“Dem Was Hard Times, Sho’ Nuff”

2021 ◽  
pp. 39-58
Author(s):  
Peter Irons
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Civil War ◽  
New Deal ◽  
White Men ◽  
Vice President ◽  
Hard Times

This chapter is almost entirely in the words of two very different groups of people: the first is four White men, all distinguished in state and federal offices, who defended slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War; the second is composed of thirteen former slaves, in accounts of their lives recorded and transcribed in the 1930s by a New Deal agency, the Federal Writers Project. The four slavery defenders are John Calhoun of South Carolina, a former vice president, who predicted an eventual breakup of the Union over slavery; George Fitzhugh, a lawyer who claimed that Black slaves were “happy” and well-cared-for by their masters; Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, who resigned from the Senate in 1861 to become president of the Confederacy; and Alexander Stephens of Georgia, who served as Davis’s vice president. Countering the myth of the “happy slave,” its victims recounted the brutality they endured, the breakup of slave families by selling wives from husbands and children from parents, and the “breeding” of “big black bucks” with multiple women to produce more slaves.

scholarly journals The Tenuous Attachments of Working-Class Men

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn Edin ◽  
Timothy Nelson ◽  
Andrew Cherlin ◽  
Robert Francis
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Child Support ◽  
Ethnic Difference ◽  
Metropolitan Areas ◽  
Ethnically Diverse ◽  
White Men ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Work Family ◽  
Diverse Groups

In this essay, we explore how working-class men describe their attachments to work, family, and religion. We draw upon in-depth, life history interviews conducted in four metropolitan areas with racially and ethnically diverse groups of working-class men with a high school diploma but no four-year college degree. Between 2000 and 2013, we deployed heterogeneous sampling techniques in the black and white working-class neighborhoods of Boston, Massachusetts; Charleston, South Carolina; Chicago, Illinois; and the Philadelphia/Camden area of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. We screened to ensure that each respondent had at least one minor child, making sure to include a subset potentially subject to a child support order (because they were not married to, or living with, their child's mother). We interviewed roughly even numbers of black and white men in each site for a total of 107 respondents. Our approach allows us to explore complex questions in a rich and granular way that allows unanticipated results to emerge. These working-class men showed both a detachment from institutions and an engagement with more autonomous forms of work, childrearing, and spirituality, often with an emphasis on generativity, by which we mean a desire to guide and nurture the next generation. We also discuss the extent to which this autonomous and generative self is also a haphazard self, which may be aligned with counterproductive behaviors. And we look at racial and ethnic difference in perceptions of social standing.

The Civil War Agricultural New Deal

Social Forces ◽  
1936 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. D. Ross
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
New Deal

Secession and War

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John R. Kelso
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Critical Step ◽  
Early Experiences

In this chapter, John Russell Kelso narrates the events that occurred between April and July 1861 as the Civil War broke out. He recalls how his school closed a few weeks earlier than usual following the intense excitement generated by the firing upon Fort Sumpter by the secessionists of South Carolina. He considers his decision to stand by the Union as it prepared to fight the Confederate States to be the most critical step of his life. During a grand meeting called in their town, addressed by Peter Wilkes and other speakers from Springfield, Missouri. Kelso joined with others to form military companies called Home Guards. He was the first man to volunteer into this service. Kelso shares his early experiences as a Union soldier fighting the Confederate rebels.

Look Away! Dixie’s Landed!

2018 ◽  
pp. 123-154
Author(s):  
Nina Silber
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Gone With The Wind ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
The New Deal

The pro-Confederate Lost Cause memory of the Civil War continued to have considerable staying power during the 1930s, seen most notably in the popularity of the book and film versions of Gone With the Wind. At the same time, the Lost Cause was adapted to fit the sensibilities of this era. Many white Americans, for example, were drawn to the suffering of Civil War era white southerners in light of the economic trials of the 30s. Conservatives also doubled-down on the Lost Cause narrative as they pushed back against aspects of the New Deal agenda, as well as a reawakened civil rights movement and anti-lynching campaign. Finally, conservatives adapted the Lost Cause story to target Northern radicals and communists as the same kind of agitators who punished white southerners during Reconstruction. Black activists and communists tried to expose the racist and unpatriotic underpinnings of the Lost Cause but often fell short.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Nina Silber
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
New Deal ◽  
State Building ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Central Objective ◽  
Familial Influences ◽  
The New Deal

This introduction lays out the book’s central objective: to explore why Americans returned to the Civil War throughout the New Deal years. The Civil War offered a prism for exploring the emotional upheaval people experienced in light of the Depression; the political debates that swirled around the state-building initiatives of the New Deal; and struggles over race and civil rights. Also explored here is the evolution of this book, including personal and familial influences on the author.

