{"id":8859,"date":"2010-09-11T05:43:40","date_gmt":"2010-09-11T05:43:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=8859"},"modified":"2014-09-19T21:07:30","modified_gmt":"2014-09-19T21:07:30","slug":"the-long-shadow-of-the-civil-war-southern-dissent-and-its-legacies-book-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=8859","title":{"rendered":"The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies [Book Review]"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies [Book Review]<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Civil War Book Review<\/a>
\nSummer 2010<\/p>\n

Michael Perman<\/a><\/strong>, Professor of History and Research Professor of Humanities
\nUniversity of Illinois, Chicago<\/em><\/p>\n

Family and Dissen<\/em>t in the South during and after the Civil War<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Bynum, Victoria E. The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies<\/a><\/em>. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.<\/p>\n

Victoria Bynum\u2019s<\/a> new book expands on her 2002 study, The Free State of Jones: Mississippi\u2019s Longest Civil War<\/a><\/em>, because it supplements the resistance against the Confederate<\/a> government in southern Mississippi<\/a> with two other similar revolts, one in east Texas<\/a> and the other in central North Carolina<\/a>. 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 \u201clong shadow of the Civil War<\/a>\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

…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 \u201ca rich man\u2019s war and a poor man\u2019s fight\u201d that was also perceived as \u201ca slaveowners\u2019 war and a non-slaveowners\u2019 fight.\u201d 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<\/a>, lived openly with his racially-mixed family and their offspring, defiantly unconventional conduct that is described in some detail in the book\u2019s sixth and final chapter…<\/strong><\/p>\n

…Victoria Bynum\u2019s interest in Anna Knight is especially understandable, since one of her fields is women\u2019s history and her first book was Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South<\/em> (1992). In fact, two chapters of the six in The Long Shadow of the Civil War<\/em> 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 \u201cThe Women of the Knight Family\u201d 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 <\/strong>Jim Crow<\/strong><\/a> South.<\/strong> And lastly, chapter three examines the resistance in North Carolina\u2019s Quaker Belt that was mounted during the post-war period of Reconstruction<\/a> against the former Confederates and the Ku Klux Klan<\/a> 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<\/a>…<\/p>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,459,8,6940,20],"tags":[3808,2316,2000,3807,1457,1456,1453,1454],"class_list":["post-8859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-history","category-media-archive","category-slavery","category-usa","tag-anna-knight","tag-civil-war","tag-civil-war-book-review","tag-michael-perman","tag-newt-knight","tag-newton-knight","tag-victoria-bynum","tag-victoria-e-bynum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8859"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8859\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}