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• Reconstruction's Ragged Edge: The Politics of Postwar Life in the Southern Mountains The University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 2016

1. Reconstruction's ragged edge : the politics of postwar life in the southern mountains LCCN 2015017856 Type of material Book Personal name Nash, Steven E., author. Main title Reconstruction's ragged edge : the politics of postwar life in the southern mountains / Steven E. Nash. Published/Produced Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2016] Description xiv, 272 pages : map ; 25 cm. ISBN 9781469626246 (cloth : alk. paper) 1469626241 (cloth : alk. paper) Shelf Location FLM2016 171440 CALL NUMBER F259 .N37 2016 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) CALL NUMBER F259 .N37 2016 CABIN BRANCH Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-nash-36b375ba/

  Steven Nash
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  Steven Nash
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  Associate Professor of History at East Tennessee State University
  East Tennessee State University The University of Georgia
  Johnson City, Tennessee Area 98 98 connections
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  Experience
  East Tennessee State University
  Associate Professor of History
  Company NameEast Tennessee State University
  Dates EmployedAug 2016 – Present Employment Duration1 yr 5 mos
  Education
  The University of Georgia
  The University of Georgia
  Degree NameDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Field Of StudyHistory
  Dates attended or expected graduation 2002 – 2009

  Western Carolina University
  Western Carolina University
  Degree NameMaster of Arts (M.A.) Field Of StudyAmerican History (United States)
  Dates attended or expected graduation 1998 – 2001

  Penn State University
  Penn State University
  Degree NameBachelor of Arts (B.A.) Field Of StudyHistory
  Dates attended or expected graduation 1994 – 1998

• ast Tennessee State University - https://www.etsu.edu/cas/history/faculty_staff/nashse.php

  Steve Nash Ph.D.
  Assistant Professor
  Department of History
  Contact:
  423-439-4284 / nashse@etsu.edu
  Rogers-Stout 107
  Education:

  B.A., 1998, The Pennsylvania State University
  M.A., 2001, Western Carolina University
  Ph.D., 2009, University of Georgia

  Areas of Academic Specialty

  19th Century U.S.
  Civil War & Reconstruction
  Appalachia
  Environmental History

