Report of the Commission to Investigate Charges of Fraud and Corruption


Book Description

Reprint of the original, first published in 1872. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.







Reconstruction's Ragged Edge


Book Description

In this illuminating study, Steven E. Nash chronicles the history of Reconstruction as it unfolded in the mountains of western North Carolina. Nash presents a complex story of the region's grappling with the war's aftermath, examining the persistent wartime loyalties that informed bitter power struggles between factions of white mountaineers determined to rule. For a brief period, an influx of federal governmental power enabled white anti-Confederates to ally with former slaves in order to lift the Republican Party to power locally and in the state as a whole. Republican success led to a violent response from a transformed class of elites, however, who claimed legitimacy from the antebellum period while pushing for greater integration into the market-oriented New South. Focusing on a region that is still underrepresented in the Reconstruction historiography, Nash illuminates the diversity and complexity of Appalachian political and economic machinations, while bringing to light the broad and complicated issues the era posed to the South and the nation as a whole.




Race and Politics in North Carolina, 1872–1901


Book Description

Eric Anderson studies one of the most remarkable centers of black political influence in the late nineteenth century—North Carolina’s second congressional district. From its creation in 1872 as a result of gerrymandering to its collapse in the extremism of 1900, the “black second” produced increasingly effective black leaders in public office, from postmasters to prosecuting attorneys and congressmen. Race and Politics in North Carolina illuminates the complex effects upon whites of the rise of black leadership, both within the Republican party and in the larger community. Although many white Republicans found it difficult to accept an increasing role for blacks, they worked in acceptable if awkward partnership with Negro Republicans. By 1900 strident appeals for white solidarity had cracked the fragile biracial unit of the Republican second district. With the emergence of such Democratic leaders as Furnifold Simmons, Josephus Daniels, Charles B. Aycock, and Claude Kitchin—second district men all—a restrictive notion of the Negro’s place in society had triumphed in North Carolina and the nation. Eric Anderson’s study examines regional and national history. His record clarifies a confusing, uneven period of promise from the emancipation to the disfranchisement of black Americans.




Railroads, Reconstruction, and the Gospel of Prosperity


Book Description

This book describes the southern Republicans' post- Civil War railroad aid program--the central element of the Gospel of Prosperity" designed to reestablish a vigorous economy in the devastated South. Conceding that race and Unionism were basic issues, Mark W. Summers explores a neglected facet of the postwar era: the attempt to build a new South and a biracial Republican majority through railroad aid. Originally published in 1984. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.




A Man of Bad Reputation


Book Description

Five years after the Civil War, North Carolina Republican state senator John W. Stephens was found murdered inside the Caswell County Courthouse. Stephens fought for the rights of freedpeople, and his killing by the Ku Klux Klan ultimately led to insurrection, Governor William W. Holden's impeachment, and the early unwinding of Reconstruction in North Carolina. In recounting Stephens's murder, the subsequent investigation and court proceedings, and the long-delayed confessions that revealed what actually happened at the courthouse in 1870, Drew A. Swanson tells a story of race, politics, and social power shaped by violence and profit. The struggle for dominance in Reconstruction-era rural North Carolina, Swanson argues, was an economic and ecological transformation. Arson, beating, and murder became tools to control people and landscapes, and the ramifications of this violence continued long afterward. The failure to prosecute anyone for decades after John Stephens's assassination left behind a vacuum, as each side shaped its own memory of Stephens and his murder. The malleability of and contested storytelling around Stephens's legacy presents a window into the struggle to control the future of the South.




Carpetbagger's Crusade


Book Description

Originally published in 1965. The Supreme Court's momentous school desegregation decision of 1954 was a postmortem victory for Albion Tourgée. Just fifty-eight years earlier this once-famous carpetbagger's attack on segregation was crushed in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson. His legal defeat in 1896 typified his frustrated but prophetic career. Tourgée was an idealistic Union veteran who ventured south in 1865. As an advocate of civil rights, political equality, free schools, and penal reform, he was elected to North Carolina's Constitutional Convention of 1868. Olsen records both the fierce struggles and the impressive accomplishments that filled Tourgée's fourteen years in the South. With the collapse of the Southern experiment, Tourgée was inspired to turn to fiction to express his convictions. A Fool's Errand by One of the Fools and Bricks without Straw were classics of their day, providing absorbing accounts and defenses of radical Reconstruction. In 1879 Tourgée went north, where he renewed and extended his crusade for Negro equality by writing, lecturing, and lobbying. For many years he was the most militant and persistent advocate of racial equality in the nation. He was also a vigorous critic of the industrial age, demanding the utilization of federal power in behalf of equality, democracy, and economic justice.







Well-Nigh Reconstructed


Book Description

In 1882, William Simpson Pearson, writing under the pseudonym Brinsley Matthews, published Well-Nigh Reconstructed, a thinly disguised autobiographical novel excoriating the enormous societal changes that had beset the former Confederacy during Reconstruction. Pearson’s work was especially notable in that the author was a onetime Radical Republican and supporter of Ulysses S. Grant’s bid for the presidency. A product of Pearson’s perception that northern Reconstruction policies had devastated his native North Carolina, the book set in motion a genre of politically motivated novels that would culminate near the turn of the twentieth century with Thomas Nelson Page’s Red Rock and later Thomas Dixon Jr.’s infamous The Clansman. Though set in Virginia and Alabama, it is clear that Well-Nigh Reconstructed drew heavily on Pearson’s own experiences and that it was conceived as a direct response to A Fool’s Errand, a pro-Reconstruction novel by fellow North Carolinian Albion Tourgée. Echoing Pearson’s own disillusionment with the Radical Republicans, the novel’s protagonist, Archie Moran, comes to see Radical Reconstruction as an attempt to turn the South into a carbon copy of the North, and through a series of encounters involving corrupt carpetbaggers, greedy politicians, and the Klan trials of the late 1870s, Moran grows weary of politics altogether and resigns his Republican Party affiliation. For Pearson and his doppelganger, Moran, Reconstruction became a vast breeding ground for corruption. Featuring an extensive introduction by historian Paul D. Yandle, who sets the political and regional scene of Reconstruction North Carolina, this reissue of Well-Nigh Reconstructed will shed new light on the ways in which sectionalism, regionalism, and the embrace of white supremacy tended to undermine the recently reconstituted Union among Appalachian residents.




To Die Game


Book Description

During the Civil War many young Lumbee Indians of North Carolina hid in the swamps to avoid conscription into Confederate labor battalions and carried on a running guerilla war. To Die Game is the story of Henry Berry Lowry, a Lumbee who was arrested for killing a Confederate official. While awaiting trial, he escaped and took to the swamps with a band of supporters. The Lowry band became as notorious as their contemporaries Jesse and Frank James, as they terrorized bush-whacked leaders of possses and military companies. For more than five years, with the support of local Indians and Negroes, they eluded capture. In 1872, Henry disappeared and some of his other followers were eventually hunted down and killed by bounty hunters.