(Un)Furl That Banner: The Response of White Southerners to the Civil War Centennial of 1961-1965

2002 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 879 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Cook
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
White Southerners

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.

Reunited with Bands of Iron

2019 ◽  
pp. 17-44
Author(s):  
R. Scott Huffard
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
New South ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
The North ◽  
New Development ◽  
Cultural Power ◽  
Expansion Strategies

This chapter details how white southerners used the economic and cultural power of the railroad to reunify with the North and to move beyond the sectional tensions of the Civil War. For white southerners, the memory of the war and the destruction of the region’s railroads inspired calls for new development. Travel narratives and arguments from boosters like Henry Grady show how these elites saw the railroad as critical to idea that a New South would rise. The chapter then goes into a discussion of how northern railroad corporations like the Illinois Central and Louisville & Nashville pursued southern expansion strategies after the Civil War. Finally, the chapter discusses a key moment of reunification in 1886, when southern railroads shifted the gauge of thousands of miles of track to match the northern standard gauge.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Milewski
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Global History ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
The World ◽  
Progressive Force ◽  
Judicial Systems

African Americans’ experiences in southern courts during the eight-and-a-half decades after the Civil War is part of a larger, global story of struggles for rights within the courts. White southerners’ efforts to control people of color through the courts is also part of that wider, global history. The very structure of judicial systems often enabled them to serve as both a conservative and a progressive force. In many countries around the world, the courts have been used both to uphold elites’ power and to challenge that same power....

You Must Remember This

2018 ◽  
pp. 155-182
Author(s):  
Nina Silber
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
World War ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
War Narrative ◽  
At Home

In the lead up to World War II, and in the course of the war itself, memories of the Civil War were deployed once again. This time, the war, the fight against slavery, and Lincoln in particular, assumed noteworthy prominence, reminding Americans of the importance of fighting a just and moral war. However, this created a challenging rhetorical environment for cementing a united homefront – including both white southerners and African Americans. White southerners, like Douglas Freeman, tried to keep Confederates prominent in the Civil War narrative, while black Americans used the new emphasis on Lincoln to talk about racial oppression at home and abroad. An anti-communist backlash, in the end, helped silence voices that focused on problems of racial oppression.

How to Litigate a Case Against a White Southerner

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Milewski
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Civil Cases ◽  
White Southerner

Chapter 2 traces the legal journey of African Americans who succeeded in litigating cases against white southerners in the 35 years after the Civil War. In many cases, they litigated suits against the very whites who had enslaved them. The chapter discusses why black southerners turned to the courts and the obstacles they met in attempting to litigate suits against whites. It follows black southerners as they hired lawyers, testified before crowded courtrooms, and appealed their suits to their state’s highest courts. It discusses as well why white lawyers represented black litigants, the motivations of white and black witnesses in such suits, and the considerations of juries and judges deciding civil cases between black and white southerners.

Challenging Whites’ Bequests

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Milewski
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
White Americans ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
The Right

Chapter 3 examines cases in which masters had set aside money in their wills for their slaves to be emancipated and sent to Liberia upon their owner’s death. In the 35 years after the Civil War, former slaves who had been sent to Liberia or had been slated to be sent to Liberia brought suits in southern courts over these wills to try to gain funds that had been left for their emigration. There, in postwar courts, their suits appealing to white men’s last testaments would often fare well before judges and juries of white southerners, who sought to uphold the right of white Americans to do what they wished with their property upon their death.

The Post-Civil War Racial Separations in Southern Protestantism: Another Look

1977 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 453-473 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth K. Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Racial Attitudes ◽  
Higher Learning ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Methodist Episcopal ◽  
Public Office ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Methodist Episcopal Church ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Scholars who have assessed the racial attitudes of southern Protestants in the late nineteenth century have strangely neglected the pronouncements of two outspoken bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Affirming in the 1880s that white southerners would “never tamely and without protest submit to the intrusion of colored men into places of trust and profit and responsibility,” Bishop George Foster Pierce insisted that blacks had no “right on juries, [in] legislatures, or in [other] public office.” And he frowned equally on their pursuit of higher learning; advanced schooling instilled expectations of advancement “far above the station he [the Negro] was created to fill,” the churchman felt, including hopes for interracial mating. Nor was the succeeding senior Southern Methodist bishop more liberal in outlook.

scholarly journals Honor and Humiliation: James Chesnut and Violent Emotions in Reconstruction South Carolina

2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-49
Author(s):  
Anna Koivusalo
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Emotional Expression ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Life Goals ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Southern Honor

Reconstruction has been seen as the period of redeeming lost southern honor. I argue, however, that the Reconstruction struggle was not simply about restoring pre-war honor to defeated Southerners, for the Civil War had not terminated or subdued honor. Rather, its contents, the idea of what was honorable, underwent changes. These changes were observed and lamented by James Chesnut, Jr. (1815–1885), a politician from South Carolina. Honor can be seen both as a source of emotion guidelines and as a tool used for navigating between acceptable and unacceptable emotions. By expressing acceptable emotions, an individual could claim ownership to honor and attempt to achieve life goals. During Reconstruction, the role of honor and the importance of honor-related emotional expression intensified. Because of major changes in society, individual goals changed and the necessity of forceful alteration to the understanding of honor arose. It became transformed, borrowing from violence, racism, and a more acute fear of shame. Aiming to preserve white supremacy, many white Southerners readjusted their honor ideals and emotional expression. Nonetheless, some moderate individuals, like Chesnut, found it difficult to adopt these new ideals and thus all but lost their political power.

Defining Loyalty in an Age of Emancipation

2018 ◽  
pp. 87-117
Author(s):  
Erik Mathisen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
State Power ◽  
The United States ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
The Republic ◽  
American State

Beginning at the start of the war, the growth of the American state worked in tandem with concerns about the threats to that state’s survival from disloyal persons, all of which generated a rapid expansion of state power. By the middle of the Civil War, ideas about loyalty had coalesced around a new plan for the occupied South, a plan in which white southerners, shorn of their citizenship, would become colonial subjects of the American state. At the same time, the doctrine of emancipation created opportunities and challenges for African Americans, who grabbed the idea of loyalty as a key to their inclusion in the republic. Looking at how freedpeople both encouraged and challenged U.S. policy as soldiers and laborers, the chapter examines how officials came to realize that any future for the United States in the Confederate South lay in providing some measure of protection for loyal African Americans, in contrast to white southerners, whose loyalty was suspect.

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