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Print Marked Items
Reconstruction's Ragged Edge: The Politics
of Postwar Life in the Southern Mountains
Caitlin Verboon
Journal of Southern History.
83.3 (Aug. 2017): p709+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text:
Reconstruction's Ragged Edge: The Politics of Postwar Life in the Southern Mountains. By Steven E. Nash.
Civil War America. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Pp. xvi, 272. $39.95, ISBN
978-1-46962624-6.)
In terms of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the southern mountains are probably best known for having
relatively few black residents and a strong contingent of Union supporters. This demographic reality might
lead us to think that the region remained relatively untouched by the most significant Reconstruction
conflicts. Yet these areas were also hotbeds of extralegal violence, indicating that Reconstruction did in fact
affect Appalachian communities. Steven E. Nash draws together these strands and places small mountain
communities within a larger story of sweeping political, economic, and social changes, and he argues that
these communities were central to Reconstruction nationally. Not only did white Republicans cooperate
with their black neighbors and the federal government to transform regional power structures in western
North Carolina, but circumstances in these counties influenced overall state policy as well. Mountaineers
shaped Reconstruction at both the micro and the macro levels.
Nash begins by situating western North Carolina in its antebellum context, but he quickly moves to the
region's transition from slavery to freedom and from war to peace. As mountaineers adapted to their
changing circumstances, loyalty became a significant but fluid way they understood each other and their
larger communities and measured social, racial, and political relationships. Loyalty could not be taken for
granted, and it was not a simple dichotomy; rather, loyalty was measured by degrees. With so much in flux,
even loyalty among so-called anti-Confederates was unpredictable; and after losing to conservatives in 1865
and 1866, they turned to the federal government for help in securing control of local politics. Though the
military was an important presence, it was Freedmen's Bureau agents who "became the conduit of federal
power for mountaineers of all races," and they forced white anti-Confederates to accept black men as their
political partners in a national Republican Party (p. 90). This alliance reshaped the landscape of western
North Carolina and turned the region into an enclave of seemingly solid Republican support.
Republican power was not as solid as it appeared, however, and the second half of Reconstruction's Ragged
Edge: The Politics of Postwar Life in the Southern Mountains untangles the many strands of its demise. The
twin forces of violence and regional development retied the connections between white supremacy and the
future of the region. Nash's careful uncovering of how these forces joined race and progress may be his
most significant contribution. Republicans did not break ties with their black allies outright, but as they
fought for internal improvements, especially long-awaited railroads, their biracial coalition crumbled under
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the pressures of bipartisan cooperation. "Ku Klux Klan assaults and intimidation began the process," Nash
writes, "and a market-oriented New South would finish it" (p. 150). Progress is not necessarily positive, and
social justice turned out to be a price most mountaineers were willing to pay in order to secure a spot for
their region in a changing economic order. African Americans in the mountains and across the South
suffered the consequences of their onetime allies' gradual repudiation.
At its heart, this book is about power. Wartime hostility among white communities, class tensions, racial
conflict, and jurisdictional contests meant that power remained up for grabs through the postwar period,
especially as inter- and intraparty loyalties shifted. The shape and trajectory of these power struggles were
slightly different in the mountains than in other parts of the South, but they were not wholly dissimilar.
These mountain communities were on the edge of Reconstruction, as the title suggests, and there were
limits to how much influence they wielded at the state level. But it is at the edges that we can discern the
shape of the whole. A broader look at the region, by incorporating mountain communities in other states in
the southern Appalachians would have made Nash's claims stronger, but even so, Reconstruction's Ragged
Edge fills a hole in our collective understanding of the era. Appalachian scholars will find this book to be a
valuable addition to Reconstruction scholarship.
Caitlin Verboon
University of Maryland, College Park
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Verboon, Caitlin. "Reconstruction's Ragged Edge: The Politics of Postwar Life in the Southern Mountains."
Journal of Southern History, vol. 83, no. 3, 2017, p. 709+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501078158/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=621a8fb2.
Accessed 17 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A501078158

Verboon, Caitlin. "Reconstruction's Ragged Edge: The Politics of Postwar Life in the Southern Mountains." Journal of Southern History, vol. 83, no. 3, 2017, p. 709+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501078158/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 17 Dec. 2017.

• The State of Buncombe
  https://thestateofbuncombe.com/2016/08/12/book-review-reconstructions-ragged-edge-by-steven-e-nash/
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  Book Review: Reconstruction’s Ragged Edge By Steven E. Nash
  AUGUST 12, 2016 / KATHERINE CUTSHALL
  a318-11
  “Registration at the South- Scene at Asheville, North Carolina”, Harpers Weekly September 1967, North Carolina Collection at Pack Library

  The Southern Appalachian Mountains are one of the most frequently misunderstood regions, both culturally and historically, in the United States. Perceptions of the region as backward, generally free of slavery, loyally Unionist, and sequestered from the rest of the nation were frequent and pervasive in the late nineteenth and into the twentieth century. A lack of thorough and accurate historical research of the region, until recently, only served to allow those misconceptions to fester and harden. Steven E. Nash turns those misconceptions of postwar life and politics on their head in Reconstruction’s Ragged Edge: The Politics of Postwar Life in the Southern Mountains. Nash’s latest work is the next logical step in the historiography of nineteenth century western North Carolina, and should be read alongside the works of his mentors, like Southern Mountain Republicans 1865-1900 by Gordon B. McKinney and Mountain Masters: Slavery and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina by John C. Inscoe.

