Jeff Forret

Bruce E. Baker

The history of capitalist development in the United States is long, uneven, and overwhelmingly focused on the North. Macroeconomic studies of the South have primarily emphasized the role of the cotton economy in global trading networks. Until now, few in-depth scholarly works have attempted to explain how capitalism in the South took root and functioned in all of its diverse—and duplicitous—forms. Southern Scoundrels explores the lesser-known aspects of the emergence of capitalism in the region: the shady and unscrupulous peddlers, preachers, slave traders, war profiteers, thieves, and marginal men who seized available opportunities to get ahead and, in doing so, left their mark on the southern economy. Eschewing conventional economic theory, this volume features narrative storytelling as engaging and seductive as the cast of shifty characters under examination. Contributors cover the chronological sweep of the nineteenth-century South, from the antebellum era through the tumultuous and chaotic Civil War years, and into Reconstruction and beyond. The geographic scope is equally broad, with essays encompassing the Chesapeake, South Carolina, the Lower Mississippi Valley, Texas, Missouri, and Appalachia. These essays offer a series of social histories on the nineteenth-century southern economy and the changes wrought by capitalist transformation. Tracing that story through the kinds of oily individuals who made it happen, Southern Scoundrels provides fascinating insights into the region’s hucksters and its history. Contents Introduction, Jeff Forret and Bruce E. Baker “Preachers and Peddlers: Credit and Belief in the Flush Times,” John Lindbeck “A Gentleman and a Scoundrel? Alexander McDonald, Financial Reputation, and Slavery’s Capitalism,” Alexandra J. Finley “‘How Deeply They Weed into the Pockets’: Slave Traders, Bank Speculators, and the Anatomy of a Chesapeake Wildcat, 1840–1843,” Jeff Forret “Bernard Kendig: Orchestrating Fraud in the Market and the Courtroom,” Maria R. Montalvo “William A. Britton v. Benjamin F. Butler: Occupied New Orleans, Confiscation, and the Disruption of the Cotton Trade in Wartime Natchez,” Jeff Strickland “Devils at the Doorstep: Confederate Judges, Masters of Sequestration,” Rodney J. Steward “‘Irresistibly Impelled toward Illegal Appropriation’: The Civil War Schemes of William G. Cheeney,” Jimmy L. Bryan, Jr. “Das Kapital on Tchoupitoulas Street: The Marketing of Stolen Goods and the Reserve Army of Labor in Reconstruction-Era New Orleans,” Bruce E. Baker “The Violent Lives of William Faucett,” Elaine S. Frantz “Eureka! Law and Order for Sale in Gilded Age Appalachia,” T. R. C. Hutton

Grifters and Graft in the Nineteenth Century

Southern Scoundrels

Carole Emberton

Academic studies of the Civil War and historical memory abound, ensuring a deeper understanding of how the war’s meaning has shifted over time and the implications of those changes for concepts of race, citizenship, and nationhood. The Reconstruction era, by contrast, has yet to receive similar attention from scholars. Remembering Reconstruction ably fills this void, assembling a prestigious lineup of Reconstruction historians to examine the competing social and historical memories of this pivotal and violent period in American history. Many consider the period from 1863 (beginning with slave emancipation) to 1877 (when the last federal troops were withdrawn from South Carolina and Louisiana) an “unfinished revolution” for civil rights, racial-identity formation, and social reform. Despite the cataclysmic aftermath of the war, the memory of Reconstruction in American consciousness and its impact on the country’s fraught history of identity, race, and reparation has been largely neglected. The essays in Remembering Reconstruction advance and broaden our perceptions of the complex revisions in the nation's collective memory. Notably, the authors uncover the impetus behind the creation of black counter-memories of Reconstruction and the narrative of the “tragic era” that dominated white memory of the period. Furthermore, by questioning how Americans have remembered Reconstruction and how those memories have shaped the nation's social and political history throughout the twentieth century, this volume places memory at the heart of historical inquiry.

Struggles over the Meaning of America's Most Turbulent Era

Remembering Reconstruction

Historical Memory in the American South

What Reconstruction Meant

Drawing on a tremendous range of newspapers, memoirs, correspondence, and published materials, the author examines what both white and black South Carolinians thought about the history of Reconstruction and how it shaped the way they lived their lives in the first half of the twentieth century.

