Mixed Race Studies

The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies [Book Review]

Civil War Book Review
Summer 2010

Michael Perman, Professor of History and Research Professor of Humanities
University of Illinois, Chicago

Family and Dissent in the South during and after the Civil War

Bynum, Victoria E. The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Victoria Bynum’s new book expands on her 2002 study, The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War, because it supplements the resistance against the Confederate government in southern Mississippi with two other similar revolts, one in east Texas and the other in central North Carolina. The outcome is not a longer book but a very compact volume of just 148 pages of text that presents, to a wider audience than most scholarly monographs, the little-known story of this local opposition to the Confederacy. Bynum then proceeds to show that, after the war, these same three pockets of resistance generated a pattern of dissidence that continued throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. This “long shadow of the Civil War” consisted of a tradition of dissent that passed through several generations within the families and communities that were involved in these three initial anti-Confederate insurgencies.

…The people who engaged in these overt acts of resistance were, according to Bynum, non-slaveholding farmers who lived outside the plantation areas of their states and who increasingly resented the conflict as “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight” that was also perceived as “a slaveowners’ war and a non-slaveowners’ fight.” Moreover, these rebels came from the same local communities and were even related to each other. As kinfolk, they banded together, with the women playing a major role in the resistance, protecting their families and communities from Confederate threats to their livelihood and shielding their male kin who were of draft-age. A third characteristic was their independent spirit and their nonconformist behavior. One of the most prominent of them, Newt Knight, lived openly with his racially-mixed family and their offspring, defiantly unconventional conduct that is described in some detail in the book’s sixth and final chapter…

…Victoria Bynum’s interest in Anna Knight is especially understandable, since one of her fields is women’s history and her first book was Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (1992). In fact, two chapters of the six in The Long Shadow of the Civil War focus on women, while a third deals with women and race. Chapter two emphasizes the part played by women, primarily in the Quaker Belt, within the resistance against the Confederacy. Not only did women support this dangerous defiance but they acted on their own in many aspects of it, in particular harboring deserters and encouraging their sons to refuse to enlist. Chapter six is about “The Women of the Knight Family” and it explores the very complicated and independent maneuvers that these mixed-race women employed to deal with the conventions of race and gender in the Jim Crow South. And lastly, chapter three examines the resistance in North Carolina’s Quaker Belt that was mounted during the post-war period of Reconstruction against the former Confederates and the Ku Klux Klan who were determined to remove the Republicans from control of their state and to restore the freedmen to the subordinate position they had endured as slaves. In this contest, black women in particular challenged attempts to control their autonomy especially their sexuality, even defending themselves in court, a remarkable development so soon after emancipation…

Read the entire review here.

The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies [Review by Paul D. Escott]

H-Net Reviews
May, 2010
3 pages

Paul D. Escott, Reynolds Professor of History
Wake Forest University

“Few histories,” writes Victoria Bynum, “are buried faster or deeper than those of political and social dissenters” (p. 148). The Long Shadow of the Civil War disinters a number of remarkable dissenters in North Carolina, Mississippi, and Texas. It introduces the reader to stubbornly independent and courageous Southerners in the North Carolina Piedmont, the Mississippi Piney Woods, and the Big Thicket region around Hardin County, Texas. These individuals and family groups were willing to challenge their society’s coercive social conventions on race, class, and gender. They resisted the established powers when dissent was not only unpopular but dangerous–during the Civil War and the following decades of white supremacy and repressive dominance by the Democratic Party. Their histories remind us of two important truths: that the South was never as monolithic as its rulers and many followers tried to make it; and that human beings, though generally dependent on social approval and acceptance by their peers, are capable of courageous, independent, dissenting lives…

…In nearby Orange County, North Carolina, there was “a lively interracial subculture” whose members “exchanged goods and engaged in gambling, drinking, and sexual and social intercourse” (p. 9). During the war these poor folks, who had come together despite “societal taboos and economic barriers,” supported themselves and aided resistance to the Confederacy by stealing goods and trading with deserters. During Reconstruction elite white men, who felt that their political and economic dominance was threatened along with their power over their wives and households, turned to violence to reestablish control. Yet interracial family groups among the poor challenged their mistreatment and contributed to “a fragile biracial political coalition” (pp. 55-56) that made the Republican Party dominant before relentless attacks from the Ku Klux Klan nullified the people’s will…

…Professor Bynum closes her book with a chapter on the interracial offspring of Newt and Rachel Knight. Called “white Negroes” or “Knight’s Negroes” by their neighbors, these individuals continued to exhibit an independent spirit as they dealt with their society and with each other. They chose to identify themselves in a variety of ways; different members of the family adopted different approaches to life. Some passed as white, others affirmed their African American identity, and still others saw themselves as people of color but kept a distance from those whom society defined as Negroes. Within the family group there were many independent spirits. One woman, the ascetic Anna Knight, forged a long and energetic career as an educator and Seventh-Day Adventist missionary…

Read the entire review here.

The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies

University of North Carolina Press
April 2010
240 pp.
6.125 x 9.25, 9 illus.
1 map, notes, bibl., index
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8078-3381-0
Large Print ISBN: 978-0-8078-7909-2

Victoria E. Bynum, Emeritus Professor of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

In The Long Shadow of the Civil War, Victoria Bynum relates uncommon narratives about common Southern folks who fought not with the Confederacy, but against it. Focusing on regions in three Southern states–North Carolina, Mississippi, and Texas—Bynum introduces Unionist supporters, guerrilla soldiers, defiant women, socialists, populists, free blacks, and large interracial kin groups that belie stereotypes of the South and of Southerners as uniformly supportive of the Confederate cause.

Examining regions within the South where the inner civil wars of deadly physical conflict and intense political debate continued well into the era of Reconstruction and beyond, Bynum explores three central questions. How prevalent was support for the Union among ordinary Southerners during the Civil War? How did Southern Unionists and freed people experience both the Union’s victory and the emancipation of slaves during and after Reconstruction? And what were the legacies of the Civil War–and Reconstruction–for relations among classes and races and between the sexes, both then and now?

Centered on the concepts of place, family, and community, Bynum’s insightful and carefully documented work effectively counters the idea of a unified South caught in the grip of the Lost Cause.

Visit Dr. Bynum’s blog Renegade South here.