  Nash clearly understands the need to provide a heap context for readers. He openly acknowledges the messiness of WNC’s history and opens the book with an overview of Antebellum and Civil War era western North Carolina; confirming the nearly dispelled myth of mountaineers’ Union loyalties and progressive views on race. Immediately the reader is confronted with the delicate nuances of economics in western North Carolina, and Nash reaffirms that the mountain planter class, “exhibited a level of political and economic control comparable to the broader southern gentry.” This idea sets the stage to demonstrate how the power held by these mountain masters manifested itself during the Reconstruction period.

  Although western North Carolina was not exactly exceptional in the Antebellum period, Nash’s research demonstrates that when it comes to Reconstruction (which is too often ignored) WNC was a unique example of how the Freedman’s Bureau succeeded and fell short. Because of the centrality of the region’s location, Freedmen’s Bureau agents were able to help connect local Republican party leaders (who already had a strong presence in some mountain counties) with national party organizers and sweep the elections of 1868. This grand success early into Reconstruction led the Freedman’s Bureau to believe its work had been done, so it withdrew from the region along with federal forces leaving a gap for the former planter class to once again take the reigns.

  Reconstruction’s Ragged Edge falls in line with the contemporary historiography of the region, and rightly so, by placing an emphasis on the importance of the geographical nuances and challenges of the Southern Mountains. The years after Federal withdrawal, Nash argues, were wrought with a burst of political power for Conservatives and groups like the Ku Klux Klan, due in part, because of the one political issue that brought support from western Carolinian Republicans and Democrats; the need for internal improvements, namely, railroads. Geographic isolation, though it hadn’t been such a large problem for economic centers like Asheville before the war, became an increasingly important issue to mountain farmers switched from cereals and corn to tobacco after the Civil War. The major markets for the plant were in the central part of North Carolina, however, there was no railroad access for western farmers to ship their crops. Between the withdrawal of Federals and support for needed infrastructure, the Republican party fell apart before it was even able to take off.

  In Reconstruction’s Ragged Edge Steven E. Nash has grown the canon of literature about nineteenth century western North Carolina in a big way. Although Gordon B. McKinney had previously studied the politics of the region in Southern Mountain Republicans 1865-1900, he did not focus on, as Nash demonstrates, the important geo-political factors at play in western North Carolina at the time. While there was some impact on the region’s Republican tendencies by the outcome of the Civil War and small populations of African Americans in the area, Nash makes it clear that, like much of the history of western North Carolina, there were many factors at play in this economically and politically volatile era in American History.

  Overall, Nash’s Reconstruction’s Ragged Edge: The Politics of Postwar Life in the Southern Mountains will be an important read for all students of Appalachian history. Nash has compiled a wide breadth of research to make his case for this timely exploration of Reconstruction in the heart of Southern Appalachia. Employing a variety of sources and using masterful prose, Nash has unraveled the complicated and nuanced history of an often ignored region and era in American History and created a foundation for future scholars to uncover even more.

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  Reconstruction’s Ragged Edge: The Politics of Postwar Life in the Southern MountainsPrinter-friendly versionPDF version

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  Book:
  Reconstruction’s Ragged Edge: The Politics of Postwar Life in the Southern Mountains
  Steven E. Nash
  , The University of North Carolina Press, 2016, ISBN: 9781469626246; Price: £36.95
  Reviewer:
  Dr Bruce E. Baker
  Newcastle University
  Citation:
  Dr Bruce E. Baker, review of Reconstruction’s Ragged Edge: The Politics of Postwar Life in the Southern Mountains, (review no. 2069)
  DOI: 10.14296/RiH/2014/2068
  Date accessed: 17 December, 2017
  Reconstruction, we are told, has moved on. A few years ago now, the historiographical pioneers, such as Heather Cox Richardson, boarded up the little old log cabin in the lane, hastily painted ‘GTT’ across the door, and headed west.(1) More recently many others have followed, finding new forms of forced labor and new venues for the expansion of and opposition to federal power.(2) These immigrants were greeted a few old settlers who had been there already, arguing that Reconstruction’s future was in the West for years, glad of the company.(3) Restless souls are even now gazing across the Pacific.(4)

