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George Brown Tindall

The history of African Americans in South Carolina after Reconstruction and before Jim Crow

First published in 1952, South Carolina Negroes, 1877–1900 rediscovers a time and a people nearly erased from public memory. In this pathbreaking book, George B. Tindall turns to the period after Reconstruction before a tide of reaction imposed a new system of controls on the black population of the state. He examines the progress and achievements, along with the frustrations, of South Carolina's African Americans in politics, education, labor, and various aspects of social life during the short decades before segregation became the law and custom of the land. Chronicling the evolution of Jim Crow white supremacy, the book originally appeared on the eve of the Civil Rights movement when the nation's system of disfranchisement, segregation, and economic oppression was coming under increasing criticism and attack.

Along with Vernon L. Wharton's The Negro in Mississippi, 1865–1890 (1947) which also shed new light on the period after Reconstruction, Tindall's treatise served as an important source for C. Vann Woodward's influential The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955). South Carolina Negroes now reappears fifty years later in an environment of reaction against the Civil Rights movement, a a situation that parallels in many ways the reaction against Reconstruction a century earlier. A new introduction by Tindall reviews the book's origins and its place in the literature of Southern and black history.

University of South Carolina Press

Southern Classics

South Carolina Negroes, 1877-1900

Emory M. Thomas

This volume, first published in 1971, has made us look again at the events surrounding the Civil War. The Confederate Southerners likened themselves to the American revolutionaries of 1776. Although both revolutions sought independence and the overthrow of an existing political system, the Confederates battled for a political separation to conserve rather than to create. The result, however, was a transformation of the antebellum traditions they were fighting to preserve.

The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience

Albert T. Morgan

A grassroots history unmatched in Reconstruction literature

Yazoo is a rare and revealing firsthand account of Reconstruction told by a Wisconsin carpetbagger and devout abolitionist who moved to Mississippi in pursuit of wealth and social reform. Seeking economic opportunity for himself as well as a chance to bring about a new social order in the defeated South, Albert T. Morgan leased a cotton plantation in Yazoo County, Mississippi, in1865. 

His farming venture failed —as did his efforts to secure interracial democracy—but his decade spent in Yazoo County brought opportunities to serve in elected office as a constitutional delegate, state senator, and county sheriff and supervisor. The decade also gave him an intimate understanding of the trials and tribulations associated with the African American freedmen's struggle for equality. In 1884, nine years after fleeing the state under threat of death, Morgan published Yazoo at his own expense to explain the difficulties he and his compatriots faced in Mississippi.

An absorbing story made all the more poignant by Joseph Logsdon's new introduction, Yazoo offers a sustained narrative about the social and political dynamics of Reconstruction on the plantations, in the local courthouse, on the deserted roads and byways, and even in the bedrooms of leading planters and politicians. In this unparalleled text Morgan documents the creation of the Mississippi Plan, which became the model for former Confederates' "redemption" of the South, and traces the orchestration of interracial democracy's failure to the manipulations of the former slaveholding elite.

Yazoo; or, On the Picket Line of Freedom in the South: A Personal Narrative

Elizabeth Allston Pringle

A Woman Rice Planter offers insights into a broad spectrum of Southern life after the Civil War. As an account of a woman's struggle for survival and dignity in a distinctly male-dominated society, it contributes significantly to women's history. It presents a rich portrait of a distinctive place—the South Carolina Low Country—in a troubled and generally undocumented time, a portrait made all the more vivid by the fine pen-and-ink sketches of Charleston artist Alice R. Huger Smith.

Elizabeth Alston Pringle was the daughter of Robert Francis Withers Allston, a state legislator and governor, who was at one time owner of seven plantations but bankrupt at the time of his death. Left to struggle for income to regain the property and position the family held prior to the war, Pringle turned to writing and eventually published a column on Southern culture in the New York Sun under the pseudeonym Patience Pennington. In 1913 she collected and reshaped these newspaper columns and compiled them into one volume, A Woman Rice Planter, a best-selling book that reduced her financial worries. Her descriptions of the vagaries of rice planting, of her relationships with former slaves and the first generation of free-born African Americans, and of her life in the early Reconstruction period are important to our understanding of the prevailing attitudes and persistence of the Old South in the New.

The volume was illustrated by Alice R. Huger Smith (1876–1958), an American painter and printmaker. This edition features an introduction by Charles Joyner (1935–2016), distinguished professor emeritus of southern history and culture at Coastal Carolina University and author of several books, including Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community.

