The Long Shadow of the Civil War

February 22, 2010
Bynum (Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South
), a historian at Texas State University, offers an analysis of “home front schisms” in three Confederate regions: Big Thicket in eastern Texas, Piedmont North Carolina's “Quaker Belt,” and the counties in Mississippi's Piney Woods known as the “Free State of Jones.” Geographically and culturally isolated, they were largely populated by nonslaveholding subsistence farmers whose relationships with slaves and free blacks often generated “a lively interracial subculture” and even interracial family networks. Conscription policies favoring planters and manufacturers, together with food requisitions and taxes collected in kind by force, contributed to a sense of “rich man's war, poor man's fight” that made civilian-supported desertion and draft-evasion endemic. Defiance escalated to insurgency; Bynum quotes one unrepentant de facto Unionist: “we fought like dogs, and we buried them like asses....” The collapse of Reconstruction left these dissenters marginalized by a race-based legal system and a lost cause mythology. Bynum highlights the “solid South” as a construction and even more successfully presents the importance of “kinship, community, and place” in sustaining resistance to oppression. 9 illus., 1 map.