  Our old friend, the freed man, has had to make room for others. 50 years ago, the northern working man demanded equal treatment, and more recently Native Americans have joined the scene.(5) Mountaineers, many of them moonshiners, who had been believed to have emerged in 1880 from a timber camp or a coal mine through a process of parthenogenesis, have been discovered in an earlier epoch.(6) New characters have crowded the stage, and that stage itself has expanded to accommodate them. There is a lot going on all over the place, and the plots multiply at a confusing rate. The freedom narrative, which has now endured nearly as long as slavery itself endured under the Constitution, is being unwritten.(7)

  And yet. Blank spaces remain on the map. While all the expansions noted above are welcome, and help us understand Reconstruction better by conceiving of it less narrowly, we should be glad that some historians are not packing up the wagon and joining the migrant trail but staying put and trying to wrest another harvest from well-tilled ground. For every Edgefield County or Granville County or southwest Georgia, there remain other places with their own stories, similar in some ways yet distinct in others both subtle and profound.(8) Until quite recently, the biggest, blankest space on the map of Reconstruction historiography was Appalachia. As Andrew Slap explained, the revisionist historians of Reconstruction had been indifferent because there were never enough African Americans to exert meaningful political power, and the Appalachian historians were unable to fit this period into the narratives of capitalist exploitation that defined their field, with its activist roots. A key exception to this sweeping generalization, of course, was Gordon McKinney’s study of Republicans in the mountains, which encompassed the complex politics of seven states in fewer than 300 pages.(9)

  Steven E. Nash’s Reconstruction’s Ragged Edge: The Politics of Postwar Life in the Southern Mountains fills in an important part of this space in splendid fashion, covering 20 counties in western North Carolina; essentially everything from the Blue Ridge westwards. In doing so, Nash draws on much of the best work on Reconstruction across the South in recent years and provides new insights on many key questions.

  It is a book of fundamental significance to the history of North Carolina, but many of its points help us understand broader processes in the region and the nation.

  One of the strengths of Nash’s book is that he has chosen a chronological frame that gives the period real coherence and allows him to bookend the story of dissent and democratization with the dominance of local elites. There is tremendous change, but ultimately it is harnessed to the service of continuity, at least in terms of who directs and ultimately benefits from the change. The first chapter of Reconstruction’s Ragged Edge sets out the antebellum scene in the region through careful census work a bit like Stephen Ash did for middle Tennessee, Susan O’Donovan did for southwest Georgia, or T. R. C. Hutton did for Breathitt County, Kentucky.(10) This fleshes out the picture sketched by Wilma Dunaway, Durwood Dunn, and others of a region dominated by powerful local elites who controlled the best land, tended to own slaves but not on the scale of their counterparts in the flatlands, profited from an economy of mixed farming slanted towards livestock, and kept politics as a patronal system for their own sort of people.(11) Below them was a yeomanry of self-sufficient farmers who, unlike those in Lowcountry South Carolina, for instance, managed to be fairly economically independent of the elites, though they deferred in political matters.(12) Tenancy was well established before the Civil War. A small but not insignificant population of enslaved people also occupied western North Carolina. Only three of the counties had more than 20 per cent of their population enslaved, and in none of the counties bordering Tennessee was the population of enslaved people greater than seven per cent. It was a region connected to the outside by roads but not railroads, limiting its economic development and making internal improvements a perennial issue in politics.

  The Civil War changed much of this. Here Nash makes less of the patronal power relations Gregory P. Downs found to characterize the state as a whole and instead emphasizes the strength and durability of Unionism and its near kin, anti-Confederatism.(13) In such a local world, as in East Tennessee, disputes became both personal and persistent, with the local elites tapping into, and supporting, the power of the Confederate state. The massacre at Shelton Laurel was extreme, but indicative of the kind of war western North Carolina had. Local Confederate elites tended to see all stripes of Unionism, desertion, and dissent not simply as parts of a political or military dispute, but as the sort of character flaw and moral failing that was to be expected of the lower classes, an attitude that was to shape Reconstruction politics. Between the Confederate tax-in-kind and the wanton destruction of Stoneman’s Raid in 1865, the economy of the mountains of North Carolina was left badly damaged by the war’s end.

