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Gendered Strife and Confusion The Political Culture of Reconstruction By Laura F. Edwards University of Illinois Press, 1997 378 pp. Cloth, $49.95; Paper, $24.95 Reviewed by Christopher Waldrep of the Eastern Illinois University Department of History, author of Night Riders: Defending Community in the Black Patch, 1890—191j and Roots ofDisorder: Race and CriminalJustice in the American South, ?8??—?88?. Historians have rehabilitated that time before Redemption when African Americans actively participated in the southern polity. Some of the most exciting scholarship in this project looks at particular southern places. Kenneth C. Barnes, in Who KilledJohn Clayton?Political Violence andtheEmergence ofthe NewSouth, 1861—1893, found a competitive two-party democracy thriving in one Arkansas county. Working in Washington County, Texas, Don Nieman documented a legal system delivering fair and even-handed justice under Republican rule. In the prizewinning GenderandJim Crow: Women andthe Politics ofWhite Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896—1920, Glenda Gilmore looked at North Carolina, finding that in Reconstruction even some whites began to believe that merit and hard work should matter more than family background. None of these scholars would deny that white conservatives triumphed, but all insist that for a few years during Congressional Reconstruction a kind ofgolden age prevailed. Laura Edwards adds her voice to this chorus, arguing that Reconstruction represented a time when poor people could make themselves heard. Edwards begins GenderedStrife and Confusion with Susan Daniel, one of those marginal people manipulated in her own time and subsequendy overlooked by historians. In 1 864 Daniel accused two slaves of rape and audiorities later hanged one of the pair. Conservative governorJonathan Worth claimed that the case illustrated the horrors of northern occupation. Worth pictured Daniel as a loyal wife and gende mother, debauched by black villains who had been emboldened by federal agents. Robert Avery, the local Freedmen's Bureau officer, insisted diat Daniel's alleged rape documented the corruption ofsouthern society and its domination by southern slaveowners; he even claimed Daniel had seduced her so-called attackers. Edwards criticizes both Worth and Avery. Both men relegated Daniel to a stereotype devised by odiers, excluding her true feelings and ambitions from the Reviews ? o 5 public debate over serious political issues. Neither Worth nor Avery wanted to believe tiiat a poor woman like Daniel might have the power to shape her own life and history. In the account Edwards provides, neither Daniel nor her alleged attackers accepted the passive roles assigned to diem. She and odier Reconstruction women used die courts, seized opportunities, and took action. According to Edwards, Worth and Avery had to work hard to keep women like Daniel outside the public arena. The thesis of GenderedStrife and Confusion is that ideas about gender played an active role in shaping Reconstruction history. Edwards argues that in the slavery era southern men and women acquired formal legal identities through their households. These identities forged the structure of social and political relations throughout the South. Emancipation remade the soudiern household, forcing white authorities to rely on law to regulate social relations. This move to law implied universal rights, a fact conservatives could not escape, as much as they might have wished to do so. Edwards finds that after emancipation African Americans and poor whites used this universalism to frame their demands for equality ofrights. Conservative whites longed to recreate the antebellum household headed by male patriarchs, but, in a chapter cleverly tided "You Can't Go Home Again," Edwards shows diat white elites believed they had no choice but to institutionalize black marriages. Under the old system only white people formally and legally married; now everyonecould marry. Whites did not like making this concession but believed that only by placing blacks under law could the former slaves' sexual passions be controlled at all. In this new world where authorities relied on law in unprecedented ways, whites established a merit system to assign worth. Whereas slavery mandated a hierarchical system without social mobility, in the post-slavery era those in power announced themselves willing to reward hard work and energy with merit. But instead ofallowing a genuinely level playing field, white elites used this system to justify themselves and condemn others as immoral and...

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