Plain Folk's Fight
Plain Folk's Fight

Author: Mark V. Wetherington

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2011-01-20

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 0807877042

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In an examination of the effects of the Civil War on the rural Southern home front, Mark V. Wetherington looks closely at the experiences of white "plain folk--mostly yeoman farmers and craftspeople--in the wiregrass region of southern Georgia before, during, and after the war. Although previous scholars have argued that common people in the South fought the battles of the region's elites, Wetherington contends that the plain folk in this Georgia region fought for their own self-interest. Plain folk, whose communities were outside areas in which slaves were the majority of the population, feared black emancipation would allow former slaves to move from cotton plantations to subsistence areas like their piney woods communities. Thus, they favored secession, defended their way of life by fighting in the Confederate army, and kept the antebellum patriarchy intact in their home communities. Unable by late 1864 to sustain a two-front war in Virginia and at home, surviving veterans took their fight to the local political arena, where they used paramilitary tactics and ritual violence to defeat freedpeople and their white Republican allies, preserving a white patriarchy that relied on ex-Confederate officers for a new generation of leadership.

Houses Divided
Houses Divided

Author: Lucas Volkman

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-02-01

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0190865733

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Houses Divided provides new insights into the significance of the nineteenth-century evangelical schisms that arose initially over the moral question of African American bondage. Volkman examines such fractures in the Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches of the slaveholding border state of Missouri. He maintains that congregational and local denominational ruptures before, during, and after the Civil War were central to the crisis of the Union in that state from 1837 to 1876. The schisms were interlinked religious, legal, constitutional, and political developments rife with implications for the transformation of evangelicalism and the United States from the late 1830s to the end of Reconstruction. The evangelical disruptions in Missouri were grounded in divergent moral and political understandings of slavery, abolitionism, secession, and disloyalty. Publicly articulated by factional litigation over church property and a combative evangelical print culture, the schisms were complicated by the race, class, and gender dynamics that marked the contending interests of white middle-class women and men, rural church-goers, and African American congregants. These ruptures forged antagonistic northern and southern evangelical worldviews that increased antebellum sectarian strife and violence, energized the notorious guerilla conflict that gripped Missouri through the Civil War, and fueled post-war vigilantism between opponents and proponents of emancipation. The schisms produced the interrelated religious, legal and constitutional controversies that shaped pro-and anti-slavery evangelical contention before 1861, wartime Radical rule, and the rise and fall of Reconstruction.