  Many aspects of the aftermath of slavery were no different in western North Carolina than anywhere in the South, but the structure of the antebellum economy did lead to some distinctions. Whites had a hard time adjusting to the loss of mastery, and family networks were important sources of support to slavery survivors, just as we might expect. African Americans were vulnerable to violence in the chaotic months after the war. The economy, though, had never relied that heavily on black labor, and landowners had plenty of white labor to call upon, somewhat lowering the stakes and the pressure associated with the question of black labor elsewhere. For the most part, freed people slotted easily into the structures of tenancy that had long accommodated their white neighbors before the war. Geography was a factor, limiting participation from western North Carolina in the freed men’s convention in Raleigh in October 1865. When the Freedmen’s Bureau finally opened an office for the state’s western district in November 1865, it was in Salisbury, over 200 hard miles from the westernmost corner of North Carolina. Local agents in western counties, once they got in post, were ordered to make it up as they went along rather than wait for instructions from headquarters.

  Presidential Reconstruction saw swings of power back and forth in western North Carolina, with every swing of the pendulum bringing Unionists closer to an alliance with the Republicans in the North. As Union soldiers returned home in late 1865, some sought vengeance against Confederate neighbors, but not on the scale of East Tennessee. Many consistent Unionists resented Governor W. W. Holden’s appointment of local elites whose Unionism had been very conditional and, indeed, undetectable during the war itself, to positions of local authority. They responded by strongly supporting anti-Confederates in both the October 1865 constitutional convention and the election a month later. This all was the result of a fundamental pivoting of the region’s political alignment. As Nash explains:

  A prewar political culture that stressed local relationships and a kind of patron-client relationship between the wealthier mountaineers and their poorer white neighbors broke down, as Unionists rallied lower-class support and looked outward for help. . . . No longer willing to work with the former governing elite, the mountain Unionists looked for new patrons and asserted their own power. (pp. 66–7)

  Things got worse for Unionists in 1866, as Conservatives made gains in that year’s election. By the time the Reconstruction Acts were passed in March 1867, western North Carolina Unionists were willing to embrace the Republican Party. Still, Conservatives continued to persecute Unionists, especially through the courts. In additional to maintaining local power, this was an unsubtle way of directly challenging federal authority. A key figure in this was David Coleman, Solicitor of the Eighth Judicial Circuit until General E. R. S. Canby removed him in late 1867. Another prominent Conservative, Judge Augustus Merrimon, resigned rather than accept military interference with state laws.

  Nash makes a strong case that the Freedmen’s Bureau was the principal agent of federal power in the mountains and deserves much of the credit for whatever success and security the Republicans (now African Americans as well as white Unionists) enjoyed during Reconstruction. Although Nash does not frame it this way, the Republican Party becomes one of the patrons described by Gregory P. Downs in Declarations of Dependency. White Unionists and freed people both become clients of the same patron, and this experience draws them into a functional alliance that would have been much harder to establish otherwise. This alliance became crucial to the Republican Party since the African-American vote, small though it was, could swing elections in several counties along the eastern edge of the region. The beginning of Congressional Reconstruction brought a new constitution to North Carolina that for the first time made county governments elective, taking power away from local elites. But while African Americans were trying to accomplish things like building schools, with the help of the Freedmen’s Bureau until it closed in late 1868, Conservatives were beginning to court the poor whites by opposing the federal tax on distilling.

