Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865–1915 by K. Stephen Prince (review)

The long retreat from Reconstruction, culminating at the dawn of the twentieth century in a rigid system of racial subordination, has been the subject of a number of illuminating studies in recent years. While most of these books acknowledge that a changing national context, and not merely the South’s internal trajectory, is essential for understanding this process, scholarly attention has focused mainly on shifting political and economic trends. Concentrating on the intellectual and cultural context in which white southern identity was remade after the war, Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865–1915 brings new depth to our understanding of the nation’s turn away from the egalitarian possibilities that flickered briefly after slavery’s demise.

In exploring the reconstruction of white southern identity, K. Stephen Prince situates his book in recent historiography that challenges deeply embedded notions of southern exceptionalism. The conversation about whether the South remained distinctive, he insists, was a national one, and northerners played an active and critical role in reconfiguring the meaning of the South. Making impressive use of a diverse array of cultural artifacts—travelogues, speeches, newspaper editorials, regional literature, broadsides, playbills, minstrelsy, and film—the author succeeds in demonstrating the North’s deep entanglement in reforging an image of the South that remained distinctive yet could be fully absorbed into a shared national consensus on key issues of the day, including race.

Prince sets his work directly against the “reunion” narrative popularized in the work of David W. Blight and others that sees a reconciliation of two divergent sections. Prince sees a national convergence forged largely on the basis of resurgent racism. Erudite, forcefully argued, and in places beautifully written, the book is organized into three sections: “Reconstruction,” which corresponds closely with the period between emancipation and the restoration of white home rule; “Construction,” taking the story up to the consolidation of the New South vision in the mid-1890s; and “Destruction,” focused on the white South’s place in a “Jim Crow nation” (p. 11).

Using travel narratives and newspaper reports from the period immediately following the war, Prince conveys the sense of exoticism and naïveté that infused reports from northern observers. These reflected broader assumptions about the ease with which Reconstruction would change the region as free labor’s “magical transformative powers” took hold (p. 32). Popular in part because it demanded so little of northern whites, simple “Yankeeification” was untenable (p. 31). African Americans and Radical Republicans aimed for a more thoroughgoing national transformation, but they could never gain complete control. These arguments are familiar, although Prince’s insistence that the war had “destroyed [white] southern identity” takes the argument further than most, and probably too far (p. 21).

The middle section of the study offers the most original interpretive advance: rather than an “interregnum” marking the uneventful years between the high drama of Redemption and the definitive turn to Jim Crow, Prince sees instead a “crucial moment in the evolution of the sectional relationship” in which “conservative southern whites” took command of the national debate, reconfiguring a “New South” that boasted loudly of its attachment to “progress” even as it maintained racial hierarchies (p. 10). Just as Henry W. Grady and others insisted that the South should be left alone to solve its “negro problem,” so, too, southern writers “performed important cultural work,” insisting that they should be trusted to tell the South’s stories (pp. 218, 11). The demeaning and stylized spectacle of minstrelsy provided a coarse counterpart to the “moonlight and magnolias” marking literary production, and both reinforced—on a national stage—a benign memory of plantation slavery and collective indifference to the worsening predicament of African Americans (p. 11).

The development of a national consensus about race based on the white South’s terms coincided with...