Stephen Prince has written a cultural history of the South's project to invent and impose its own story after the Civil War, and Carole Emberton centers her study of the postwar South upon the nature, uses, and meanings of violence for both white and African American men. These studies differ in focus, period, sources, and more. Both evaluate the discourse of the postwar period, but it is Prince who makes that the center of his study, evaluating fiction and nonfiction, and white and African American discourse. Emberton, by putting violence at the center of her study, interrogates the stories of the South as a part of a wider social history of the immediate postwar experience. Both simply excel.

In Stories of the South, Prince deftly contrasts the shifting attitudes toward the Klan and carpetbaggers. As Northern white readers of these stories of the South found more and more compelling the idea that carpetbaggers were a problem and the Klan was comprised of upright men wanting only self-defense, opposition to the white South's dominance crumbled. By shifting the focus of the “race question,” white Southern writers succeeded in making the answer self-evident: we are like you, you would have done the same, so simply leave us alone. Decade by decade, and through hundreds of books, stories, and articles penned by white Southern writers, this argument became more and more the common sense not just of the unreconstructed South, but of the re-made “New North” as well (119).

There are important arguments in each of Prince's six chapters, which march chronologically through the shifting rhetorical strategies deployed in the fifty years after the Civil War. The North's first postwar narrative of the South—emerging during Reconstruction—tended to take the posture of objectivity and contrasted traitorous Southern whites against an idealized version of the North. But as early as the mid-1870s, that narrative began to shift, moving from a focus upon the shocking stories of the Klan to perceiving carpetbaggers as making the situation worse. This transition within the North to more closely align with white Southern views continued for the next generation, boosted by the story of progress and intersectional activism that was “the New South.” Prince nicely captures how this necessitated a new North as well, a North accepting of Southern white views on race: “we have misunderstood the South” (126), as one Philadelphia man wrote. The new focus upon “the corrupt carpetbagger aided northern Republicans immeasurably in navigating the retreat from an activist Reconstruction” (89), argues Prince.

All of this stands as something of a prelude to the blossoming of Southern literature—and pontificating—that arises around the turn of the century. As Albion Tourgee wrote in 1888, “a foreigner … judging our civilization by our fiction, would undoubtedly conclude that the South was the seat of intellectual empire in America” (136). Prince evaluates the work of Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, George Washington Cable, and Charles Chesnutt, among others, in this era when so many northerners came to believe that, in terms of race relations, “white southerners simply knew better” (145). Prince is further convincing that, while some authors provide complex narratives—such as Chesnutt's stories critical of the white South—there was “slippage” when Northerners read them (141), simplifying the elements of the stories that they internalized and losing much of the nuance. Perhaps this was even truer in the theatrical performances of race, from Fisk singers to minstrel shows, where it seemed that every performance was under pressure to conform to the pleasingly simple stories of the South that had become familiar. Called “genuine” and “authentic” (184), these performances, like the fiction that inundated the nation's publishers, offered a strong rationale for Northern inaction on race.

This “sustained public relations barrage” (208) was vital to the wider history of the South in this period, as Prince explains, for “disfranchisement, segregation, and lynching were not carried out on tiptoes, Jim Crow arrived amid trumpets and fanfare” (209). White Southerners were winning “with the pen what they had lost with the sword” (137), by providing this fusillade of rhetoric as cover for the substantial expansions in the nature of white supremacy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is a particularly compelling formulation of the importance of narrative to history: these stories provided the rationales historical actors needed to allow them to take action—or, here, the inaction of Northerners and racial moderates—that they want to take.

Stories of the South evaluates some of the classic voices of the white South—Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris, for instance—but also much more. It places those well-known stories in the context of the national, Northern publishing industry and its audiences, and it includes both dissenting white voices and the stories that African Americans told of the South. In fact, the Northern white audience for these stories is particularly important to this history, for the North's evolution from anti-South to enamored-of-the-romantic-South fundamentally paralleled and to some extent shaped the wider history of the growing comfort, reach, and command of white supremacy in the South. The success of the white storytelling about the South had wide ramifications, for it was one of the foundations upon which the Jim Crow police state could exist for generations.