  With the removal of federal power in the form of the Freedmen’s Bureau, Conservatives used the violence of the Ku Klux Klan to crush the Republicans in the mountains. The attacks began in response to the elections in April and November 1868 and included the public beating of a solicitor who had dared to prosecute the Ku Klux Klan. Violence intensified in 1870. In one incident sparked by distilling enforcement, the husband of a victim, James McGahey, tracked down the Klansman who had assaulted his wife and killed him. On a larger scale, Governor Holden recruited 600 men from western North Carolina to break the power of the Ku Klux in the central Piedmont counties. Nash provides a careful analysis of these young men, mostly poor farm laborers and largely from Madison and Mitchell counties. What becomes clear from this account of Ku Klux violence is that the courts offered no relief but instead only prompted further attacks. Nash’s account here shows what happened when the federal government did not intervene directly to stop the Ku Klux as it had in South Carolina. The Kirk-Holden War proved the undoing of Holden and only briefly paused the onslaught, which reached a peak in early 1871. Ku Klux violence in western North Carolina did not have dramatic, immediate electoral effects, but it broke down the ties between the Republican ‘party’s grassroots supporters and the national government’, according to James Justice, a state legislator from Rutherford County (p. 148). The only thing that might have saved them, Justice believed, was more victims like McGahey taking immediate vengeance and stopping the Ku Klux Klan before it grew out of control.

  Although the Republicans held the governorship in the 1872 election, the writing was on the wall for the party in western North Carolina. There, with no meaningful federal support, many of the party’s previous supporters turned their attention more towards the future of the region’s economy. As Nash explains, ‘white mountaineers crossed party lines in support of internal improvements, building class-based coalitions without the taint of federal interference or racial divisions’ (p. 155). As Conservatives regained control, a newly constituted local elite with heavier representation from middle-class professionals took charge, ‘hop[ing] to integrate the region into the national market, embracing outside investors and foreign capital to develop the region’s natural resources and build its railroads without threatening their local control’ (p. 150). From here on, it is a story of competing railroads, the Western North Carolina Railroad inching westwards, and the Spartanburg and Asheville climbing up the Blue Ridge escarpment from the south through the end of the 1870s, bringing rail connections to both Asheville and Hendersonville by 1880. With yet another new constitution in 1877 ending county home rule, the new elite were firmly entrenched, and the Republicans were no longer a significant force. In summary, ‘Whereas the predominantly pro-Confederate plantation belt unified in opposition to federal power and social change regarding former slaves, white mountaineers worried less about the future of labor and more about what class of whites would govern’ (p. 181). The region’s elites offered the rest of the residents a stark choice: continued progress towards the egalitarians goals of Reconstruction, at the cost of continual violence and chaos, or a future in which a slightly reconfigured set of antebellum elites ruled and everyone got railroads and prosperity.

  This is the part of the review where the reviewer traditionally quibbles with what is wrong with the book, but that seems a disingenuous way to conclude. Nash has produced a very effective study that does more than just fill in one of the blank spaces on the map of Reconstruction historiography in the South. It provides an interesting and instructive story on its own terms, but it also gives us a useful comparison to other regions across the South. What happens to Reconstruction in an area where the African-American population is not crucial to the labor supply but can operate as a swing vote? How important was the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in controlling the Ku Klux Klan? These questions are much easier to answer now that we have a detailed study of Reconstruction in western North Carolina.

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  Reconstruction's Ragged Edge: The Politics of Postwar Life in the Southern Mountains. by Steven E. Nash (review)
  Drew Swanson
  From: The Journal of the Civil War Era
  Volume 7, Number 2, June 2017
  pp. 339-340 | 10.1353/cwe.2017.0049

  The University of North Carolina Press colophon
  In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
  Reviewed by
  Drew Swanson (bio)
  Reconstruction's Ragged Edge: The Politics of Postwar Life in the Southern Mountains. By Steven E. Nash. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Pp. 288. Cloth, $39.95.)
  Steven Nash's new account of Reconstruction in the western North Carolina mountains reveals a regional case of Eric Foner's famous description of Reconstruction as an "unfinished revolution." In this corner of Appalachia, Nash argues in Reconstruction's Ragged Edge, efforts at biracial Republican political power made real strides between the end of the Civil War and 1870, with the support of the Freedmen's Bureau and other federal initiatives. By the later date, reactionary violence, a loss of federal support, and a renewed emphasis on the business of business began to undo much of this change. More broadly, Nash convincingly argues for the importance of Reconstruction histories rooted in the past and politics of particular localities, as well as for the necessity of paying greater attention to Appalachian history between the end of the Civil War and the industrial extractive era that gained steam in the 1880s.

