The Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan in York County, South Carolina, 1865-1877
The Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan in York County, South Carolina, 1865-1877

Author: Jerry Lee West

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2002-01-01

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 9780786412587

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The Reconstruction was meant to be a time of rebuilding and healing for the South following the Civil War. But the Reconstruction, marked by the continued strong hatred and hostility between liberated African Americans and angry Ku Klux Klan members, was hardly a time of reconciliation for the South. This work deals with the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan, a paramilitary group with political aims that used violence and intimidation to achieve its goals. It addresses exclusively the Klans activities in York County, South Carolina, during the years 1865-1877. It clarifies some misconceptions about the Reconstruction Klan and disentangles it from later organizations that used the same name. There are no reports of its burning crosses or persecuting Jews and Catholics and it has no connection to the Klan that appeared in the early part of the twentieth century or todays counterpart that marches under the Confederate flag. Throughout the Reconstruction, blacks and whites tried to out-shout each other in the new era of conversation, and, as shown in this work, made little progress in understanding, or trying to understand, each other.

Anthropology Across Borders and Limits
Anthropology Across Borders and Limits

Author: Roman Ignatiev

Publisher: African Books Collective

Published: 2024-01-23

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 1988391210

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This volume presents a collection of papers on New World anthropology and history, from physical anthropology to historical memory to women’s history. The papers were presented at the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Russian-American Research Nexus (RARN) Forums, and offer a unique perspective on the New World from a variety of Russian and American scholars. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of anthropology and history of the New World. It is also an essential resource for anyone interested in the latest research on this important topic.

Carpetbaggers, Cavalry, and the Ku Klux Klan
Carpetbaggers, Cavalry, and the Ku Klux Klan

Author: James Michael Martinez

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780742550780

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In some places during Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was a social fraternity whose members enjoyed sophomoric high jinks and homemade liquor. In other areas, the KKK was a paramilitary group intent on keeping former slaves away from white women and Republicans away from ballot boxes. South Carolina saw the worst Klan violence and, in 1871, President Grant sent federal troops under the command of Major Lewis Merrill to restore law and order. Merrill did not eradicate the Klan, but he arguably did more than any other person or entity to expose the identity of the Invisible Empire as a group of hooded, brutish, homegrown terrorists. In compiling evidence to prosecute the leading Klansmen and restoring at least a semblance of order to South Carolina, Merrill and his men demonstrated that the portrayal of the KKK as a chivalric organization was at best a myth and at worst a lie. Book jacket.

Coming for to Carry Me Home
Coming for to Carry Me Home

Author: J. Michael Martinez

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Published: 2011-12-22

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1442215003

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Coming for to Carry Me Home examines the history of the politics surrounding U.S. race relations during the half century between the rise of the abolitionist movement in the 1830s and the dawn of the Jim Crow era in the 1880s. J. Michael Martinez argues that Abraham Lincoln and the Radical Republicans in Congress were the pivotal actors, albeit not the architects, that influenced this evolution. To understand how Lincoln and his contemporaries viewed race, Martinez first explains the origins of abolitionism and the tumultuous decade of the 1830s, when that generation of political leaders came of age. He then follows the trail through Reconstruction, Redemption, and the beginnings of legal segregation in the 1880s. This book addresses the central question of how and why the concept of race changed during this period.

Freedom on Trial
Freedom on Trial

Author: Scott Farris

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-12-15

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 1493046365

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The Confederacy lost the Civil War but quickly began to win the peace when a mysterious organization arose called the Ku Klux Klan. The Ku Klux, as it was then called, sought to restore white supremacy by terrorizing the formerly enslaved to prevent them from voting or owning firearms. To support Black resistance to the KKK’s campaign of murder and mayhem, President Ulysses S. Grant suspended the writ of habeas corpus in large portions of South Carolina and sent the famed 7th Cavalry to make mass arrests. Grant’s new attorney general, the first former Confederate to serve in a presidential Cabinet and an ardent advocate for Black equality, Amos T. Akerman, aggressively prosecuted the Ku Klux in a series of sensational trials that shocked the nation and forced a reckoning regarding just how much the Civil War and the recently enacted Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution had changed America and its notions of citizenship. Highlighting forgotten Black and white civil rights pioneers and weaving in the story of the author’s own great-grandfather’s crimes as a member of the Ku Klux Klan, Freedom on Trial tells a gripping story of a moment pregnant with promise when race relations in the United States might have taken a dramatically different turn. It is a story that also offers a sober lesson for those engaged in the ongoing work of fulfilling the American promise of equality for all.