Wartime

Keep the Days ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 47-69
Author(s):  
Steven M. Stowe
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Working Class ◽  
White Men ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Material World ◽  
The Moment

This chapter looks at women diarists from the southern slave-owning class looking at civil war. Some wrote a great deal about the battles and politics, while others wrote only occasionally about the far-reaching conflict. But all of the diarists comment on the sheer, local craziness of war—the reversals, weird occurrences, and outright destruction of lives and the material world. War demanded that they write in their diaries, but war also made writing inadequate. War shook up everything normal, and so the diarist found herself writing how normal time turned into something else—wartime. Women found themselves writing about cannonades and enemy soldiers at the door, about strange mutations in everything “every-day,” in the routines of home, the choice of clothing and food, and in the novel presence of working-class white men in the shape of Confederate soldiers. Wartime challenged women’s inventiveness as diarists, and it shows how the diary as a text—open, changeable, tied to the moment—brings wartime close to readers today.

This Division between Faith in Democracy and Power Descending from Authority

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Ritterhouse
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Textile Mill ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Great Smoky Mountains ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
The Road ◽  
Federal Intervention ◽  
Tennessee Valley ◽  
Poor White

This chapter traces the first leg of Jonathan Daniels's trip through the textile mill towns of North and South Carolina and into Tennessee. His ambivalent attitude toward working-class white southerners related to the popularity of poor-white caricatures in Erskine Caldwell's novels Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre. Daniels saw the impact of the Civilian Conservation Corps in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and pondered the effects of the Tennessee Valley Authority in Knoxville, Norris, and Chattanooga. TVA commissioner David Lilienthal reassured him that New Deal programs were committed to grassroots democracy rather than social planning by outsiders. Yet Daniels was conscious of the challenges to segregation and white supremacy the New Deal was likely to bring. Wary of federal intervention in the South, Daniels looked to the road ahead with even greater concerns about far left and far right, Communist and proto-fascist, alternatives.

On-Site Neutralization of Civil War Munitions Recovered From an Underwater Environment

2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (6) ◽  
pp. 15-22
Author(s):  
Valentine A. Nzengung ◽  
Ben Redmond
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Chemical Reduction ◽  
Army Corps ◽  
Army Corps Of Engineers ◽  
Black Powder ◽  
Underwater Environment ◽  
Explosive Ordnance Disposal ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
The U.S

AbstractThis paper describes the recovery, on-site nondestructive mechanical breaching, and chemical neutralization of munitions recovered from an underwater environment. The munitions were recovered during salvaging of the scuttled confederate states ship (CSS) Georgia, as part of the Savannah Harbor Expansion Project (SHEP). The CSS Georgia was scuttled on December 20, 1864. The CSS Georgia wreck site is on the Georgia and South Carolina border and covers an approximate area of 350 × 200 feet at a depth of about 36 feet. Because the CSS Georgia shipwreck site would obstruct the SHEP, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) entered into agreements to salvage some artifacts, including the munitions, for conservation. Due to the historical significance of the artifacts and the munitions among the CSS Georgia wreckage, the USACE required that the munitions be neutralized in the safest and least destructive manner possible. The munitions on board the scuttled CSS Georgia consisted of two types of civil war era projectiles, often described as cannon balls. A total of 185 munitions were removed from the CSS Georgia site in 2015. The majority of the recovered projectiles (170) were mechanically breached, and energetics were safely neutralized using MuniRem, an innovative chemical reduction reagent for explosives. After the black powder was completely flushed and neutralized, fuzes were unscrewed, if it could be done safely; otherwise, the explosive ordnance disposal technicians drilled into the fuzes at an angle. The contents of the fuze were neutralized in a solution of MuniRem before reattachment to the projectile. The neutralized black powder solids and wastewater were disposed as nonhazardous wastes. This project constitutes the largest on-site chemical neutralization of recovered confederate and underwater disposed military munitions from the U.S. civil war era.

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