Download or read book Ballots and Fence Rails written by William McKee Evans and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ballots and Fence Rails recounts the struggle to reshape the post-Civil War society of the lower Cape Fear River in North Carolina, the Confederacy's last outlet to the sea. Focusing on events in the port city of Wilmington and its rural environs, William McKee Evans ranges in time from the region's occupation by Union forces in 1865 to the end of Reconstruction in 1877. Evans shows that although social change was sought at the ballot box, it was just as often resisted in the streets, with one faction armed with pistols and sabers and another, at one point, armed mostly with fence rails. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of the region, Evans dramatically portrays the conflict as it was viewed by former slaves, southern conservatives, carpetbaggers, and scalawags. Evans also clarifies many generalizations about Reconstruction that are often empty or unsubstantiated, showing that the right to vote cannot alone diffuse political power and that Reconstruction at the local level often differed from Reconstruction at the state level. First published in 1967, when local history was still viewed as parochial or less important than national history, Evans's work is now considered pioneering. In his foreword Charles Joyner writes that "by seeking the universal in the particular, by pursuing large questions in his small place, William McKee Evans in Ballots and Fence Rails makes an important and distinctive contribution to the historical discipline."
Download or read book Standing Their Ground written by Adrienne Monteith Petty and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The transformation of agriculture was one of the most far-reaching developments of the modern era. In analyzing how and why this change took place in the United States, scholars have most often focused on Midwestern family farmers, who experienced the change during the first half of the twentieth century, and southern sharecroppers, swept off the land by forces beyond their control. Departing from the conventional story, this book focuses on small farm owners in North Carolina from the post-Civil War era to the post-Civil Rights era. It reveals that the transformation was more protracted and more contested than historians have understood it to be. Even though the number of farm owners gradually declined over the course of the century, the desire to farm endured among landless farmers, who became landowners during key moments of opportunity. Moreover, this book departs from other studies by considering all farm owners as a single class, rejecting the widespread approach of segregating black farm owners. The violent and restrictive political culture of Jim Crow regime, far from only affecting black farmers, limited the ability of all farmers to resist changes in agriculture. By the 1970s, the vast reduction in the number of small farm owners had simultaneously destroyed a Southern yeomanry that had been the symbol of American democracy since the time of Thomas Jefferson, rolled back gains in landownership that families achieved during the first half century after the Civil War, and remade the rural South from an agrarian society to a site of global agribusiness.
Download or read book Slave Patrols written by Sally E. Hadden and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2003-10-30 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Obscured from our view of slaves and masters in America is a critical third party: the state, with its coercive power. This book completes the grim picture of slavery by showing us the origins, the nature, and the extent of slave patrols in Virginia and the Carolinas from the late seventeenth century through the end of the Civil War. Here we see how the patrols, formed by county courts and state militias, were the closest enforcers of codes governing slaves throughout the South. Mining a variety of sources, Sally Hadden presents the views of both patrollers and slaves as she depicts the patrols, composed of "respectable" members of society as well as poor whites, often mounted and armed with whips and guns, exerting a brutal and archaic brand of racial control inextricably linked to post-Civil War vigilantism and the Ku Klux Klan. City councils also used patrollers before the war, and police forces afterward, to impose their version of race relations across the South, making the entire region, not just plantations, an armed camp where slave workers were controlled through terror and brutality.
Download or read book Ghosts of the Confederacy written by Gaines M. Foster and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1987-04-23 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After Lee and Grant met at Appomatox Court House in 1865 to sign the document ending the long and bloody Civil War, the South at last had to face defeat as the dream of a Confederate nation melted into the Lost Cause. Through an examination of memoirs, personal papers, and postwar Confederate rituals such as memorial day observances, monument unveilings, and veterans' reunions, Ghosts of the Confederacy probes into how white southerners adjusted to and interpreted their defeat and explores the cultural implications of a central event in American history. Foster argues that, contrary to southern folklore, southerners actually accepted their loss, rapidly embraced both reunion and a New South, and helped to foster sectional reconciliation and an emerging social order. He traces southerners' fascination with the Lost Cause--showing that it was rooted as much in social tensions resulting from rapid change as it was in the legacy of defeat--and demonstrates that the public celebration of the war helped to make the South a deferential and conservative society. Although the ghosts of the Confederacy still haunted the New South, Foster concludes that they did little to shape behavior in it--white southerners, in celebrating the war, ultimately trivialized its memory, reduced its cultural power, and failed to derive any special wisdom from defeat.
Download or read book Freedom for Themselves written by Richard M. Reid and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than 5,000 North Carolina slaves escaped from their white owners to serve in the Union army during the Civil War. In Freedom for Themselves Richard Reid explores the stories of black soldiers from four regiments raised in North Carolina. Constructing a multidimensional portrait of the soldiers and their families, he provides a new understanding of the spectrum of black experience during and aftger the war.