With one of the best titles in years, Beyond Redemption does not disappoint when one opens the covers, hitting just the right note time and again: on how violence was normalized, how manhood itself (always) implied the capacity for violence, how black men claiming the rights of manhood were therefore so fear-inspiring for Southern whites, how violence was already so fundamental to Southern life before the war as well as after, and particularly how so much of this violence—and so much of the era overall—was fueled by a pervasive fear. It is as though Emberton had taken all of the pieces of this postwar puzzle—each element of which has been explored previously—and put them together in the way that simply makes the most sense, tracing “the relationship between violence, manhood, and politics” (9). I had the disconcerting/enjoyable sensation repeatedly while reading Beyond Redemption that I was both treading over terrain I knew well, and that only now did I have a full understanding of it.

In Reconstruction, violence was everywhere, as the South experienced a “crime-wave panic” (30). If violence was commonplace, so was suffering, which was considered an inevitable, perhaps necessary part of freedom. Before the war as well as after, the violence of disciplining black bodies was pervasive, as represented in Nast's images of whipping as well as lynchings. This violence of the white South helped to radicalize Reconstruction, but that was not its only effect: the repetitious and voluminous coverage of Southern violence ultimately normalized it. Violence was simply not so out of place in the nineteenth century: coercion—even coercion that bleeds into outright violence—fit with the understandings of the age, from social Darwinism's violent survival struggles of peoples to the commonplace belief that coercion was the only means to motivate the underclass.

Under slavery, mortal safety for blacks was largely embodied in a slaveholder who wanted his property to live; freedom created for African Americans a new geography of safety and threatened violence. Blacks moved near soldiers, built militias (countering Douglass's observation that “a slave was a man without force” [107]), grouped together, and moved to the safer cities. Freedom, to an extent, was fighting; it was won, ultimately, with arms in a war (which not only introduced a huge number of guns into the region but likewise trained large numbers of men, black and white, in their use). The vote was likewise bound up in violence; before the war, the expansion of white manhood suffrage came with increasing political violence at the polls. Elections and politics were manly, coarse, and themselves violent, and “Democrats’ long-standing relationship with political violence would continue through the war years into Reconstruction” (144). These contexts that Emberton develops for the postwar violence—how violence was implicit ideologically in freedom and manhood, and how pre-war as well as postwar elections were saturated with violence—are especially helpful. As the book develops, the links between freedom, manhood, and violence only become more compelling.

A turning point came in 1868, when the white South invented “a discourse of predation” (155). The language of victimization abounded, and everyone (of both races) was on the defensive or at least claiming self-defense as they excused their acts of violence. Republicans, seeing the violence of Southern Democrats, were more unified in this moment than even during the war (161). But by the mid-1870s, the growing perception of the unmanliness of Southern Republicans turned moderate Northern Republicans away: “if you cannot take care of yourselves, you are not worthy to be freemen” (166).

Violence in the hands of whites was increasingly seen as necessary and appropriate; the same could not be said about perceptions of violence from African Americans. As Charles Chesnutt wrote: “The qualities which in a white man would win the applause of the world in a negro [are] taken as the marks of savagery” (168). Violence was an expression of masculinity, and violence had utility. Here Emberton quotes Primo Levy's words from another era of extraordinary violence: “‘useless violence’ was not really useless. It became ‘an end in itself with the sole purpose of inflicting pain’” (186).

Reconstruction was much more than mere violence, and Emberton's story centers the reader on that fact. Violence might have reached epidemic proportions in the disorder after the Civil War, but it was already endemic to the masculine nineteenth-century world, particularly in the South. The ways that masculinity was defined by violence, and the ways that freedom and suffrage, in turn, were defined by masculinity, makes the whole of the era more legible. Violence, as she convincingly shows, provide “the threads that weave … history together” (7), and nowhere was that more true than in the post-Civil War South.

Neither study charts entirely new terrain: works on postwar violence as well as on the development of Southern myths about itself have been with us for decades. But each puts the pieces together especially well; each centers on sources and on historical questions that are particularly apt; each is convincing in its arguments as well as very engaging to read. If someone (a student?) were to read one book on the postwar South's disorder, Beyond Redemption would be an excellent choice. If a student were to read one book on how the white South won the rhetorical battle over how to frame its race relations, Stories of the South would be the place to go. Despite the excellent and influential work that has come before, these two books have shifted the ways I want to talk about this era with my students and in my own work.