader is intimately familiar with the Marine Corps during this period. For example, on the first page and numerous subsequent pages Sullivan refers to "Harris" but does not mention that this was Col. John Harris, the Commandant ofthe Marine Corps, until page 49. It would have been helpful if he had reprinted the list of abbreviations provided in his first volume. The U. S. Marine Corps in the Civil War—The Second Year will provide a useful reference for anyone interested in the details ofthe Marine Corps' role in the Civil War. David A. Dawson Ohio State University Who Killed John Clayton ? Political Violence and the Emergence of the New South, 1861-1893. By Kenneth C. Barnes. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998. Pp. xii, 203. $4995, cloth; $16.95, paper.) On the evening of January 29, 1889, an unknown assailant assassinated John M. Clayton, an unsuccessful Republican candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives , at his hotel in Plummerville, Conway County, Arkansas. Clayton was in that town securing evidence of fraud that he intended to use to contest his Democratic opponent's right to the Congressional seat. He was concerned particularly with gathering testimony concerning the theft of the local ballot box, which would have contained hundreds of pro-Clayton African American votes. This crime provides the central focus for this fascinating study by Kenneth C. Barnes, a native of Conway County, now on the history faculty at the University of Central Arkansas. Who KilledJohn Clayton? is, in fact, much more than simply an examination of murder. Barnes uses this incident as the entry into the world of a post-Civil War Southern community, scrutinizing Conway County's social drama, discovering the tensions that made possible the murder of a highly visible public 326civil war history figure. The testimony collected in the unsuccessful federal prosecution of men alleged to be involved in the murder and in the Congressional investigation of the 1 888 election, contemporary newspaper articles on the case and Arkansas society, with the addition even of modem folklore about the assassination provide the keys to Barnes's analysis. If this microscopic history reflects the approaches of European historians Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Carlo Ginzburg, or Giovanni Levi, Barnes's own training in European history probably accounts for the fact. Barnes finds the origins of the Clayton murder in the Civil War, which divided Conway County into factions based largely on region and class and whose members readily killed each other to achieve their ends. A war begun as a part of the great national crisis could hardly end locally with the surrender of the Confederate armies. Once unleashed, this violent struggle for local power continued into the postwar years and the intense feelings generated by the war made it possible for the continued use of violence to resolve the conflict. Especially in the 1 88os, when a potential coalition between white subsistence farmers and African Americans within Conway County threatened the electoral majority of white elites, the latter had little recourse but to use violence as a political weapon when politics as usual would not maintain their power. And the twenty years of violence that...