Download or read book Across Fortune s Tracks written by Walter E. Campbell and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 1996 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Rand Kenan, Jr. (1872-1965) is best remembered throughout his native North Carolina as a major benefactor of his alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. But he was also a gifted scientist and business executive. In this first
Download or read book The Salmon P Chase Papers written by Salmon Portland Chase and published by Kent State University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 894 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Day of Blood written by LeRae Umfleet and published by North Carolina Division of Archives & History. This book was released on 2009 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this thoroughly researched, definitive study, LeRae Umfleet examines the actions that precipitated the riot; the details of what happened in Wilmington on November 10, 1898; and the long-term impact of that day in both North Carolina and across the nation.
Download or read book The Two Reconstructions written by Richard M. Valelly and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-10-02 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2005 J. David Greenstone Book Award from the Politics and History section of the American Political Science Association. Winner of the 2005 Ralph J. Bunche Award of the American Political Science Association Winner of the 2005 V.O. Key, Jr. Award of the Southern Political Science Association The Reconstruction era marked a huge political leap for African Americans, who rapidly went from the status of slaves to voters and officeholders. Yet this hard-won progress lasted only a few decades. Ultimately a "second reconstruction"—associated with the civil rights movement and the Voting Rights Act—became necessary. How did the first reconstruction fail so utterly, setting the stage for the complete disenfranchisement of Southern black voters, and why did the second succeed? These are among the questions Richard M. Valelly answers in this fascinating history. The fate of black enfranchisement, he argues, has been closely intertwined with the strengths and constraints of our political institutions. Valelly shows how effective biracial coalitions have been the key to success and incisively traces how and why political parties and the national courts either rewarded or discouraged the formation of coalitions. Revamping our understanding of American race relations, The Two Reconstructions brilliantly explains a puzzle that lies at the heart of America’s development as a political democracy.
Download or read book Black Wilmington and the North Carolina Way written by John L. Godwin and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2000 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this gripping narrative of the development of the Civil Rights movement in North Carolina, Dr. John L. Godwin brings to life the infamous case of the Wilmington Ten and the subsequent allegations of conspiracy. Through extensive research and interviews, he seeks to uncover some of the truth behind the actual events of the 1972 trial, while at the same time drawing readers in with the compelling details of the movement's origins in North Carolina and its ultimate outcome in one community. Dr. Godwin underscores his effort with a comprehensive exploration of the Civil Rights movement through the eyes of the locality, comparing it incisively to the earlier protests of the 1960s. His portrait joins that of scholars who have sought to describe the transformation brought about by black leadership on the local and state level, recounting both its victories and the frustrated hopes of local activists, in addition to how the new conservatism ultimately succeeded in co-opting the movement. For Wilmington, this is set against the background of North Carolina politics and civic culture, highlighting the role of Benjamin Chavis and his rise to national prominence. Filled with pictures that personalize this troubled era of American history, Dr. Godwin's book is an essential resource, not only to historians but also to students of public policy.
Download or read book There is a River written by Vincent Harding and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1981 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a comprehensive and organic historical survey of the black movement toward freedom in the United States.
Download or read book The Waterman s Song written by David S. Cecelski and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first major study of slavery in the maritime South, The Waterman's Song chronicles the world of slave and free black fishermen, pilots, rivermen, sailors, ferrymen, and other laborers who, from the colonial era through Reconstruction, plied the vast inland waters of North Carolina from the Outer Banks to the upper reaches of tidewater rivers. Demonstrating the vitality and significance of this local African American maritime culture, David Cecelski also reveals its connections to the Afro-Caribbean, the relatively egalitarian work culture of seafaring men who visited nearby ports, and the revolutionary political tides that coursed throughout the black Atlantic. Black maritime laborers played an essential role in local abolitionist activity, slave insurrections, and other antislavery activism. They also boatlifted thousands of slaves to freedom during the Civil War. But most important, Cecelski says, they carried an insurgent, democratic vision born in the maritime districts of the slave South into the political maelstrom of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Download or read book Wilmington s Lie written by David Zucchino and published by Atlantic Monthly Press. