Description
Book SynopsisThis post-revisionist study examines the motives and the concerns of the ex-slaves in South Carolina who supported a movement that eventually led to white supremacy.
Although most freedmen throughout the states of the former Confederacy were Republicans loyal to the party of the Federal government that had emancipated them, they were factions of African-American voters who aligned themselves with local white Democratic leaders. one such group of black conservatives joined the “Red Shirts,” white paramilitary clubs that attempted to restore antebellum values in electing former Confederate general Wade Hampton governor of South Carolina in 1876.
Drago’s fine analysis recovers and explains this lost aspect of Southern black history. Drawing on primary sources that include testimonies of several black Red Shirts before a Congressional investigation of the election and eleven slave narratives, he de-romanticizes the black experience by examining the relationship between black initiative and southern paternalism.
Trade Review“The problem examined by this book is an important one as the findings help to shatter the view that the South’s African-American population represented a monolithic entity.”
—Carl Moneyhon, author of
The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on Arkansas “This is a significant work . . . beautifully written, deeply researched, and rationally organized.”
—Willard B. Gatewood, author of
Aristocrats of Color