A Woman Rice Planter

Mary Elizabeth Massey

First published by the University of South Carolina in 1952, Ersatz in the Confederacy remains the definitive study of the South's desperate struggle to overcome critical shortages of food, medicine, clothing, household goods, farming supplies, and tools during the Civil War.

Mary Elizabeth Massey's seminal work carefully documents the ingenuity of the Confederates as they coped with shortages of manufactured goods and essential commodities—including grain, coffee, sugar, and butter—that previously had been imported from the northern states or from England. Creative Southerners substituted sawdust for soap, pigs' tails and ears for Christmas tree ornaments, leaves for mattress stuffing, okra seeds for coffee beans, and gourds for cups. Women made clothing from scraps of material, blankets from carpets, shoes from leather saddles and furniture, and battle flags from wedding dresses.

Despite the Confederates' penchant for "making do" and "doing without, " Massey's research reveals the devastating impact of war's shortages on the South's civilian population. Overly optimistic that they could easily transform a rural economy into a self-sufficient manufacturing power, Southerners suffered from both disappointment and hardship as it became clear that their expectations were unrealistic. Ersatz in the Confederacy's lasting significance lies in Masseys clearly documented conclusion that despite the resourcefulness of the Southern people, the Confederate cause was lost not at Gettysburg nor in any other military engagement but much earlier and more decisively in the homefront battle against scarcity and deprivation.

Ersatz in the Confederacy: Shortages and Substitutes on the Southern Homefront

Ben Robertson

Red Hills and Cotton is suffused with Ben Robertson's deep affection for his native Upcountry South Carolina. An internationally known and respected journalist, Robertson had a knack for finding the interesting and exotic in seemingly humble or ordinary folk and a keen eye for human interest stories. His power of description and disarmingly straightforward narrative were the hallmarks of his writing.

A loyal Southern son, Robertson cherished what he judged to be the South's best traditions: personal independence and responsibility, the rejection of crass materialism, a deep piety, and a love of freedom. He repeatedly lamented the region's many shortcomings: poverty, racial hierarchy, political impotence, lack of inttellectual curiosity, and its tendency to blame all of its twentieth-century problems on the defeat of the Confederacy.

An informative and entertaining new introduction by Lacy K. Ford, Jr., associate professor of history at the University of South Carolina, provides fascinating new facts about Robertson's life and recasts his achievements in Red Hills and Cotton as social commentary. Ford captures the essence of Robertson's restless and questioning, but unfailingly Southern, spirit.

Red Hills and Cotton: An Upcountry Memory

The first book-length examination of the award-winning author of poetry and fiction firmly rooted in Appalachia

Since his dramatic appearance on the southern literary stage with his debut novel, One Foot in Eden, Ron Rash has continued a prolific outpouring of award-winning poetry and fiction. His status as a regular on the New York Times Best Sellers list, coupled with his impressive critical acclaim—including two O. Henry Awards and the Frank O'Connor Award for Best International Short Fiction—attests to both his wide readership and his brilliance as a literary craftsman. In Summoning the Dead, editors Randall Wilhelm and Zackary Vernon have assembled the first book-length collection of scholarship on Ron Rash. The volume features the work of respected scholars in southern and Appalachian studies, providing a disparate but related constellation of interdisciplinary approaches to Rash's fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

The editors contend that Rash's work is increasingly relevant and important on regional, national, and global levels in part because of its popular and scholarly appeal and also its invaluable social critiques and celebrations, thus warranting academic attention. Wilhelm and Vernon argue that studying Rash is important because he encourages readers and critics alike to understand Appalachia in all its complexity and he consistently provides portrayals of the region that reveal both the beauty of its cultures and landscapes as well as the social and environmental pathologies that it continues to face.

The landscapes, peoples, and cultures that emerge in Rash's work represent and respond to not only Appalachia or the South, but also to national and global cultures. Firmly rooted in the mountain South, Rash's artistic vision weaves the truths of the human condition and the perils of the human heart in a poetic language that speaks deeply to us all. Through these essays, offering a range of critical and theoretical approaches that examine important aspects of Rash's work, Wilhelm and Vernon create a foundation for the future of Rash studies.

Robert Morgan, Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell University and author of fourteen books of poetry and nine volumes of fiction including the New York Times bestselling novel Gap Creek, provides a foreword.