  The book's first chapter outlines the social and political conditions in the Carolina mountains immediately before and during the Civil War, with a particular focus on the importance of slavery, despite the relatively low percentage of slaves and planters in the region. Like many other scholars, Nash argues that the conflicted and shifting allegiances of mountain residents during the war set up divisive postwar politics. Chapter 2 also covers familiar material, exploring the process of emancipation in the mountains, including discussion of labor contracts, child indentures, and the daily operations of the Freedmen's Bureau.

  Beginning in the third chapter, Nash's historiographical intervention becomes clearer, as he argues that mountain Republicans fully adopted "the mantle of the Republican Party—complete with that party's national stance on issues of race and civil rights" (56). This assessment challenges older scholarship that cast mountain Republicanism as being of a different stripe than that in other parts of the state, supposedly because of the region's comparatively small African American population. When Republicans firmly grasped power under congressional protection in 1868, conservatives decided to make race the crucial issue in state politics. This was, Nash contends, "a strategic shift away from the politics of loyalty to the politics of white supremacy" (108). Thanks in part to the work of local offices of the Freedmen's Bureau, which the book portrays as both active and fairly effective, the crucible of race politics did not immediately fracture the party in the western mountains. [End Page 339]

  Ku Klux Klan violence and simultaneous strident Conservative Party (the name for North Carolina's opposition party during Reconstruction) responses to Republican power changed all that. By the time that violence—which took place in the state's piedmont region as well as the mountains—forced out Republican governor William Woods Holden in 1871, the national commitment to securing southern civil rights, or even electoral rights, had waned. As Nash notes, "Federal power played a critical role in mountain and state Republicans' rise to power in 1868, but little help was forthcoming in 1871" (143). This "redemption" changed the focus of mountain politics, with the question of white supremacy moving from center stage, to be replaced by economic development issues such as the Western North Carolina Railroad, investment in mining and logging, and the expansion of highland tobacco farming. In the last chapter, Nash emphasizes the interrelationship of railroad development, local politics, and racial violence in a way similar to the work of Scott Reynolds Nelson in Iron Confederacies: Southern Railways, Klan Violence, and Reconstruction (1999), a book that is strangely absent from the bibliography. White Republicans and Conservatives, though still divided on many issues, could clasp hands across new railroad lines, mica mines, and tobacco fields.

  The book is written in an accessible style, thoroughly researched, and well argued. In particular, Nash should be commended for his close reading of the state's secondary literature and the era's primary sources. He does an excellent job placing convoluted events—such as the murder of Wyatt Outlaw, the Kirk-Holden War, Klan violence...

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  Summers on Nash, 'Reconstruction's Ragged Edge: The Politics of Postwar Life in the Southern Mountains'
  Author:
  Steven E. Nash
  Reviewer:
  Mark W. Summers

  Steven E. Nash. Reconstruction's Ragged Edge: The Politics of Postwar Life in the Southern Mountains. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. 288 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4696-2624-6.

  Reviewed by Mark W. Summers (University of Kentucky )
  Published on H-SHGAPE (March, 2017)
  Commissioned by Jay W. Driskell

  With so prestigious a press and such a formidable range of sources in North Carolina’s Research Triangle, it is an irony that no study of Reconstruction in the Tarheel State as a whole has come out in a century (though, to be fair, Paul Escott’s book treating a longer period and W. McKee Evans’s brilliant examination of the Cape Fear region make up for much of the lack). What place could use it more or would have more materials to draw on, to make it possible? A very good start, however, could be made in limning some of the most distinctive themes found in Steven E. Nash’s skillful examination of the Civil War’s aftermath in the westernmost twenty-odd mountain counties.