Barbara Hahn

The cotton kings' relates a rip-roaring drama of competition in the marketplace and reveals the damage markets can cause when they do not work properly. It also explains how they can be fixed through careful regulation. At the turn of the twentieth century, cotton was still the major agricultural product of the American South and an important commodity for world industry. Key to marketing cotton were futures contracts, traded at exchanges in New York and New Orleans. Futures contracts had the potential to hedge risk and reduce price volatility, but only if the markets in which they were traded worked properly. Increasing corruption on the powerful New York Cotton Exchange pushed prices steadily downwards in the 1890s, impoverishing millions of cotton farmers. The U.S. Department of Agriculture tried to solve the problem with better crop predictions and market information, shared equally and simultaneously with all participants, but these efforts failed. To fight the cotton market's corruption, cotton brokers in New Orleans, led by William P. Brown and Frank Hayne, began quietly to assemble resources.0They triumphed in the summer of 1903, when they cornered the world market in cotton and raised its price to reflect the reality of increasing demand and struggling supply. The brokers' success pushed up the price of cotton for the next ten years. However, the structural problems of self-regulation by market participants still threatened the cotton trade. More corruption at the New York Cotton Exchange appeared, until eventually political pressure inspired the Cotton Futures Act of 1914, the federal government's first successful regulation of a financial derivative.

Capitalism and Corruption in Turn-of-the-century New York and New Orleans

The Cotton Kings

Although the period of Reconstruction from 1863 to 1877 is commonly understood as an "unfinished revolution" for civil rights, national expansion, racial identity formation, and social reform, few scholars have attempted to understand the various and competing social and historical memories of this pivotal and violent period. While acknowledging views of Reconstruction have changed for professional historians, relatively little is known about how popular memories of the period were shaped and transmitted throughout American culture beyond the academy. By questioning how Americans have remembered Reconstruction and how those memories have shaped the nation's social and political history through the late twentieth century, Remembering Reconstruction places memory at the heart of historical inquiry.

Struggles Over the Meaning of America's Most Turbulent Era

This book traces the history of mob violence in North and South Carolina, probing the origins of a phenomenon that has left an open wound in the American psyche. Lynching marked the violent outer boundaries of race and class relations in the American South between Reconstruction and the civil rights era. Everyday interactions could easily escalate into mob violence and did so thousands of times. Bruce E. Baker examines this important aspect of American history by studying seven lynchings in North and South Carolina and looking behind the superficial accounts and explanations provided at the time to explain the deeper causes and wider contexts of these events. Many studies of lynching begin only after Reconstruction had ended and African- Americans found themselves with little political power. This Mob Will Surely Take My Life, however, provides the most thorough study yet written of the Ku Klux Klan's most violent episode - the killing of thirteen black militia members in Union, South Carolina, in 1871- to argue that this act of mob violence set the stage in important ways for the entire lynching era. Enmities born in Reconstruction lingered afterwards and lay behind an 1887 lynching in York County, South Carolina. As lynching became an unsurprising part of life in the South, African-Americans even found that they could use it themselves, in one case to punish a child's killer and in another to settle a church's factional squabbles. The book ends with a discussion of the varied forces that opposed lynching and how, by the 1930s, they had begun to be effective.

Lynchings in the Carolinas, 1871-1947

This Mob Will Surely Take My Life

Jack Wells

J. Laurence Hare

Essential Skills for Historians helps undergraduate students make the transition from general university study to a more in-depth study of history, and to gain the skills and techniques they need to conduct an independent research project or embark on a career as a professional historian. The book begins with an examination of the historical discipline and its relevance to contemporary culture. It then guides readers through the steps of developing a research project, using two sample projects that illustrate the connections between core proficiencies such as critical thinking and effective time management, and professional proficiencies such as source criticism and historical interpretation. By following these source projects as they develop, the book also highlights the importance of sound historical practice and a critical understanding of the past in contemporary society. Finally, the book discusses the outcomes of historical research and reveals the wide array of possibilities for careers built upon the skills gained from studying history. Covering key topics such as research strategies, reading sources, effective writing and professional ethics – and with useful features such as glossaries, guidelines for student projects, hands-on exercises, further reading and a companion website containing extra resources – Essential Skills for Historians equips aspiring historians with everything they need to succeed whilst also demonstrating the value of history in the wider world.

Bruce E. Baker

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