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Pulitzer Prize–winning, searing account of the 1898 white supremacist riot and coup in Wilmington, North Carolina. By the 1890s, Wilmington was North Carolina’s largest city and a shining example of a mixed-race community. It was a bustling port city with a burgeoning African American middle class and a Fusionist government of Republicans and Populists that included black aldermen, police officers and magistrates. There were successful black-owned businesses and an African American newspaper, The Record. But across the state—and the South—white supremacist Democrats were working to reverse the advances made by former slaves and their progeny. In 1898, in response to a speech calling for white men to rise to the defense of Southern womanhood against the supposed threat of black predators, Alexander Manly, the outspoken young Record editor, wrote that some relationships between black men and white women were consensual. His editorial ignited outrage across the South, with calls to lynch Manly. But North Carolina’s white supremacist Democrats had a different strategy. They were plotting to take back the state legislature in November “by the ballot or bullet or both,” and then use the Manly editorial to trigger a “race riot” to overthrow Wilmington’s multi-racial government. Led by prominent citizens including Josephus Daniels, publisher of the state’s largest newspaper, and former Confederate Colonel Alfred Moore Waddell, white supremacists rolled out a carefully orchestrated campaign that included raucous rallies, race-baiting editorials and newspaper cartoons, and sensational, fabricated news stories. With intimidation and violence, the Democrats suppressed the black vote and stuffed ballot boxes (or threw them out), to win control of the state legislature on November 8th. Two days later, more than 2,000 heavily armed Red Shirts swarmed through Wilmington, torching the Record office, terrorizing women and children, and shooting at least sixty black men dead in the streets. The rioters forced city officials to resign at gunpoint and replaced them with mob leaders. Prominent blacks—and sympathetic whites—were banished. Hundreds of terrified black families took refuge in surrounding swamps and forests. This brutal insurrection is a rare instance of a violent overthrow of an elected government in the United States. It halted gains made by blacks and restored racism as official government policy, cementing white rule for another half century. It was not a “race riot,” as the events of November 1898 came to be known, but rather a racially motivated rebellion launched by white supremacists. In Wilmington’s Lie, Pulitzer Prize–winner David Zucchino uses contemporary newspaper accounts, diaries, letters and official communications to create a gripping and compelling narrative that weaves together individual stories of hate and fear and brutality. This is a dramatic and definitive account of a remarkable but forgotten chapter of American history.
Download or read book George Crook written by Paul Magid and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2013-07-10 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renowned for his prominent role in the Apache and Sioux wars, General George Crook (1828–90) was considered by William Tecumseh Sherman to be his greatest Indian-fighting general. Although Crook was feared by Indian opponents on the battlefield, in defeat the tribes found him a true friend and advocate who earned their trust and friendship when he spoke out in their defense against political corruption and greed. Paul Magid’s detailed and engaging narrative focuses on Crook’s early years through the end of the Civil War. Magid begins with Crook’s boyhood on the Ohio frontier and his education at West Point, then recounts his nine years’ military service in California during the height of the Gold Rush. It was in the Far West that Crook acquired the experience and skills essential to his success as an Indian fighter. This is primarily an account of Crook’s dramatic and sometimes controversial role in the Civil War, in which he was involved on three fronts, in West Virginia, Tennessee, and Virginia. Crook saw action during the battle of Antietam and played important roles in two major offensives in the Shenandoah Valley and in the Chattanooga and Appomattox campaigns. His courage, leadership, and tactical skills won him the respect and admiration of his commanding officers, including Generals Grant and Sheridan. He soon rose to the rank of major general and received four brevet promotions for bravery and meritorious service. Along the way, he led both infantry and cavalry, pioneered innovations in guerrilla warfare, conducted raids deep into enemy territory, and endured a kidnapping by Confederate partisans. George Crook offers insight into the influences that later would make this general both a nemesis of the Indian tribes and their ardent advocate, and it illuminates the personality of this most enigmatic and eccentric of army officers.
Download or read book Race Place and Memory written by Margaret M. Mulrooney and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2022-03-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revealing work of public history that shows how communities remember their pasts in different ways to fit specific narratives, Race, Place, and Memory charts the ebb and flow of racial violence in Wilmington, North Carolina, from the 1730s to the present day. Margaret Mulrooney argues that white elites have employed public spaces, memorials, and celebrations to maintain the status quo. The port city has long celebrated its white colonial revolutionary origins, memorialized Decoration Day, and hosted Klan parades. Other events, such as the Azalea Festival, have attempted to present a false picture of racial harmony to attract tourists. And yet, the revolutionary acts of Wilmington’s African American citizens—who also demanded freedom, first from slavery and later from Jim Crow discrimination—have gone unrecognized. As a result, beneath the surface of daily life, collective memories of violence and alienation linger among the city’s black population. Mulrooney describes her own experiences as a public historian involved in the centennial commemoration of the so-called Wilmington Race Riot of 1898, which perpetuated racial conflicts in the city throughout the twentieth century. She shows how, despite organizers’ best efforts, a white-authored narrative of the riot’s contested origins remains. Mulrooney makes a case for public history projects that recognize the history-making authority of all community members and prompts us to reconsider the memories we inherit. A volume in the series Cultural Heritage Studies, edited by Paul A. Shackel Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Download or read book Reconstructing Democracy written by Justin Behrend and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within a few short years after emancipation, freedpeople of the Natchez District created a new democracy in the Reconstruction era, replacing the oligarchic rule of slaveholders and Confederates with a grassroots democracy that transformed the South after the Civil War.
Download or read book Politics in Wilmington and New Hanover County North Carolina 1865 1900 written by Jerome A. McDuffie and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 794 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