Patriots and Cosmopolitans
Patriots and Cosmopolitans

Author: John Fabian Witt

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-06-30

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 0674045289

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Ranging from the founding era to Reconstruction, from the making of the modern state to its post-New Deal limits, John Fabian Witt illuminates the legal and constitutional foundations of American nationhood through the stories of five patriots and critics. In their own way, each of these individuals came up against the power of American national institutions to shape the directions of legal change.

Vale of Tears
Vale of Tears

Author: Edward J. Blum

Publisher: Mercer University Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 9780865549623

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Vale of Tears: New Essays in Religion and Reconstruction offers a window into the exciting work being done by historians, social scientists, and scholars of religious studies on the epoch of Reconstruction. A time of both peril and promise, Reconstruction in America became a cauldron of transformation and change. This collection argues that religion provided the idiom and symbol, as often the very substance, of those changes. The authors of this collection examine how African Americans and white Southerners, New England Abolitionists and former Confederate soldiers, Catholics and Protestants on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line brought their sense of the sacred into collaboration and conflict. Together, these essays mark an important new departure in a still-contested period of American history. Interdisciplinary in scope and content, it promises to challenge many of the traditional parameters of Reconstruction historiography. The range of contributors to the project, including Gaines Foster and Paul Harvey, will draw a great deal of attention from Southern historians, literary scholars, and scholars of American religion.

The Bloody Shirt
The Bloody Shirt

Author: Stephen Budiansky

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2008-01-24

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 1101213930

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“Effective in showing the sheer depth and virulence of white supremacy in the South . . . This book and the story it tells should keep us vigilant at protecting our political rights, rendered sacred in the blood of Reconstruction, and beyond.”—The New York Sun A gripping look at terrorist violence during the Reconstruction era Between 1867, when the defeated South was forced to establish new state governments that fully represented both black and white citizens, and 1877, when the last of these governments was overthrown, more than three thousand African Americans and their white allies were killed by terrorist violence. Drawing on original letters and diaries as well as published racist diatribes of the time, acclaimed historian Stephen Budiansky concentrates his vivid, fast paced narrative on the efforts of five heroic men—two Union officers, a Confederate general, a Northern entrepreneur, and a former slave—who showed remarkable idealism and courage as they struggled to establish a New South in the face of overwhelming hatred and organized resistance. The Bloody Shirt sheds new light on the violence, racism, division, and heroism of Reconstruction, a largely forgotten but epochal chapter in American history.

A Guide to Olde York
A Guide to Olde York

Author: Yorkville Historical Society

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2020-04-20

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1439669694

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Welcome to York, a city that can trace its beginnings to the origins of York County, South Carolina. Explore the thirty different styles of architecture in a compact historic district that is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Within three blocks, discover how an elephant brought Santa Claus into town. Walk the paths of Catawba and Cherokee warriors and chiefs, as well as where leaders and militia rode during the Revolutionary War. And imagine the sights and sounds as Jefferson Davis gave his last public address before the cabinet of the Confederacy dissolved. The Yorkville Historical Society offers this fascinating history and more in a guided tour through the White Rose City.

Confederate Phoenix
Confederate Phoenix

Author: Edmund L. Drago

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 0823229378

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In this innovative book, Edmund L. Drago tells the first full story of white children and their families in the most militant Southern state, and the state where the Civil War erupted. Drawing on a rich array of sources, many of them formerly untapped, Drago shows how the War transformed the domestic world of the white South. Households were devastated by disease, death, and deprivation. Young people took up arms like adults, often with tragic results. Thousands of fathers and brothers died in battle; many returned home with grave physical and psychological wounds. Widows and orphans often had to fend for themselves. From the first volley at Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor to the end of Reconstruction, Drago explores the extraordinary impact of war and defeat on the South Carolina home front. He covers a broad spectrum, from the effect of "boy soldiers" on the ideals of childhood and child rearing to changes in education, marriage customs, and community as well as family life. He surveys the children's literature of the era and explores the changing dimensions of Confederate patriarchal society. By studying the implications of the War and its legacy in cultural memory, Drago unveils the conflicting perspectives of South Carolina children--white and black--today.