There is of course political/racial violence in Virginia after the Civil
War.  What is distinctive about it is that in most of the cases I have
examined, from the shooting of a Underwood Constitutional Convention
delegate in Charlotte Courthouse in 1867-68 to the extensive violence in and
around Danville in 1883--not just on one day--the attacks were mostly
carried out during the day and entirely without masks.  Steven Hahn has
argued in A Nation Under Our Feet (2004) that the absence of a genuine
Reconstruction in Virginia in the 1860s negated a need for a KKK.  I would
only add that something in the culture of white Virginians in the 19th
century as compared to the rest of the South seems to have rejected night
time masked violence.

Is it possible that "honor culture" shaped this response to emancipation in
Virginia?

Harold S. Forsythe
----- Original Message -----
From: "Henry Wiencek" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, November 16, 2006 6:38 AM
Subject: Re: The Redemption debate


> Kevin Hardwick rightly asks, "But what about in Virginia? To my knowledge,
> studies of white terrorism during reconstruction are thin on the ground
> for
> Virginia."  The study we could look at is J. Douglass Smith's
> award-winning
> "Managing White Supremacy: Race Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow
> Virginia."  The state avoided violence because white Virginians found
> non-violent ways to exclude blacks from the political process.  Smith
> writes
> (p. 20) "Virginia became the only state of the former Confederacy to avoid
> post-war military rule by agreeing to a new constitution in 1869 that
> granted the suffrage to black men."  Smith then goes on the describe how
> the
> suffrage was stripped away.  The Danville Riot played a role in that
> process, but by and large the Democratic Party in Virginia didn't need to
> resort to the rope, the lash, or the torch.  Great power can do nefarious
> work by other means, such as restrictive voting laws and a fresh state
> Constitution that undermined the 1869 document.  In this way the
> Democratic
> Party managed to disenfranchise not only blacks, but poor whites as well.
> Smith writes (26), "By the end of 1902, determined registrars and literacy
> tests had eliminated all but 21,000 of an estimated 147,000 blacks of
> voting
> age from registration lists; three years later the new poll tax cut that
> number in half. The electorate was so thoroughly eviscerated that
> throughout
> the first half of the twentieth century the Democratic Party regularly
> elected its gubernatorial candidates with the support of less than 10
> percent of the adult population."  In 1905 Governor Claude Swanson said,
> "We
> have no Negro problem here. . . . The suffrage question has been
> determined
> with justice and fairness and has ceased to be a subject of discussion or
> agitation."  Indeed.
>
> Henry Wiencek
>
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