Summoning the Dead: Essays on Ron Rash

John Andrew Rice

John Andrew Rice's autobiography, first published to critical acclaim in 1942, is a remarkable tour through late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America. When the book was suppressed by the publisher soon after its appearance because of legal threats by a college president described in the book, the nation lost a rich first-person historical account of race and class relations during a critical period—not only during the days of Rice's youth, but at the dawn of the civil rights movement.

I Came Out of the Eighteenth Century begins with Rice's childhood on a South Carolina plantation during the post-Reconstruction era. Later Rice moved to Great Britain when he won a Rhodes scholarship, then to the University of Nebraska to accept a professorship. In 1933 he founded Black Mountain College, a legendary progressive college in North Carolina that uniquely combined creative arts, liberal education, self-government, and a work program.

Rice's observations of social and working conditions in the Jim Crow South, his chronicle of his own fading Southern aristocratic family, including its famous politicians, and his acerbic portraits of education bureaucrats are memorable and make this book a resource for scholars and a pleasure for lay readers. Historical facts are leavened with wit and insight; black-white relations are recounted with relentless and unsentimental discernment. Rice combines a sociologist's eye with a dramatist's flair in a unique voice.

This Southern Classics edition includes a new introduction by Mark Bauerlein and an afterword by Rice's grandson William Craig Rice, exposing a new generation of readers to Rice's incisive commentaries on the American South before the 1960s and to the work of a powerful prose stylist.

I Came Out of the Eighteenth Century

William Garrott Brown

In 1904 William Garrott Brown traveled the American South, investigating the region's political, economic, and social conditions. Using the pen name "Stanton," Brown published twenty epistles in the Boston Evening Transcript detailing his observations. The South at Work is a compilation of these newspaper articles, providing a valuable snapshot of the South as it was simultaneously emerging from post–Civil War economic depression and imposing on African Americans the panoply of Jim Crow laws and customs that sought to exclude them from all but the lowest rungs of Southern society.

A Harvard-educated historian and journalist originally from Alabama, Brown had been commissioned by the Evening Transcript to visit a wide range of locations and to chronicle the region with a greater depth than that of typical travelers' accounts. Some articles featured familiar topics such as a tobacco warehouse in Durham, North Carolina; a textile mill in Columbia, South Carolina; and the vast steel mills at Birmingham. However, Brown also covered atypical enterprises such as citrus farming in Florida, the King Ranch in Texas, and the New Orleans Cotton Exchange. To add perspective, he talked to businessmen and politicians, as well as everyday workers.

In addition to describing the importance of diversifying the South's agricultural economy beyond cotton, Brown addressed race relations and the role of politicians such as James K. Vardaman of Mississippi, the growth of African American communities such as Hayti in Durham, and the role universities played in changing the intellectual climate of the South.

Editor Bruce E. Baker has written an introduction and provided thorough annotations for each of Brown's letters. Baker demonstrates the value of the collection as it touches on racism, moderate progressivism, and accommodation with the political status quo in the South. Baker and Brown's combined work makes The South at Work one of the most detailed and interesting portraits of the region at the beginning of the twentieth century. Publication in book form makes The South at Work conveniently available to students and scholars of modern Southern and American history.

The South at Work: Observations from 1904

Edgar Tristram Thompson

The first complete publication of an overlooked gem in American intellectual history

A rare classic in American social science, Edgar Thompson's 1932 University of Chicago dissertation, "The Plantation," broke new analytic ground in the study of the southern plantation system. Thompson refuted long-espoused climatic theories of the origins of plantation societies and offered instead a richly nuanced understanding of the links between plantation culture, the global history of capitalism, and the political and economic contexts of hierarchical social classification. This first complete publication of Thompson's study makes available to modern readers one of the earliest attempts to reinterpret the history of the American South as an integral part of global processes. In this Southern Classics edition, editors Sidney W. Minz and George Baca provide a thorough introduction explicating Thompson's guiding principles and grounding his germinal work in its historical context.

Thompson viewed the plantation as a political institution in which the quasi-industrial production of agricultural staples abroad through race-making labor systems solidified and advanced European state power. His interpretation marks a turning point in the scientific study of an ancient agricultural institution, in which the plantation is seen as a pioneering instrument for the expansion of the global economy. Further, his awareness of the far-reaching history of economic globalization and of the conception of race as socially constructed predicts viewpoints that have since become standard. As such, this overlooked gem in American intellectual history is still deeply relevant for ongoing research and debate in social, economic, and political history.

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