  The main danger that this book raises will be in readers’ minds. If they think that Reconstruction’s Ragged Edge offers a convincing challenge to stereotypical impressions of a southern Appalachia apart in its prejudices, ideas, interests, and economic aspirations from the rest of the section, they think right; if they assume that it is no more than that, they sell its author short. The story Nash tells goes further. Reconstruction’s Ragged Edge does indeed compensate for the comparative neglect given to the Appalachian South in Reconstruction surveys, by taking up an area where the give-and-take that went into defining African Americans’ freedom and the making of a new set of relationships between labor and employer played a less central role. Though the plantation South did not lie so far away, in the upcountry, other considerations made white residents more likely to give a favorable hearing to Republicans than planters would in the cotton and sugar belt, where labor control and keeping local black majorities from sharing power became all-consuming priorities. Whites in the uplands had divided over loyalty to the Union, even as they united in endorsing racial hegemony. The end of slavery was not enough to erase their antebellum political affiliations, any more than it could alter the antebellum priorities of bringing railroads and economic development to areas isolated from the rest of North Carolina by technology rather than by distinct values.

  Under those conditions, a competitive party system had the chance to arise. With direct federal intervention--the army, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and a congressionally devised program of Reconstruction and restoration--Republicans won office, local and statewide. That they depended on federal might rather than on their own resources proved one fatal mistake among many. Their downfall came when that outside support was removed, but not for that reason alone. Klan violence would not have the catastrophic impact that it had in the Piedmont; the ostracism and intimidation so ferociously applied in black belt counties in Alabama and Mississippi played a comparatively minor role here. As Dr. Nash shows, the Democrats solidified their advantage by making the issue of economic development their own.

  Two concerns loomed particularly large. Federal action against illicit whiskey distilling infuriated small farmers, for whom moonshining provided an essential income enhancement. At the same time, everybody looking for economic development wanted to see the area connected by rail to the Atlantic coast. Republicans’ draw rested on their commitment to a crowd of subsidies and grants to promoters. Democrats could counter it best by embracing local railroad interests and showing that they were better placed to complete unfinished lines. The scandals and unfulfilled promises of railroad aid that Republicans had held out cost them a vital constituency. The pressing need for rail connections ended up pushing black priorities farther and farther back among their white allies. In the end, the “Redemption” that Democrats delivered offered industrial development at the price of the social change that the mountain counties also needed. The chance for a real makeover was lost across the South, but as Nash makes clear, the forces and methods used to kill Reconstruction came in varying proportion, depending on what part of the section historians study; that variability might have been better served by a more flexible federal policy of punishments and incentives--going lighter on moonshiners, say, or giving stronger encouragement to wartime Unionists in the upcountry than in other parts of the South where Unionism lacked a large white constituency--as well as a more consistent readiness to respond to the night-riders and vigilantes who carried death and fear in their wake.

  This is a smart, well-researched, and well-written book, even if some of its arguments have been culled from Nash’s previous work and amalgamated into this overview. Its mining of primary sources is not only exhaustive; the endnotes have no end of historiographical digressions which is as rewarding a feast as the body of the book itself. The author has a style occasionally wry and always felicitous. “Reconstruction could not be escaped by a mixed drink,” he comments at one point (p. 55). It is, of course, not a full story of Reconstruction’s changes in household or personal relationships. Political, rather than social evolution, remains at the heart of Reconstruction’s Ragged Edge, and on the latter much more work remains to be done. To which the author could rightly respond: so what? The book’s strengths in what it does make it so indispensable not only for the study of North Carolina but the whole South in the war’s aftermath that one can only hope that it serves as an inspiration for a larger study, from the Tennessee border to the coastline. Based on his handling of the subject here, no scholar would be fitter to handle it than Steven Nash.

  Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=48105

  Citation: Mark W. Summers. Review of Nash, Steven E., Reconstruction's Ragged Edge: The Politics of Postwar Life in the Southern Mountains. H-SHGAPE, H-Net Reviews. March, 2017.
  URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=48105

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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