Perhaps because I spent some time in North Carolina and wrote some of my
early history on biracial politics in that state in the late 19th
century, Lemann's point doesn't seem so far from the Virginia
experience. Certainly, right across the border there was real violence
and terrorism during Reconstruction. Henry Wiencek in his book on the
Hairstons recounts how it affected the lives of ordinary people during
that turbulent time. Just read Albion Winegar Tourgee's novel _A Fool's
Errand_and the outstanding biography of Tourgee by Otto Olsen for some
of the best description of the Reconstruction Klan, its methods and
organization, that exist in print. Probably the single best
comprehensive book on the Klan in that period is a work published in the
1970s, Allen Trelease's _White Terror_.

It's true that Trelease and Jack Maddox in his book on Reconstruction
mention that Klan activity and nightriding was reported in only two
Virginia counties during Reconstruction. But Virginia, in contrast to
North Carolina, had a rather truncated Reconstruction. The Old Dominion
was quiet in the 1870s, only to have some real biracial politics and
conflict with the Readjusters in the early 1880s. By the 1890s Populist
period, Virginia was again relatively quiet. North Carolina, on the
other hand, had its Kirk-Holden War in the early 1870s; was relatively
quiet in the 1880s; then virtually revived Reconstruction with the
Fusionists in the mid-1890s, that led to the vicious Wilmington Race
Riot. Beginning with the formation of the Democratic Organization in the
early 1890s, especially after the 1902 Constitution, Virginia's
leadership put a lid on extra-legal racial violence. The state, with its
electric chair (adopted early in the 20th century), would police the
caste line and punish any transgression.

Jim Hershman

[log in to unmask] wrote:

>Let's bring this discussion back to Virginia.
>
>There is no question that white terrorists "redeemed" the
>South during the years of reconstruction.  What happened in
>Louisiana strikes me as similar in magnitude to the terror
>inflicted in Memphis in 1866, or in New Orleans that same year.
>
>But what about in Virginia?  To my knowledge, studies of white
>terrorism during reconstruction are thin on the ground for
>Virginia.  There were several lynchings, and certainly the
>fear of lynching described in Suzanne Lebsock's A MURDER IN
>VIRGINIA was real enough.  Most studies of lynchings conclude,
>however, that while they did occur, they were not anywhere
>near so endemic in Virginia as they were in other states
>further south.
>
>There was a riot in Danville, described by Jane Daily in an
>artcile and also her recent book.  At least as Daily portrays
>it, however, that riot was nowhere near so dramatic as the
>events in the deep south, nor was it as clearly connected to
>underlying organized terrorist groups.
>
>So is it the case that the violence in Virginia was less
>organized?  Was there less of it?  Lemann's book is useful in
>part because the exceptional epidsode whose story he tells can
>stand in for the less dramatic, smaller episodes of white
>terrorism that occurred on a smaller scale throughout the deep
>south.  But there does not seem to be a corresponding "big"
>event in Virginia, whose telling could stand in for the
>systemic, far ranging, but less well documented and less
>dramatic smaller episodes.
>
>A second comment:
>
>To my mind there is a danger in allowing stories like Lemann's
>to dominate our telling of history.  One of the reasons I
>admire the scholarship of Rhys Isaac, and especially his
>superb recent biography of Landon Carter, is that it
>problematizes the narrative of slavery.  An event like the one
>Lemann describes is dramatic, and because it is dramatic, it
>reads exceptionally well.  But it is dramatic in part because
>it has such clear and sympathetic protagonists, and likewise
>clear and vile antagonists.  Isaac's biography of Carter is
>unsettling because it forces the reader to ask, what would *I*
>have been like, and how would *I* have been shaped by the
>expectations and values of my society, had I been born into
>the station of Landon Carter?  How would I think and act, had
>it been *me* who was the owner of slaves?  To put it another
>way, it forces the reader to treat the slave owner as
>something other than a monster, who exists *outside* of the
>course of normal human events.  To my mind, this is the issue
>that Hannah Arendt, writing in another context, referred to as
>the banality of evil.  Evil is not something that exists
>outside of humanity, but rather is a potential within every
>one of us.  Isaac's biography show us how that is possible.
>
>Lemann's narrative is powerful because the heros and villains
>are so clear.  But the villains are pretty monstrous--there is
>nothing banal about them.  My sympathies are with the heroes,
>and I can easily imagine myself acting as they acted--or at
>least, I'd like to think I would act with the courage that
>they displayed.  But what about the villains?  How do we enter
>into *their* world, and see what it was that corrupted them,
>and led them to act as they did?  What work does it require
>from us, to imagine "it was these and these conditions that
>had to be in place, to have corrupted *me*, and shaped *me*,
>to have acted as they acted."
>
>When I teach reconstruction and Jim Crow, I put up images of
>post cards from lynchings from the late 19th and early 20th
>centuries, taken from the American Memory site at the Library
>of Congress.  The images on the front of the post cards are
>vivid and horrible--pornographic in their violence and in the
>degradation they portray.  But its the words on the back that
>haunt me.  Aunt Millie, writing to her cousin, all day to day
>and matter of fact.  Saw your uncle today.  Made a pretty
>penny selling eggs.  Oh, and by the way, attended the lynching
>too.  Now there we see banality, in all its inexplicable
>ugliness.  And how do we explain the society that produces
>Aunt Millie, and her familiar sensibilities--and her utter
>obliviousness to the evil in which she was participating?
>
>To my mind, that's the kind of question that gets obscured
>when we allow the big, dramatic, events to dominate the
>telling of history.  Hitler's executioners were willing.  So
>were the lynchers and so were the KKK terrorists.  If we
>demonize them too much, they become monsters, outside of
>history, and outside of the potentialities inside each of us.
>
>All best,
>Kevin
>Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
>Department of History
>James Madison University
>
>To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the instructions
>at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html
>
>

To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the instructions
at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html